Spoilers for the Season 4 premiere of “The Good Fight” on CBS All Access follow:

It was all a dream.

If you have watched “The Good Fight” from the beginning (and have a good memory), you recognized that the opening of the Season 4 premiere, “The Gang Deals With Alternate Reality,” is the first scene of the series, but flipped. Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski) is watching TV in 2017, witnessing the historic inauguration of …. Hillary Clinton. The Champagne that she had intended to pop in celebration in the series’s pilot can finally be deployed.

Hold my beer, “Dallas,” “The Good Fight” seems to be saying: Not just one season, but the entire run of the series to date — a story of law, politics and resistance in the reign of Donald Trump — has been a bizarre dream.

It wasn’t, as it turns out. But it’s still a characteristically bold, unusual step for a series like “The Good Fight” to begin a season with an episode like this, rather than dropping it as a one-off change of pace midseason. And while it’s not a typical scene-setting premiere, setting up story lines for the season to follow, it makes a strong fun-house summary of the themes and intellectual toughness of the series to date — as well as, perhaps, a preview of coming attractions.

“The Good Fight” is a show about college-educated urban liberals, feminists, African-American activists — people for whom the Trump presidency has been a nightmare. So the restoration of the timeline they were expecting in 2016, you might think, would be like waking to a beautiful morning.