Eli's story is probably the most mirthful this week, as that wonderful James Carville-like guy is back and we finally meet his fairly charming candidate, whose college years included a penchant for taking candid photographs where he's blowing statues. Eli wants to get the pictures out there, because I don't know if you've figured out Eli's million-dollar strategy yet, but it's called disclosure. Every time.

At first the candidate swears that it's just this one Santa Claus that he fellated -- if you ever wanted to hear Alan Cumming say "fellating" like a hundred times without actually having to attend the scary Bret Easton Ellis Caligula parties that presumably take up 90 percent of Alan Cumming's downtime, have I got a show for you -- but it turns out he was really into doing it, like, all the time. So in the end they switch the entire story over to alcoholism and send him to rehab, with the story note that the Carville guy wants to send their candidate, Mulvey, into the State Senate race that Parker Posey was also talking about, which makes Eli feel nervous.

Also making Eli nervous: His snotty, charmless daughter Marissa's newfound and very intense interest in Zach Florrick. She's over at his house when Grandma Jackie shows up yet again on Peter's behalf, which makes Jackie nervous in turn, but when the horrible Weirdo Tutor also shows up wearing some kind of attention-begging getup, Jackie loses her entire goddamn mind and starts going through all of Alicia's shit, starting with her bedroom.

The case itself is a lipless white guy we meet like one time, who was arrested for killing his girlfriend, but the real situation is that she was carjacked and killed with the gun he'd given her, but the actual point of the story is that the information key to getting him off is something that only Ricky Packer, a truly monstrous individual on Death Row, knows. Luckily Romany Malco's Legal Aid is working his defense, so it's both convenient and futile.

They have to stall and stretch the whole entire Death Row appeal from like a 36-hour timeframe, just in order to find out this one fact, and one of the murders was incorrectly solved and there is a fake confession to one of them by a youthful wannabe, and it's all very stressful, and Alicia spends the whole time asking her dipshit questions like, "Is the death penalty really okay? What is its role in society?" and "How do appeals generally work?" and "What do defense attorneys do again? I keep forgetting, is it being really judgmental about their clients instead of doing their jobs?" and whatever else happens when she's busy being the audience insert for an audience so goddamn stupid they cannot possibly exist. She thinks maybe he is redeemable, but then he is mean to his mom. The end.

But the big, weird, odd news is that Kalinda is back, getting all up in the Dana/Cary stuff, and that's neat because you sort of see how all the pieces have been arranged so that a given episode here in the middle act of the season can have Carville guy, and L/G getting investigated, and maybe Eli or maybe not Eli, and all that. So Kalinda, having gotten turned away by Cary, just decides to flirt her way into Cary's stuff through Dana instead. Dana's like, "Don't worry, I'm not a lesbian" and Cary's like, "Neither was I, until I met Kalinda." Like wanting to make out with both Cary and Kalinda proves a goddamn thing.

How it ends up is that Cary and Kalinda end up in the middle of a shootout the cops are having with the guy who actually did the murder our case is about, and Cary throws himself atop her and she feels like maybe this world isn't so cruel. Which is neat, because one of the things Dana wanted from her was information about this investigation of Will, so she goes straight to Will and instructs him to ask her to watch his back and take care of him. Also watching Will (and Alicia) is Diane, and how she is doing it is: Like a hawk.

After the guns die down, Cary and Kalinda go feel post-traumatic for a little while, and then sort of make out for a second, and then Cary realizes that she is maybe playing Jedi mind tricks on him, maybe she doesn't even know she's doing it, and just walks away in the middle of their makeout, and then I guess probably she wonders also if she is doing Jedi mind tricks even when she doesn't know she is doing it. It was nice to have her center stage of an episode after so long, but she did mostly get her ass kicked around the place.

Next week: Puppetmaster Peter is on the show, coming after Will for all kinds of complicated Baltimore reasons, and also Wendy Scott-Carr is involved, due to still existing.