So, I couldn’t bring myself to write about episodes 11 and 12. We were busy with awards season, and to be honest, they were a total slog. I wasn’t going to do this one, either, until Fug Nation alerted me to Important Developments On The Mouth Front, so … here we are. Let me sum up, hastily:

In Episode 11, the first one back, Alicia spent the ENTIRE TIME bitter and ragey and full of hateface at the entire world — all because Eli deleted a voicemail ages ago that ultimately still didn’t stop her from hooking up with Will Gardner. Peter “Martin O’Malley” Florrick loses badly in Iowa, so his campaign ends, Margo Martindale leaves, and Eli takes back his old job because Peter is still governor. And it does that thing this show LOVES wherein they pick a particular song and have it recur throughout. In this case, it’s a Song of Cardiac Bitterness that Alicia is listening to through her headphones. This show is so in love with its quirky opens and closes.

The next episode is Alicia being horrible to Eli’s awesome daughter Marissa as she tries to broker peace, and Alicia blah blah blah crabby craby, until Cary suggests she and Lucca come back to Lockhart, Agos, & Lee (though Lucca points out she was never there in the first place), and blah blah blah angryface, nothing happens. Oh, Lucca does hook up with their client Matthew Lillard, because she likes to have short and hot and ultimately meaningless flings with musicians.AND, Grace solves a squabble between Alicia in 903 and the woman in 603 who is sick of getting all her visitors and packages by mistake. Grace handles the HOA board adeptly and they don’t penalize or evict Alicia for running a home business (um, did Alicia THE LAWYER not look into this when she did it?!?!?!?), and Alicia is totally fine and Grace’s reward is… getting fired, because someone FINALLY noticed that she was not paying any attention to school and doing terribly. Basically, Alicia is a terrible lawyer AND terrible parent right now.

That brings us about up to speed.