Alicia is forced to stand by her husband Peter Florrick as he resigns as State's Attorney of Cook County, Illinois under threat of corruption charges. Six months later, forced to become the breadwinner after Peter is sentenced to ten years, Alicia reactivates her long-dormant law career: she takes a job as a junior associate at Stern, Lockhart & Gardner and is assigned to represent a woman accused of murdering her ex-husband in a hung jury-induced retrial.
This episode provides examples of the following tropes:
- Bitch Slap: After standing by Peter at the press conference where he insists he's guilty of nothing but an extramarital affair, Alicia slaps him silly the second they're out of sight of the press.
- By-the-Book Cop: Detective Briggs. While he's trying to jam up an innocent woman, it's due to honest errors in classification of forensic evidence rather than active malice. He sticks around for the trial after being questioned, realizes Alicia is onto something with her theory about the victim's brother-in-law, and immediately leaves to reopen the case, resulting in charges being dropped against Alicia's client.
- Distant Prologue: Six months pass between The Teaser and the proper start of the series during Alicia's first day at S,L&G.
- Guilty Until Someone Else Is Guilty: Double Subverted. Alicia probably has enough reasonable doubt after she destroys the prosecution's key witnesses, but just to make sure, she digs further and is able to circumstantially connect the victim's brother-in-law to the crime. The judge doesn't allow her to finish this line of questioning, but Detective Briggs still hears it and finds it convincing enough to reopen the investigation. S.A. Childs then drops the charges before the jury can reach a verdict, in favor of prosecuting the brother.
- Hide the Evidence: Due to a mistake rather than active malice. Off of a suggestion from Peter, Alicia investigates the concept of "pitted" evidence, police slang for material gathered at the crime scene but then judged irrelevant. In this case, dog hair found on the victim was mistakenly attributed to the victim's dog and not analyzed, when it in fact belonged to racing greyhounds at the track where the victim's brother-in-law worked.
- Rogue Juror: Diane instructs Alicia to reuse her trial strategy from the first trial, saying that the jury was hung 50/50 and it's unlikely the state will want to retry the case a third time. Unfortunately, Alicia investigates the jurors with Kalinda and discovers that the vote was actually 11-1 for conviction: the last juror went off a gut feeling about the defendant instead of the evidence, but the judge refused to allow them to declare themselves hung until five of the other jurors switched their votes to acquittal just so they could go home.
- Schlubby, Scummy Security Guard: One of the prosecution's key witnesses is the security guard where the murder took place, who claims he didn't see anything happen the night of the murder with video evidence to back him up, disproving the defendant's story. Alicia finds out that the guard never walked the grounds like he was supposed to and simply copied a security tape of him doing so every night, including the night of the murder. He perjured himself and destroyed the defendant's credibility to avoid losing his job.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Diane tries to replace Alicia on the case with Cary after she changes from Diane's trial strategy due to the Rogue Juror problem. Will calls her out for risking the client's freedom over Alicia showing her up and nothing ultimately happens.
