That time that Alicia pretended to be jealous of Celeste, that was pretty bad. Not on a scale of normal, but on a scale of Alicia that was really bad. And this is like... So institutionalized, so within-the-system, that it's simultaneously way worse and not really that bad. I don't know. This case is really interesting. As a line Alicia's drawing in her development it's not even that big of a blip, because the layers -- of it's my job, this is a democracy, the purity of adversarial trial law, client loyalty, the guy is a fucker -- there is almost no way to see down the hall of mirrors to how bad this is, so it's like it's not even bad.

Except neither of them are doing their jobs in good faith, which means it's a provisional morality which isn't my favorite kind of thing, and they are doing it in reference to an unrelated case, which means they're jerking absolutely everybody around. I think it's really weird to say, but it's like: I wouldn't blink if Will or Kalinda, even Diane, were doing this. But because it's Alicia -- and, obscurely, because it's Coyne -- I feel like this one hurts.

EXT. PACKER ESTATE

But why bother going into all of that, when you can have a silly death penalty conversation that goes nowhere and illustrates only the top level of what's really going on here? Play the mom card, put Alicia in an ambiguous situation that is less than ten percent as ambiguous as what's really going on, so we can have an Alicia Moment where she sees that things are not always black and white.

Alicia: "Do you believe that Priest Guy? That no matter who he is, no matter what he did, he shouldn't be killed?"
Coyne: "Yeah, don't you?"
Alicia: "Suddenly no. Those girls were my daughter's age. They don't exist anymore. And to get that call. To spend every night thinking about your daughter's last breath... He raped... Did you see what he did with their bodies? But we don't execute him. Why not?"
Coyne: "...Because it would be wrong?"
Alicia: "Hmm. I know that I agree with you, and yet I feel that I do not. Moms!"

STATE'S ATTY

Dana: "Okay, here's the camera. What are we looking at?"
Kalinda: "The day she disappeared, let's see the corner where Packer said the guy died."
Dana: "There's the victim. Want to see his replacement the next night?"
Kalinda: "Yeah, there he is. That's the guy. Let's find him, he's the murderer."
Dana: "Hey, so what's the Baxter situation?"
Kalinda, verbatim: "They had a falling out. He was a corrupt judge. Will got him thrown off the bench."
Dana: "No, our office got him thrown off the bench. Gardner didn't do crap."