"Mind's Eye" is a brilliant episode of television and one of the top five best episodes "The Good Wife" has ever produced. Every year, there are only a few masterpiece television episodes; The Good Wife already had one in October with "Oppo Research," and it now has the second in "Mind's Eye."
The success of "Mind's Eye" relies on the directing, editing, and camera-work working to enhance the script and create a "thinking" effect. If one of those aspects had faltered in "Mind's Eye," the whole episode would have collapsed into inharmonious pile of ashes . And yet it expertly carries out each of those ambitious mechanical elements neatly. Robert King personally directed the episode, and since he also penned the script, he was able to commit to the material and own the idea in a way a more detached director could not have.
The most impressive thing about "Mind's Eye," from an audience and critical point of view, is the psychology of the episode. Alicia has already been shown as being one of the most fascinating creations on television for the past six years; she's constantly changing and has one of the deepest emotional wells of any character in film or television right now. And this episode plunges us right into that well. We get to see first-hand what she is thinking, what she wants, and how she feels about people in her life. This leads to great fun as we trek with Alicia to the different things she envisions, moments that will have you laughing out loud--such as banter from Eli, Marisa and Johnny in the campaign office (thank you Alan Cumming)--and other moments that scrape at weathered emotional scars.
"Mind's Eye" brings a new definition to the word clever. Just about every second of this episode is clever in some shape, way or form. If you live inside your mind like I do (and Alicia does), you can fully appreciate how Alicia's thoughts interrupt each other, her skewed images of others based on personal bias, and the imagery she creates to conceptualize the other characters. For example, when Alicia is on the phone with Kalinda, she imagines Peter and Kalinda in a dark, ominous room, having their affair; or when prepping for questions about her children in an upcoming interview, she imagines a homeless Zach stranded on a park bench, reflecting her guilt as a mother for distancing herself from him.
The intelligent structure of "Mind's Eye" first explores the more shallow problems in Alicia's life (legal problems at FAL and an ethical decision about her campaign, and her internal struggle of picking between the two professions), then mid-episode it shifts to more personal thoughts like as her sexuality (the question being hotly debated on forums and social media: Will her first post-Will love interest be Johnny Elfman or Finn Polmar?), and then it boils down to her utmost sensitive and intimate thoughts (her lingering grief over Will's death, her guilt for disowning Zach after learning he hid having an abortion from her, and afraid of her atheism influencing Grace's ardent belief in God.) Delving into the analysis of each of these topics would be essays in it of themselves.
Yes, Josh Charles was not physically with us in this episode, but this is a pivotal episode concerning Alicia's feelings about Will. The actor playing "Will" was kept in a darkened setting, symbolizing Will's presence, but we never saw him because Will is really not there. He is dead. And these moments with Will were the emotional bullets for me. In "The Decision Tree," we learned that Alicia's happiest moment in her life was shared with Will when they were making love on a balcony in New York. And that's the setting in which Will lives in Alicia's mind. It made Alicia's episode arc--saying goodbye to Will once and for all, allowing herself to move on--all the more powerful.
Julianna Margulies deserves a round of applause for her work "Mind's Eye." I deservedly praise her performance in nearly every episode, but episodes like this one especially. I cannot imagine a more difficult task for an actor than to communicate the narrative of a character through expressions and their eyes, and this is something Margulies has shown she is able to do in spades. She won an Emmy for this acting style last year for "The Last Call." The type of acting required of Margulies in "Mind's Eye" is not as aggressive as "The Last Call," it's more passive, and something most actresses would not be able to accomplish so deftly.
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