Those scenes had some cute details to them—Lombardozzi’s blunt, funny advice played well against the ashen Matt Czuchry, who has done award-worthy work all season as the embattled Cary. But they also felt like tiring stall tactics in a plot that had long ago run out of thread. Cary wasn’t going to prison. If he were—if showrunners Robert and Michelle King had decided to explore that plot—he’d have been there already. The palpable relief I felt at Cary’s liberation at the end of the episode was more to do with finally being free of the storyline. Especially after the antics Kalinda had to pull to get him off.

Kalinda breaks the law all the time to get things done, but she’s a skilled investigator who knows how to cover her ass, and her infractions are usually committed with the safe knowledge that no one’s going to call her on it. Not so much here, where she manipulates court evidence to make it seem like the cop on Cary’s case (John Ventimiglia) ignored evidence that might have dropped the charges against him. The episode did not treat this as an easy decision, or a justifiable one: Kalinda’s horror when her ploy succeeds, and the cop’s loud protests, suggest this issue will not go away anytime soon.

But despite Kalinda’s bond with Cary—and Archie Panjabi and Matt Czuchry’s fine work together over the years—it felt like a bridge too far to have her make such a tremendously stupid move to save him from two years in jail. To have Kalinda, such a self-possessed character, potentially sacrifice her freedom to save a man she’s romantically interested in, even one as sympathetic as Cary, rang hollow—and the slapstick way it occurred, with the technologically incompetent Diane somehow pulling the falsified data off her computer and introducing it into evidence before Kalinda could stop her, didn’t help.

But Cary’s exoneration still played beautifully. Czuchry nailed his palpable relief, and the show didn't edge away from the element of irony that’s been present all season—Alicia, the firm, and the judicial system itself in the end, scrambling to save an entitled white man who might go to jail for associating with a black drug trafficker. This week, we see a zoomed-in shot of Cary’s checking account (more than $250,000 in the bank, good job buddy!) and hear the presiding judge apologize for his ordeal at the hands of over-eager prosecutors. We’re on his side, no doubt, but the show’s self-awareness of Cary’s privilege was one of the brightest, best-handled notes of the episode.

Alicia’s debate camp served mostly as welcome relief from the tension of Cary’s looming sentencing, although it had some comedic details that were too weirdly goofy (like Chris Elliott’s baffling appearance as a stoned professor standing in for her opponent). Alicia’s campaign stories always consist of the same arc, which we saw again here—she’s detached and disinterested because of other storylines happening around her, but finally leaps into the political fray with glee and shows surprising acumen.