Advertisement

Inside The Good Fight's Ill-Fated Plot to Assassinate Alan Cumming's Eli Gold

The following story contains spoilers from this week’s The Good Fight — proceed at your own peril

The Good Fight bid permanent farewell to a legacy Good Wife character this week — but the

The Good Fight Season 6 Episode 4
The Good Fight Season 6 Episode 4

shocking twist was initially intended to be considerably more seismic.

More from TVLine

In Thursday’s episode (the fourth of the final season’s 10) an anti-semitic gunmen sets out to assassinate Alan Cumming’s Eli Gold. However, due to a case of mistaken identity, Democratic bigwig Frank Landau (played by franchise vet Mike Pniewski) ends up taking the fatal bullet instead — as Eli looks on in horror.

As Good Fight co-creator Robert King reveals to TVLine, the original storyline had the gunmen hitting his intended target. “We were going to kill Eli Gold,” the EP shares. “It was going to be an anti-Semitic assassination. But there was a lot of argument [in the writers room] that we not do that. People were upset about it.”

In the end, the Kings agreed. “It felt cheap to bring Eli back in Episode 2 only to kill him in Episode 4,” notes fellow co-creator/EP Michelle King. “It had the potential to feel like a stunt.”

Adds Robert King: “And it would’ve made [Eli’s daughter] Marissa’s story harder [moving forward]

The Good Fight Season 6 Episode 4
The Good Fight Season 6 Episode 4

because you have a mourning [period]. And how long would that go on for?”

Furthermore, “Given how ludicrous the world is right now…it felt more apropos] that [the shooter] would aim for the Jewish person and end up hitting [Frank], the Protestant,” Robert King explains, before adding, “We wanted every bit of violence this season to just be odd and quirky and not the way usual TV violence happens. So we wanted an anti-Semitic assassin to be like, ‘I’m aiming for Eli but I shoot the guy who is not Jewish at all.'”

Best of TVLine

Get more from TVLine.com: Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Newsletter

Click here to read the full article.