Her point being that accidents are unintentional, and fraud is not. The most interesting part of the case, the device's wandering leads that we'll hear about later, makes a strong basis for both sides. Either way, it's about establishing the actual ground-level thing. Everybody keeps talking about the bottom line, what's your bottom line, what's their bottom line, don't talk about the bottom line, but really the bottom line is about establishing this essential fact: Accidents are unintentional, fraud is not.

During this part of the deposition, Alicia also figures out a few things. Number one is that Maggie is a brilliant performer; maybe because she's telling the truth. Number two is that Celeste is funny, and scary, and knows some secrets about Will. There's a familiarity and an Eli Gold-style twinkle in her eyes when she laughs at him and calls him out for trying to manipulate the record. I think -- we'll see in coming weeks -- but my immediate feeling is that if Will and Diane had a baby, it might be Celeste: Passionate, wry and worst of all able to access both the tools that Alicia can use, and those she can't. Or at least that's where I see Alicia going, for the time being. Everything and everybody are symbolic fodder for her self-interrogation.

THE ASK & THE ARGUMENT

Meanwhile, Ira just thinks the ask is too high regardless of the other issues. Which means that even though Celeste is refusing to negotiate, the burden is still on Will because they're starting out too high to deal with: They need to be wrong by doing right, which is to say they can have the moral victory and the settlement if they go lower, because they shouldn't be talking about $14M to begin with. Not lowering it for negotiation's sake, if you see what I mean, but for negotiations to begin at all.

Will's got a bit of a blind spot for this, actually; he refuses to believe that there are fundamental aspects of anything that can't be bargained. Is that fair to say? Tammy would certainly agree; after all, "You told me not to fall in love with you" is not a rational thing to say to a woman begging you to love her, because those are fundamental assumptions that have changed and must be acknowledged.

I call it arguing with gravity. Some things are just true, even if they're not fair, and you can't change the situation until you acknowledge the situation. It's also what made his fight with Diane so gross, in the wreckage of Stern and Bond: His idea that either everything is true and immutable, or nothing at all. And I won't go out on the limb just yet, but it's food for thought that gambling is an institutionalized argument with gravity and a classic tactic of the addict: You look at the facts, you consider the facts, you tell the facts to fuck off. In addicts, it's arrogant; in men, it's privilege; but in power players -- like Eli or Will -- it's a source of great power. But the rest of us actually have to deal.