Good Wife 2025 Recap & Ending Explained: What Happens To Gunna And Tarunika?

The Good Wife–the famous US legal-political drama spanning eight seasons—has its Indian adaptation in Good Wife, which was released on Hotstar on July 4. Keeping the legal tension intact, the series shows some depth in exploring marriage as an institution, while it attempts to provide a very contemporary commentary on what it means for a woman to inhabit various gender roles such as a good wife, a good mother, and an efficient professional. From the initial glance, the title of the show prompts the image of an impeccable wife—who stands by her husband’s side no matter the circumstances, takes up a secondary role, and shadows him. However, what the show does is quite the opposite—it is a deconstruction of what it means to be a ‘good wife’; the show does not fail to deliver on this beautifully in its complexity.

Spoilers Ahead

What Is The Show About?

The premise of the show is a cheating husband—the Associate Advocate General Gunnaselan, whose scandal with a sex worker leaks on the evening of his fifteenth anniversary. However, the tape is just a facade—the accusations are graver. Gunnaselan is being accused of being in cahoots with drug kingpin Meth Maharaja besides a few more instances of corruption and bribery. Tarunika, an ex-lawyer, is Gunna’s wife—they have two children together and have to face the public brunt of not only the collapse of her marriage but also the private betrayal of the man she’d tied herself to for fifteen years—her husband, the father of the children. Yet, when Gunna extends his hand to her, Tarunika takes it.

The series traces Tarunika’s journey as she resumes working as a lawyer with a measured resilience and navigates her way through professional and personal upheavals. Tarunika joins ALH Firm, under her former lover, Hari Deepak. Her world expands—she comes across professional cases that reestablish her in the field and redefine her self-worth not only as a wife and mother but also as an able lawyer. The show’s reading of Tarunika is not reductive and one-note—but it often lets her overflow tightboxed boundaries—painting a picture of a woman who is dynamic, complex, and intelligent. While the show is about proving Gunna’s innocence, the focus remains on Tarunika’s evolution—an exceptional narrative that makes more room for the woman in the majorly male-centric world of storytelling, especially in political or legal dramas. Let’s take a look at how Tarunika evolves and whether Gunna is innocent in the public eye as what the private truth is.

How Does Tarunika Face the Blow?

A cheating husband grants permission for the society to point fingers at the wife; the first comment that comes from the voice of patriarchy is that the wife must have been lacking in her marital duties, failed to keep a happy home, or was practicing infidelity herself. However, the implications on the partner run deeper—it is a betrayal and a rupture in what they thought they knew about the partner; it is a breach of their marital oath. However, what Good Wife questions is the conventional approach of considering this breach of trust as something that brings down an institution that stood for years. While Tarunika is overcome by infidelity, she probably notes that a marriage, as well as her own identity, consists of more things than victimhood. At first, she considers divorce—a knee-jerk reaction to the situation. However, what Tarunika does after is respond to the entirety of the situation and not only the part where her husband cheated on her. 

What comes to her first is survival—both hers and that of her children. She taps into her network, reconnects with former beau, Hari Deepak, and gets a job in the law firm. We are used to seeing a woman who’s been cheated upon being painted as someone grieving, in loss, and living as a secondary shadow to the event—but Tarunika’s trajectory is one of strength and resilience. She responds to social isolation with dignity when she has to handle a case involving Sai, whose mother was a former friend who cut her off after her husband’s arrest. She fights the case for Sai, wins it with exceptional insight, but then refuses to accept the dinner invitation from his mother. Every case that comes her way makes Tarunika grow into the woman of substance that she is. However, the case that matters the most in proving Gunna’s innocence is the case about the minor egg harvesting case against a hospital, which was being represented by Vel Pandhiyan—the lawyer who brought accusations against her husband. In the fertility case, Tarunika moves with calculated grace and insight and brings down Vel Pandhiyan with poignant evidence of bribery against him. This is where the series shifts focus—in so many ways, Tarunika’s focus shifts from the cheating arc to her husband’s survival—which can be ensured by disproving that he had taken a bribe, even if it comes at the cost of admitting that he was with a sex worker. 

Is Gunna Proven Innocent?

When Gunna is supposed to go into court, his lawyer, Bharath, refuses to represent him. On the other hand, Tarunika’s colleague, Sneha Merleen, is taken in by Thillai and threatened to testify against Gunna, as she used to work with him before. Meanwhile, trust issues between Gunna and Tarunika start to arise—Gunna is often insecure of Tarunika’s newly revived friendship with Hari Deepak, but the show treats these moments with grace and consideration. The insecurities, very common in marriages, never blow out of proportion and are always overshadowed by the mutual respect that the couple have for each other even in the face of adversity. This is valid to the extent that Gunna helps out Hari in his case when no other resort is found, happily saying that he doesn’t mind doing so because Hari works with his wife. When it is Gunna’s turn to be in trouble, it is Hari who represents him in court. It is quite intriguing to see such a deconstructed love triangle where the cheating husband is being represented by his wife’s former lover, who has developed feelings for his wife again.

When Gunna is brought into court, and Sneha Merleen is asked to testify, she plays a hostile witness, refusing to admit to knowing anything about the misdealings. On the other hand, the sex worker who had claimed that she was being sent as a gift to Gunna by Meth Maharaja is discredited by Hari. There is proof of transactions made from Gunna’s account to the sex worker’s—which essentially meant they had had sexual liaisons, but the charges of corruption were fake. 

Do Gunna And Tarunika End Up Together?

Tarunika had been resistant about Hari’s attempts to rekindle their romance, even though she was feeling weak towards him. After Gunna’s innocence is proven by the court, Tarunika warms up to her husband—and when Hari asks her to rekindle the romance with him, she says that she finally feels in control of her life. However, this is where the graceful dynamic of the triangle is disrupted. Hari ends up sending a video to Tarunika where Thillai is explicitly engaging with a woman that Tarunika had seen with Sneha Merleen outside of the court. At the brink of reconciliation with her husband, this shakes Tarunika’s belief system again—she is reminded that Sneha had claimed to work under her husband and was fired promptly. Was Gunna having an affair with Sneha as well? Tarunika once again joins Gunna in his public presence as the ‘good wife,’ but deep down she is as confused as we are. 

What Reasons Do We Have To Believe Gunna And Sneha Were Having An Affair?

Sneha’s initial recognition of Tarunika outside the court for the first time was quite hearty—which may have seemed like a warm, friendly gesture, but in retrospect it seems like a calculated recognition. Tina had claimed that Gunna would open the window to feign traffic noises to Tarunika; perhaps when Gunna was with Sneha, he had done similar things, thereby letting Sneha know about Tarunika’s presence. When Tarunika and Sneha share drinks after the case victory, the sprinkler from the bar sprays water on them–a motif in the case they resolved together which would have placed the police and suspected victim under the gush of sprinklers. Maybe the sprinkle suggests a half-truth that needs to be washed down?

In Good Wife’s ending, Sneha also exchanges an uncomfortable glance with Gunna when he comes to the firm’s office, and it’s possible that it hints at some unresolved business between the two. Despite being threatened, Sneha acts as a hostile witness when she could have easily defended herself; she chooses to protect Gunna despite having admitted that she was fired from the firm. And in the end, Sneha’s acquaintance, the girl with the snake tattoo, seems to be a sex worker. There is a fair chance that Sneha was being paid by Gunna to perform sexual favors, especially as Tina admitted that Gunna liked to be called “your lordship” in his private quarters. If Gunna was seeking that, a young legal investigator would be the type that he could go for. The theories hint strongly at the fact that Sneha may have been involved in a certain capacity with Gunna, the threads of which shall continue into the next season.

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