Christine Baranski might have one of the best laughs on television. It’s a delighted ripple of sonic caramel and she puts it to considerable use in the sixth and final season of the Paramount+ legal drama “The Good Fight.” Spinning off from the long-running CBS series “The Good Wife” in 2017, it quickly established itself as a wonderfully spiky and humorously enraged treatise on This Moment We’re Living Through. What a long, strange trip it’s been.
This time, that trip is partially drug-induced. That’s why Baranski’s Diane Lockhart is laughing so much. It’s a side effect of an experimental mood enhancement treatment — she wants off this treadmill of anxiety we’re all stuck on — and the drug is called PT108. It is “less powerful than ketamine” and administered in the swanky offices of a physician played by an enigmatic if underused John Slattery. After each session, Diane emerges blissful and glassy-eyed, obsessed with the vividness of colors around her, somehow transformed into an unlikely flower child with an expensive wardrobe and high powered job.
This is in stark contrast to the reality around her — but is it even reality? When we first see Diane striding to work in Chicago, she meets up with her longtime colleague Liz Reddick (Audra McDonald) and it’s as if the Loop has been emptied entirely of people, cars, sounds. It’s eerie, but neither woman acknowledges this, except to note a bit of smoke and the smell of fireworks in the air. Behind them a towering edifice has “The Trump Building” written across it in official lettering. Is this another one of the show’s playful tricks? Is this a dream? After going upstairs, they eventually peer out their windows and suddenly down below there are crowds of protesters and police, noisily clogging the streets of downtown.
