'The Good Wife' Creators Offer 5 Teases for Sunday's Season Finale

The Good Wife wraps its sixth season Sunday with an episode written by creators Robert and Michelle King that Robert also directed. Titled, “Wanna Partner,” it will not only reveal whether Finn (Matthew Goode) accepts the offer to join Alicia (Julianna Margulies) in a new firm, but also whether the promo for the hour was correct when it suggested that whatever is between Alicia and Finn and beneath her latest argument with Peter (Chris Noth) is “nothing compared to” whomever shows up at Alicia’s door.

Of course, the Kings won’t reveal who that person is — Archie Panjabi’s Kalinda, making her final appearance in the series, is the leading contender in fans’ minds. But they do tell Yahoo TV that the door scene takes place toward the end of the hour. So plan accordingly.

Here are five more teases for the season finale and beyond.

1. Kalinda’s appearance isn’t a flashback. “There aren’t any flashbacks in this episode,” Robert confirms. “It was all present day with Archie. It has to do with Charles Lester [played by Wallace Shawn]. It’s, unfortunately, complications that have come out of Kalinda leaving. What we kind of wanted to do was play this kind of as if it were an encore. We thought people would think that was very abrupt two episodes [ago] when Archie left the scene, and wouldn’t be prepared for it, and we wanted to have a little surprise, but also a little emotional jiggle, and then have her come back in these last two [episodes].”

2. Louis Canning (Michael J. Fox) returns. “He has one of the most intense scenes I’ve seen from him, where he just explodes in anger,” Robert says. “It was a really fun scene to edit because each time he did it, he did it a little different. I’ve never seen him explode with that kind of anger before. I think the audience will enjoy that.”

3. Peter and Alicia’s kitchen conversations, however, will remain civilized. “Alicia and Peter have an interesting relationship now because of the Alicia scandal and Peter standing beside her. There’s a real sense of exhaustion between the two,” Robert says. “You get past the jealousy, not because there isn’t still reason to be emotional, it’s just at a certain point, the muscles wear out and you just kind of stop feeling those angst-y emotions. You’re just kind of done. I think Alicia’s in that position where she’s a bit done.” Adds Michelle, “For the moment. Which is not to say that that kind of jealousy doesn’t rear itself up again soon enough, just as in life. But at the moment, she’s not living with that.”

4. Finn will get some screen time. The Kings are aware that fans may not have seen Finn as much as they’d assumed they would when it was first announced that Goode would return for Season 6. “It was probably fat at the beginning and fat at the end and a little thin in the middle,” Robert says. “We were playing with the idea that Alicia has this affection for bad boys, and Finn is one of the few people in her life who actually has been fairly upstanding throughout and does not have the kind of killer’s vision of wanting to turn everything to his advantage — he’s actually a pretty good guy — and that Alicia found herself drawn to someone a little bit more like Elfman, the Steven Pasquale character, who is a bit more of a killer strategically, a little like Will in that way. I think that’s one of the reasons you’re finding Alicia now moving past that and finding whether she’s lost her chance with Finn or not.”

Michelle admits there was another factor: “As is always the case with all of these arcs, it’s half deliberate and half scheduling. Sometimes that thing is just because that’s where the story leads, and sometimes that thing is just because the actor is off doing Downton Abbey,” she says in reference to Goode’s role on that show’s next season.

Scheduling is a juggling act that they’ve had to learn to master: Mike Colter, who plays Lemond Bishop, has been filming Netflix’s A.K.A. Jessica Jones in New York City and Oliver Platt, who plays top client R.D., will star in Dick Wolf’s second Chicago Fire spinoff, Chicago Med.

“Every word is like another nail in us,” Michelle says. “These are actors we adore, and characters we adore, and so when they’re not available, it’s really difficult.” The only helpful thing, Robert says, “is when you know, like, a month ahead, then you can start building the arc, even though you thought you were going to end the series with it, you move up the end of that arc.”

Fingers crossed, we’ll see more of Platt next season. “Do you ever interview Dick Wolf?” Robert asks. “If anybody can get to Dick Wolf and ask him to let us have Oliver Platt for a few episodes, we’d love it.”

The Kings also, for the record, sound keen to see more of Sarah Steele’s Marissa Gold and David Hyde Pierce’s Frank Prady. “One of the reasons we wanted to do the campaign at all was to pull away all of Alicia’s self-delusions about being Saint Alicia, or even a totally good person,” Robert says. “The viewers over the last six years have seen an Alicia who does some corrupt things and we’ve come to accept her, but the public, in our fictional world, has never seen that side of her. They’ve always seen her as the victim, as the person who’s been kind of almost a secular saint. Then, to have all those delusions pulled away kind of leaves Alicia with nothing. Whether that leaves it open for the popular David Hyde Pierce [to return to the show], we are hoping so.”

5. They don’t want to crush you with the finale. “Hopefully, they will feel both satisfied and intrigued,” Michelle says when asked how they’d like viewers to feel at the end of the hour. “The only thing I might add to that is ‘hopeful,’” Robert says. “We never want to leave the viewers at the end of the year with all their hopes dashed, and we know this will be a hard year on them because of the loss of Archie Panjabi, and so we didn’t want it to be a complete downer of a year: Even though we have taken Alicia probably to the lowest depths other than Will’s death, we also have to show that she has this indomitable spirit that allows her to pull herself back up.”

Bonus: Robert explains why we only heard Josh Charles’s voice in March’s “Mind’s Eye” and didn’t see him in that dark balcony scene. “When someone dies in your life… I find this with my dad, I don’t have a lot of luck picturing the face,” Robert says. “We didn’t use Josh, we used the actor in the credit card commercial [within the show] that has Josh’s voice. We wanted that difficulty of picturing the person who has left you — either for emotional reasons you’re blocked, or it’s just very hard sometimes because you saw someone in movement. We wanted that with Alicia, and we also wanted to play with the idea that it really was based on voice, which is also a personal thing — someone in my family heard on a Southwest Airlines recording someone who sounded exactly like my dad after he died. So it was based on that.”

The Good Wife season finale airs Sunday, May 10 at 9 p.m. on CBS.