Over time, the heroine of “The Good Wife” got bolder and more powerful. She got less interested in being liked. PHOTOGRAPH BY JEFF NEUMANN / CBS

“I’ll announce tomorrow,” Governor Peter Florrick said. “Stand by my side.” And “The Good Wife” ended as it began, with Alicia Florrick standing by her husband at a press conference, her face pale, her hair unnaturally straight, her gaze inscrutable. Were I someone who funds politicians, Alicia’s next campaign would be a solid bet. The lady’s tough. So was the show that she stood at the center of, not as a heroine but as something rarer: a protagonist who never pulled off the mask she wore but hardened it into a shield.

This time, when Peter Florrick stepped down, having taken a deal on yet another corruption charge, Alicia didn’t hold her husband’s hand. Instead, she walked away, down an empty hallway. There was no one waiting for her there—not her hunky boyfriend, Jason (a contrived character who I had come to think of as Sex Wolf, Private Eye); not her former colleague Cary; and not her greatest ally, Diane Lockhart, who approached only to slap her in the face, furious at a courtroom betrayal. That slap parallelled a slap in the first episode, when a younger, more naïve Alicia had slapped her husband for his cheating and corruption, and for leaving their family exposed with his lies. On a YouTube video that CBS sent out immediately following the finale, the creators of “The Good Wife,” Robert and Michelle King, described these paired slaps as acts that “woke” Alicia. They also analyzed their protagonist’s story in complex and intriguingly contradictory terms: over seven seasons, they said, Alicia had in fact become stronger and more independent, capable of great things, particularly in court. But she had also made another transformation: hers was a story of “the victim becoming the victimizer.”

As for me, if I got my dream vision—in the same way that Alicia got to revisit, through imagined conversations, her closeness with Will Gardner, her dead true love and former boss and frequent elevator companion—the Kings would get a do-over on this final season. In a paragraph or two, I’m going to describe how much I admired, with a few reservations, the show’s acrid, ambiguous, unsettling last sequence, which was, refreshingly, the opposite of fan service. But first we need to put the Truth Moose on the table. For five seasons, “The Good Wife” was one of the richest, most daring shows on television: a layered exploration of the modern tension between public and private life; a pioneering series when it came to technology; and, on the most overt level, a witty and provocative meditation on the fraught, and eternally relevant, phenomenon of the political power couple. Last season, the show took an ambitious detour, allowing Alicia to pursue public office, a story that ended with her getting slammed down so hard that corporate law probably seemed like touchy-feely pro-bono work when she returned to it. It was a wild experiment that didn’t entirely pay off, despite some glorious moments. Then, this season, the show stumbled. It fell apart for the reasons that many more ordinary TV shows fall apart. It had lost key characters. It lost the plot thread, too, as law firms kept dissolving and reuniting, and older, subtler themes were revisited in newer, clunkier forms. It likely didn’t help that CBS had dithered about whether the series would continue without its original creators, requiring the writers to vamp as the backstage economics worked themselves out. I’m certainly happy that “The Good Wife” got to end in the Kings’ hands, even if it didn’t happen the way some fans might have hoped: with romantic love and female solidarity, work/life balance, a long-earned divorce, happy children, and maybe a head of naturally curly hair.

Those initial five wonderful seasons still exist. The sixth exists so that I can defend it to unbelievers. In 2012, I wrote about the show’s exploration of technology. In 2014, I wrote a larger celebration of how well the show disguised itself as a network procedural, then used the pressures of network production as fuel for its own ambition. If you’re interested in why this show was so important, read those.

But this is an ephemeral blog post meant to think out loud about an ending that only just happened, one that we’ll surely be thinking about for a while. And my first impression is: yes, it worked. It was pungent in a way that the show had earned, and refreshing precisely because it didn’t work as warm resolution for its characters, the way so many finales have done, even on highly ambitious shows, including “Parks and Recreation” and “Mad Men.” I’m not saying “End” was a perfectly constructed episode; I’m still baffled by that byzantine court case, the one with Sutton Foster making a wasted cameo. (As well as David Boies, making a very funny one.) There were an awful lot of those Socratic Will-alogues, which, though they were well-filmed and well-acted, had a gimmicky feel. But, mainly, the Kings had trapped themselves with the development of Jason the Sex Wolf, a fantasy of a cowboy-like loner bad-boy detective whose plot played like compensatory erotic fiction for viewers who miss Will and enjoy seeing Alicia getting laid, for real, for once—and who can blame us? In the process, however, the Kings trashed the closure Alicia achieved after Will’s death: all that existential wrestling, the realistic depression, the truth that she’d had to confront—that, before Will died, he had hated her. Jason was "Roar”-watching, deed-on-Mars-giving fun, but his presence felt artificial, and it threw the show back to the dull, familiar geometry of the love triangle, something the show had bravely deconstructed and ditched only a season before.

What did pay off was the rich, dizzy darkness of those last few minutes—and the way that final scene risked audience alienation. For seasons, many people, particularly female viewers, had fantasized about Alicia Florrick as a Lean In heroine: a woman who shrugged off humiliation to achieve control and success. But the Alicia we watched was never purely aspirational, despite many admirable qualities. “The Good Wife” was always quite clear about what allowed Alicia Florrick to rise: she made the compromises that were required of anyone in her world. Alicia got that corporate law job in the first place because she’d flirted with Will, knocking out someone more qualified. She’d exploited her husband’s political connections to steal a promotion from Cary. From early on, Alicia’s ethical choices warped her in response to the demands of the system, a process that she grew to accept as essentially unavoidable for adults who saw the world clearly. The show became a seven-year debate about pragmatism, one that never landed fully on one side or the other. For a story like Alicia’s, a happy ending, a romantic finale, would have been wrong, even if it felt good.

Seeing Diane slap Alicia was particularly painful. It suggested that Diane’s husband really was cheating on her—and that, by making that fact public in the courtroom, where Kurt couldn't lie, Alicia had basically turned Diane into Alicia. Now Diane, too, was no longer a happily married woman with a stable life but a cheated-on dupe, a powerful public woman humiliated in the eyes of those around her. It was a suggestion as unnerving as the notion of Alicia alone. It ended the utopian ideal of the all-female law firm; it suggested that maybe Zach’s awful fiancée was right about marriage. I can’t say I adored that moment, but I did admire it. That's probably appropriate for a show about a woman who bridled against that old insult/compliment: “Saint Alicia.” Over time, Alicia had gotten bolder and more powerful; she took less bullshit, became far savvier about her own desires, and learned to use the tools she grabbed along the way. She got less interested in being liked. I doubt that this finale will be beloved, either, because it didn't reward the characters. But for me it was an ending that commanded respect. In life and in television, it's difficult to resist the wishes of the wider world, but sometimes it's the right thing to do.