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"I am still coming down from the dizziness I experienced watching The Good Wife&amp;#x27;s final season-five episode last night. It was a true finale&amp;#x27;s finale, packed with enough power plays and cliffhangers to keep us talking about the show until fall. But that&amp;#x27;s not what made my head spin. What rocked me was how, with the precision, thoroughness, and drama-free delivery of a guided missile, it served up moments mirroring the lives of famous&amp;amp;#8212;and nonfamous&amp;amp;#8212;working women. I&amp;#x27;m thinking first of Jill Abramson, the recently ousted New York Times executive editor, whose ghost hovered over the climax of Diane&amp;#x27;s downfall at Lockhart Gardner. (Really, there should be a word-cousin of downfall that indicates not tripping or sliding but being pushed.) We don&amp;#x27;t know everything about Abramson&amp;#x27;s firing, but as Tanya wrote in the story linked above, reports suggest that she was paid less than her male colleagues and slapped with murkily sexist criticisms on her demeanor. (Brusque never seems to plague executives like Mark Cuban or Larry Ellison or Donald Trump, just off the top of my head.) And over in Diane&amp;#x27;s fictional but frustrating situation, the same gender-related tactics were in play. I appreciate that The Good Wife engineered this story line so that David Lee and Louis Canning, long characterized as soulless piranhas, were the ones going after her&amp;amp;#8212;we know they&amp;#x27;re simply greedy, not boys ganging up because they&amp;#x27;re boys. But the insidious party line Diane had to quash again and again reeked of &amp;quot;cuz you know women&amp;quot;: She was slipping in her mourning. Translation: She&amp;#x27;s emotional. That old favorite trope of guys who lie awake worried about what happens if a woman has to make war moves on her period. Which brings me to the other real-life lady who was unseen but present in &amp;quot;A Weird Year&amp;quot;: Hillary Clinton. We&amp;#x27;re seeing not just shades, but a full Hillary spectrum in Alicia right now&amp;amp;#8212;except for their cut and color, they&amp;#x27;re basically the same. Sure, this was a character molded from the DNA of Hillary and her peers in the file of publicly wronged spouses. You could pick up the parallels between Hillary Then and Alicia Then in the subway ads from season one. But it&amp;#x27;s only now, five full seasons in, that we are seeing the parallels between Hillary Now and Alicia Now. Alicia has spent all that time building her own firm, brand, and life&amp;amp;#8212;while getting more comfortable with capitalizing on her married name. It&amp;#x27;s because of how passionately I&amp;#x27;ve followed Clinton&amp;#x27;s career that I could read Eli&amp;#x27;s mind as he looked hard at Alicia in the episode&amp;#x27;s final moments. I knew he was going to ask her if she wanted to run. And I knew what she was feeling when he asked her: that here, beneath the abruptness of the question and despite the exhausting craziness of her day, was the validation that yes, she is ready for solo greatness. Just when she thought all she wanted was sleep. Of course, Jill and Hillary weren&amp;#x27;t the only invisible women in the background of this episode. There were literally millions of them tucked into relatable places&amp;amp;#8212;in Alicia&amp;#x27;s emotional surveillance of Zach&amp;#x27;s packed room, in Diane&amp;#x27;s struggle not to cry on the street. All the moments, and all these women, are part of the same narrative. The Good Wife didn&amp;#x27;t predict the future with its finale&amp;amp;#8212;it just showed that it knows its history. This episode wasn&amp;#x27;t written in the past week. Abramson hadn&amp;#x27;t yet been fired. Clinton hadn&amp;#x27;t yet been accused of &amp;quot;brain damage.&amp;quot; But we all know how these stories go. We all know there will always be more of them. And we all know that this is the season&amp;#x27;s end, but not the story&amp;#x27;s. I like to think of Diane, whiskey in hand, taking heart in Abramson&amp;#x27;s words to the Wake Forest class of 2014 this morning: &amp;quot;You know the sting of losing. Or not getting something you badly want. When that happens, show what you are made of.&amp;quot; *Disclosure: I sometimes write for The New York Times."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.glamour.com/entertainment/blogs/obsessed/2014/05/the-good-wife-season-5-finale>