#combine this with the very long messages I just wrote actually defending the chracterization of Maia Rindell

[antiphon]

mantis-blades replied to your post: the preview for the next episode has me tired...

I can’t stand Blum and I can’t stand the both sides are wrong false equivalencey nonsense they have been trying to shove down our throats this whole season.

First of all: I can’t stand Blum either. I share Marissa’s reaction to him: he’s boring. He’s a human embodiment of the Themes of the Show, but he’s toothless (unless you’re Maia, but honestly, Maia behaved very irresponsibly several times over and earned her firing).

Part two got really effing long, so it’s under a cut

That said: I don’t think, truly, that they’re trying to say both sides are the same. (For instance, this week I think the show was pretty clearly of the stance that Nazis are bad and Jay punching a Nazi is good and okay - and I guess the moderate conservatives in this instance chose not to align themselves with the Nazis. In the real world, there are plenty of people like “Nazis are awful, but PUNCHING THEM?!?!” The show didn’t have a crisis about the okay-ness of this; it had a monologue confirming the okay-ness of this.) They’ve been asking questions more like, how do you fight harmful lies when no one seems to care about the truth? and more broadly, how far can you go toward monstrous but effective tactics without becoming monstrous? The show has positioned “ethical” and “effective” as, if not dichotomous, at least in tension (effectiveness being the thing that might call you to behave unethically).

The show has a sense of the things that are clearly okay (punch a Nazi, register anti-45 voters, work against CPD on police brutality cases) and things that are clearly not okay (out and cruelly harass a trans girl; not get Kurt medical attention because it would interfere with hunting), but there are places it’s less clear. The hiring question was one - Liz’s “it’s about who we are.” Is it ok, in-universe, to (bad) hire people we disapprove of but that it’s politically advantageous to have around or take ethically murky cases if (good) that makes it possible, politically or financially, to do work that’s important? (This gets consistently negotiated, of course; Liz and Adrian took different sides when it was about hiring. In this case, for what it’s worth, I read the show as being more on Liz’s, or the more lefty, side - but the fact that they’re actively discussing their identity as a firm in these terms indicates that it’s a priority.) Is it ok, in-universe, to (bad) out and cruelly harass a trans girl if (good) it leads to the registration of tens of thousands of anti-45 voters?

The problem is that often as not, TGF is a blunt instrument. So last week we get Diane’s white lady resistance doing objectively horrible things because they like the end result, and both Diane and Liz end up going along with them because they were effective (as opposed to the *~resistance~* meeting Diane attended at the beginning of the episode, where no one could even agree on what the message was)--I wasn’t convinced as an audience member that their action was either effective enough or the only option, so there wasn’t strong tension; it was just a clearly wrong thing to do without a compelling argument for the people who did it. I think we’re supposed to see this as them compromising their values substantially but doing it anyway; I don’t think we’re supposed to see them as Just As Bad. And in general, I just don’t see the kind of both-sides-ism from the show that you’re talking about. When the show works, I see the protagonists - especially Diane previously and especially Liz now, and shoutout to Barbara Kolstad here for making real moves that way, even if it was to get written off the show, because she’s my wife and I respect her - genuinely struggling with this. (Liz taking on the responsibility for her dad’s rape and sexual assault but still getting NDAs instead of just like burning the whole thing down is an example here. She’s treating people with dignity and facing up to it - she’s not Just As Bad As Him in any way - but she’s still protecting the firm.) But it’s...also been known to fail at nuance.

Blum, for instance, has no nuance. He’s an answer to this question in human form - he’s all the way down the line where effectiveness matters entirely and ethics not at all. That’s why he’s boring: he’s the blunt-force trauma version of the Themes of the Show. TGF is trying to acknowledge the ridiculousness inherent in a world that values and responds to Blums and the absurdity of trying to exist in opposition to that within it - and sometimes it succeeds! Pitting Elsbeth Tascioni against Mike Kresteva made for great TV; Liz arguing to Margo Martindale (I forget her character’s name) (Ruth? Eastman?) that the truth doesn’t matter and getting hired for her *~anger~* was a hell of a ride. But the show has felt like a drag for me lately; part of that is that it’s been pretty humorless, but I think part of it is also that there’s been no one really fighting for the other side. Liz makes some stabs at it; Lucca and Jay have done a little, but they don’t have as much power as most of our characters.

But also - I don’t know whether you watched The Good Wife? I’m going to talk about The Good Wife, and the reason is that Alicia’s character arc was also very grounded in this ethics-effectiveness dichotomy. Over the course of the series, a lot of her development was on a path from wanting to do good to being willing to do what she had to, and what she had to would get pushed just a little farther and a little farther. (Alicia wasn’t in the law to help people; she was in the law because it made sense, and she liked being good at it.) But there was also a thing with her where at the same time that people (characters, in-universe people) were pushing her to be colder and more focused on succeeding at whatever cost in her professional life, they hated her for changing in the same way as a person - they only wanted her to be cruel during the nine to five, but how she worked was part of who she was. In I think season six, she sort of tries to facilitate a similar transformation in another high-minded character, but he backs out in the end. something she either hadn’t been able to do or hadn’t chosen to do (spoiler: both). It literally offers us an alternative to Alicia’s decisions and a person, when she’s far along in her like moral decay practically, who makes a different call. In Alicia, we get a protagonist who often makes harmful choices and certainly isn’t a good person, overall, being understandable and maybe even justified in a particular choice while still clearly seeing that she becomes worse - the show doesn’t approve of all her choices and align with her morally just because she’s the protagonist.

I bring this up because TGW was concerned with these things for seven seasons. This question of how much bad you can do (for the sake of good?) before you’re too bad, this question of how much ethically to compromise in order to accomplish what you (think you) need to, they’re baked into the universe of the show and clearly interests for its creators. So when I say I don’t think they’re being super both-sides-y, part of that is because TGW gave us seven seasons of a tension much like the one that TGF is trying to hold without writing off the distinction to make it easier. TGF situates this more in how you behave politically in the world than TGW generally did (except occasionally through Diane), but I think it has a fairly clear sense in that political existence of what goodness means. You might not always be able to accomplish it, and actions rather than people are good or bad (or at least, people are bad as a function of doing bad things), but I don’t think just because the “good” side sometimes does bad things, the show is necessarily heavy on both-sides-ism. It’s less two separate cups and more the string between two cups, with people and stances at different places on that axis.

I also think the show is trying more and more to uncouple the concepts of order and goodness, which have previously been uneasy allies in-universe. (Think of everyone’s horror when Liz suggested the DNC’s arguments needn’t be based in truth; think of how cruel Maia’s retaliatory fake news was. Worse - think how Diane was really presented as having the high ground when she told the Assholes to Avoid lady to do it right next time! Publishing unsubstantiated allegations that were clearly labeled as such was ‘doing it wrong’ at that point.) So some of the things that have previously been presented as bad AND associated with the right are now being presented more neutrally when associated with the left. I don’t think that’s a criticism of the left; I don’t think, for instance, that the first creation of retaliatory fake news by the white lady resistance (the one that closed the other fake news factory - I’m NOT talking about the stuff with the sister) was something we were supposed to see as bad or as an ethical compromise. The normal has changed, in-universe. Certain tactics that aren't necessarily harmful have been decoupled from ethical stigma that they received because they weren’t associated with order and honesty - the world has changed, and our characters are changing along with it. It’s totally possible that I’m misreading this situation, but I do think it means we’re seeing people in positions we would previously have considered compromised without seeing them as compromised. I don’t think the show has done a terrible job with this, though.

I also think the show is weaker when it takes this on outside of the workplace - it’s clearly decided it wants to situate some of its dilemmas in Diane’s personal life and not her professional life, but it benefits from having to work this out within existing, robust character relationships, not just a single person’s struggles or via some characters who are about as central to our understanding of the show as the NSA guys. So a lot of the white lady resistance stuff feels pretty thin to me, and that could be causing me to give it, and in particular its bad behavior (mostly just the thing with the sister, right? but that was really so bad), less weight than the show wants me to. Maybe it’s trying to be more both-sides-y than I’m reading it because I find the workplace stuff more real and impactful. But I feel like a lot of that has been really neglected - was the stuff about whether to hire conservatives for the sake of expediency just kind of closed when they made Lucca the head of family law, for instance? It’s been really focused on being murky but not on, like, situating that in its world and its story lmao.