Warning: Spoilers! Do not read any further unless you’ve watched Sunday, May 8’s Good Wife finale
Wait, was that really how it ended? As fans took to Twitter to express their disappointment with the ending to the hugely popular series The Good Wife, creators Michelle and Robert King released a video to explain their choices — and in particular what that slap was all about.
“To talk about the end of the series is probably to talk about the beginning of the series because we started with this feeling that it should begin with a slap and end with a slap,” Robert explained in the video shared by CBS after The Good Wife‘s final episode.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=FLNkGlTEdRk
And as Us Weekly reported previously in our finale recap, the slap they’re talking about is the shocking wallop Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) received from Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski) in the show’s final moments.
While many fans had yearned for a happy ending for lead character Alicia, instead they were handed their own, figurative slap in the face — but the creators were standing firm with their decision and were pleased to tie in the ending with the shows opening scenes (which saw Alicia slapping husband Peter, a.k.a. Chris Noth, as they stood in a hotel kitchen during the series’ first episode).
“This show is about a woman who becomes more and more confident and more and more cunning and excited about her ability and also about power, so that slap at the end is very similar to the slap in the beginning,” Robert continued. “We always had this idea of Alicia becoming more and more of something that she also was not liking in her husband.”
“We had talked about that the victim becomes the victimizer,” added Michelle, “and that’s really the circle that we see of Alicia.” (In the final court case of the series, Alicia double-crossed Diane, strategically humiliating her and her husband in court.)
“Michelle has always said the slap at the beginning of the series was like a slap that woke Alicia up,” Robert continued. “There’s a slap at the end of the series that wakes Alicia up a second time.”
Watch the whole interview in the video above and tell Us — are you happy with the way the show ended?
