Original airdate: May 17, 2000
Written by: Aaron Sorkin (21)
Directed by: Thomas Schlamme (5)
Synopsis
- In flashback, we see West Wing staffers preparing the President for a televised town hall meeting, while he also waits for word on the fate of a downed Air Force pilot in Iraq. The space shuttle crew (which includes Toby's brother) is dealing with critical problems before they can leave orbit and return to earth. Josh gets the Vice President onboard with the campaign finance reform issue. Then, at the end of the town hall, Season 1 ends in gunshots and chaos with a voice calling out on the radio, "Who's been hit? Who's been hit?"
"Decisions are made by those who show up."
Yep, Season 1 ends with a cliffhanger. Aaron Sorkin kind of made that his style, though, with each finale episode of his four seasons of
The West Wing leaving the audience waiting for answers (
Two Cathedrals, yeah, you can argue that's not
really a cliffhanger, but it has the style). Sorkin caught some flak from critics for that back in 2000, being accused of using a hackneyed plot device to hold the audience over the summer, but I mean, damn - he does it really, really well.
We saw in
Celestial Navigation a bit of playing around with time - in that episode we started with Josh giving a talk, then we saw some flashbacks of the week leading up to that talk before time catches up with him and Toby and Sam's trip to Connecticut. Here we get a full flashback treatment, something that will be used again and again in the series. The cold-open teaser shows us the present, with something bad about to happen, then we go back to 12 hours earlier to fill in the gaps and build us back up to that night.
That teaser, by the way, is
so damn good. It still makes me catch my breath and feel the tension rising in my throat. Right from the end of the nearly seven-minute cold open, when Gina Toscano sees the kid looking up to a window behind her and turns, and begins to shout as the opening titles roll ...
Holy frickin' moly, that's good TV. I still get the hairs on my neck standing up seeing that shot.
And think about seeing this for the first time. There's the President, holding court onstage for this town hall ... but why is Charlie grinning about something he said? Why is he so excited when he's talking to Josh? What's with the swooshing arm signals passed between Sam and Toby and Josh and Leo, and the President? What's that news tip CJ is giving Danny? Sorkin and director Tommy Schlamme do what I think is a great job of giving us interesting hints and leaving us wanting answers, which they give us over the course of the episode (sometimes in unexpected ways). And then, of course, the episode and the season ends in a hail of gunfire, with the crowd scattering and the radio call of "Who's been hit?" And back in 2000 ... we had to wait
four whole months to find out.
So,what's going on here. President Bartlet is preparing to hold a televised town hall meeting, mostly with college students, it appears (Sam tells Toby students aren't going to ask questions about Cuba, and Toby responds there'll be faculty there). Please note, this town hall is televised by MSNBC, which is something that hasn't been mentioned before in
The West Wing universe:
(
MSNBC being a cable news channel and joint venture of Microsoft and the NBC television network. The channel launched in 1996, so had been on the air over three years at this time. While it's an intrusion of the real world into the universe of the show, it's kind of a corporate synergy strategy to use your own real-life news network in this entertainment programming rather than made-up channels like the previously seen "CND" network.)
Over the course of the day leading up to the town hall, an Air Force pilot patrolling the no-fly zone over Iraq is shot down. President Bartlet orders the military to go in and rescue him, threatening to march on Baghdad if the Iraqis capture him (the no-fly zone and opposition with Iraq imply something like the
Gulf War happened in this universe). Meanwhile, we also discover equipment problems are causing a delay in the return of the space shuttle Columbia from orbit - and furthermore, Toby's brother is a payload specialist on the flight (Sam: "I didn't know you had a brother on the space shuttle. I didn't know you had a brother."). And Josh meets with Vice President Hoynes to get him to work with the administration's recent push to reform campaign finance rules on soft money.
So there's tension galore, and not just from that look of Gina's before the opening titles. The President and Leo go back and forth to the Situation Room as plans are made for the military rescue operation. Toby stews in frustration, smart enough to know that the situation in orbit could be dire, but powerless to do anything about it. And let's not forget CJ - after Leo (somewhat reluctantly) lets her know about the rescue mission in Iraq, he has to bring up the events of
Lord John Marbury where she was left out of the information loop entirely, and when he somewhat condescendingly says he hopes she won't have issues dealing with the press this time, she's not shy:
CJ: "I wasn't lying to the press on India-Pakistan, I was lied to by you, which made me look like an idiot."
Leo (pause): "Well, I'm not lying to you now."
Leading to a nice Schlamme-designed shot of CJ flat-out answering Danny's question about any current military operation with "No" as Leo watches through the glass:
That little give-and-take at the briefing, by the way, continues to keep Danny riled up. He feels he's still being unfairly treated by CJ after his reveal of Mandy's opposition research memo some episodes ago, and is miffed at CJ calling on him to ask the question so she can mislead the public (and the Iraqis) about the rescue mission. We do get the impression, though, that CJ is softening about that whole thing:
Danny: "CJ, I'm not staying in the penalty box forever. I have covered the White House for eight years, and I've done it with the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time magazine, and the Dallas Morning News, and I'm telling you, you can't mess me around like this!"
CJ: "Danny, I gotta tell you, that was, seriously, that was a turn-on when you said that, though I don't know why you decided to be your most haughty on the Dallas Morning News in that sentence."
So that little exchange, as well as the troubles with the space shuttle, answer our questions about the CJ/Danny scene in the teaser.
The space shuttle story gives us another insight into Toby. He's obviously a deeply private man - we've seen over the season that in many ways he's the moral center of the West Wing and this administration, doing his best to hold the President to the path of doing what's right rather than what's politically expedient, but for his personal life, well - we didn't even know he had been married until
Mandatory Minimums. Now we discover he has a brother, and he's a NASA astronaut. When Sam first talks to him about the issues the
Columbia is having in orbit, Toby is quite rude and snippy. Then later, we find he acted that way because he felt guilty. He forgot that his brother was even on the flight, since his assignment had been changed around several times, and now that he was in danger, well, Toby does have feelings after all. There are very nice scenes between Sam and Toby, and Jed and Toby, that not only show the deep emotions going on behind Toby's wall (his eyes welling up while he talks to the President, that's great acting), but also the deep affection the others in the West Wing have for him.
The shuttle does finally return safely, with word passed around via swooping arm movements, giving the audience the answer to that little bit in the teaser. What we discover, though, is that the "signal" was actually thought up by Sam to pass along word on the rescue of the Air Force pilot. The thinking was that the rescue mission might take some time, and word might come down while the President was at the town hall. Sam thought a wordless signal might be a good way to pass along good news on the pilot's rescue:
(Naturally Leo thinks it looks like a "hip-hop movement.")
The rescue mission, though, goes quickly, and Admiral Fitzwallace gets to pass the word to President Bartlet in the Oval Office well before the town hall meeting. I like how Sorkin put that scene together - Fitz comes in telling Jed he should have news soon, then they sit together and talk about the carpet for a moment, then when the call comes it's not actually word on the outcome of the mission, but the pilot himself, Scott Hotchkiss, on the line to talk to the President. The sudden surprise and joy on Jed's face is priceless. Nicely done.
(What's not so nicely done is the "urban legend" Fitz tells about the eagle in the Presidential seal, and how it turns from facing the olive branch to facing the sheaf of arrows when war is declared. That's simply
not true. While the eagle in the seal had been facing different directions at different times before 1945, in that year President Truman ordered the seal always have the eagle facing right, toward the olive branch.)
Josh's little jogging meeting with the Vice President is notable only for the location shot (on the Arlington Memorial Bridge) and the little nugget that Josh had been advising Hoynes on his presidential campaign a couple of years ago.
Hoynes: "You know something, Josh, sometimes I wonder if I'd listened to you two years ago, would I be President right now? You ever wonder that?"
Josh: "No, sir, I know it for sure."
So, in Jed's words when he discovered Charlie and Ambassador Cochran knew each other, "You have a past?" It creates a little oddity in the moment in
Five Votes Down when Josh goes to Hoynes' office to congratulate him on the maneuvering, and Hoynes tells him, "Welcome to the NFL." Would Hoynes have acted quite like that if he had Josh as an adviser during his campaign? Or was that a dig at Josh for leaving him and going to Bartlet? And how long exactly did Josh work for Hoynes before changing teams?
There we are, though, with our questions about the teaser answered and our attention back to the town hall. We still need to find out about Charlie's grinning, though ... and that comes through when the President mentions him in bringing up a fact about youth disengagement in politics, from a report Charlie had found interesting but only mentioned to the President after Zoey's urging. That moment gives us a callback to Charlie's hiring in
A Proportional Response, in which he tells Josh, "I've never felt like this before," and Josh replies, "It doesn't go away." Here Charlie tracks down Josh in the back of the auditorium:
Charlie: "He used the material I told him about. You were right."
Josh: "What do you mean?"
Charlie: "It doesn't go away."
I want to mention that town hall scene, shown to us twice, in the teaser and leading up to the climax at the end of the episode (and in both places, starting at the exact same time, where Jed tells the joke about the debating politicians and "Yes, I am lying, but hear me out!"). Sorkin and Schlamme do a masterful job of weaving different angles and focus on different speeches the two times we see it, while still leaving us sign posts along the way so we remember where we are. The bit about the President mentioning Charlie is buried and lost in the teaser - we only see Charlie's reaction - but it's right out front in the second telling. Jed's final words about his great-great-great-great grandfather
Josiah Bartlett and the founding fathers writing down "all men are created equal" was never heard in the teaser, but is prominently featured in the final act (with great shots of Leo and CJ watching him). The town hall wraps up, all our early questions answered, with a overarching crane shot of the auditorium (a
West Wing and Schlamme specialty).
And then two guys with handguns open fire on the Presidential party from a building across the street, with bullets flying and chaos everywhere. We know somebody's been hit, but who? In the DVD commentary, Sorkin mentions how viewers examined the scene like the
Zapruder film of Kennedy's assassination looking for clues ... so let's do that!
First, Gina knocks Charlie to the ground:
She then covers Zoey with her body next to a limousine:
The President is pulled away into the limousine by Secret Service:
Josh looks on in horror from behind a gate:
CJ gets pushed by a Secret Service agent:
And then is tackled by Sam just before the police car window shatters from gunfire:
Toby is on the ground, in the crowd near a fence:
And Leo is held down, presumably by Secret Service agents:
(This shot is eerily reminiscent of James Brady lying face down on the sidewalk after the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan in 1981.)
And the final shot, from overhead, with at least one person (Secret Service, perhaps?) lying motionless on the ground, with a voice on the radio calling out "People down! People down! Who's been hit? Who's been hit?"
Now, the kicker ... at the time this scene was filmed, Sorkin
didn't know who had been shot. He had built up the season to end with an assassination attempt, but he hadn't worked any further ahead than that. He literally did not have a plan for what followed or who ended up hit in the melee of bullets ... making any attempt by viewers to figure out the result of the assassination futile. That also means, for the Season 2 opener, the crew had to go back to the Virginia location to shoot more footage once Sorkin wrote that script and decided which characters actually had been shot.
Season 1 ends on an exciting note, and a cliffhanger (cliche, perhaps, but well-done in any event). Sorkin pulls together threads he'd planted throughout the course of the season - the Charlie-Zoey relationship, the soft-money campaign finance reform plan, the President's illness, Josh's brash arrogance, Gina Toscano's intuition - and has it all come together to wrap up the season and leave the audience on tenterhooks until the fall.
Tales Of Interest!
- An interesting shot from the previous episode, which I forgot to add in to that post. There's a picture on the wall of the Communications Office area that shows a young, well-coiffed Jed Bartlet (obviously a young Martin Sheen photoshopped in) talking with
Teddy Kennedy and another old-school Democratic bigwig. It's right above Bonnie's head in this shot. I can't tell if it's maybe Chicago mayor
Richard Daley, or perhaps not. It's still a pretty cool little detail in the set decoration that you're going to miss unless you're looking closely, and it really helps to add a dose of physical reality and history to this whole TV-series world we're watching.
- While we're talking pictures, there's some new portraits added to the Situation Room wall. I'm going to assume they're previous Presidents, as the one on the left is obviously
Richard Nixon. However, this brings up some universe questions:
You can get some better looks at a couple of these in early shots, but the next picture over from Nixon looks an awful lot like
Jimmy Carter, and the one on the other side of the seal looks a lot like
George H. W. Bush. The one on the right we never get a real good look at, but it sure has the impression of
Bill Clinton, who was actually President at the time this episode aired. As I've surmised earlier, a possible permutation of history in this universe was new elections called in 1974 to replace the resigned Nixon; Carter serving as President from 1975-1979 could be possible. Putting Bush in the line, perhaps elected in 1978 or 1982, okay, I could see that. Clinton, though ... that wouldn't make any sense. We know the previous President before Bartlet (elected in 1994) was Republican (the Supreme Court justice in
The Short List tells Jed he'd been waiting for a Democrat to retire), and it would have had to be a one-termer (in
The White House Pro-Am we're told the trade bill has been worked on for eight years and three presidents). The administration prior to that, elected in 1990 or perhaps 1986, was likely Democratic (as Leo served as Secretary of Labor when he went into rehab in 1993). There have been at most five, and at least three, Presidents between Nixon and Bartlet - and if these pictures indicate it was Carter, Bush, and Clinton in there, that doesn't leave room for the presidents we find out about in Season 5's
The Stormy Present. Just a fun thought about alternate reality ...
- That title,
What Kind Of Day Has It Been, is a hallmark of Sorkin's. He used it for the Season 1 finale of
Sports Night prior to this; after this he has used it for the series finales of
Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip and
The Newsroom.
- The use of the space shuttle
Columbia in the story putting the crew in peril turned out to be sadly prescient, as the real-life
Columbia broke up during re-entry in February 2003, killing all seven crew members.
- Perhaps you noticed this episode seemed stuffed with extra bodies. In the DVD commentary, Sorkin and Schlamme say the season finale is a good opportunity to put the stand-ins and other background folks onscreen for a moment, and maybe even give them a line. It also gives Sorkin a chance to dig at a well-known quirk of Martin Sheen's:
President (walking through the corridors): "Morning, Patty [...] Hey, Steve, hey, Mikey. (to Charlie) Listen, have I gotten any of the names right so far?"
Charlie: "No, sir, but you came damn close on a couple of them."
Sheen is famous for not remembering names well, or at all.
- Speaking of stand-ins and other folks, remember back in
Take This Sabbath Day, where we saw the Supreme Court justices, and one of those actors looked a lot like Ruth Bader Ginsburg?
Isn't this reporter sitting next to Danny in the press briefing room the same person?
- I mentioned the Schlamme shots of Leo watching CJ and the briefing through the window, and the sweeping overhead shot of the auditorium. I also liked the shot of Leo giving the signal to the President while he's on stage, and you see Jed's face on the monitor as his head follows Leo's arm motion. Pretty cool.
- The town hall scenes were filmed at the
Colburn School, a music school in downtown Los Angeles. I found this out because the sign outside the room being used by the press calls it the "Toby E. Mayman Recital Hall." That means the school's larger Zipper Hall was used for the auditorium shots.
- Less of an interesting item than a sad one: The political topics covered in this episode from early 2000 include: youth disengagement from politics; younger generations blaming older ones for their lack of opportunities; campaign finance reform to remove corporate "soft money" from elections; the difficulties in finding health care for all Americans; heck, President Bartlet even mentions how one of the town hall attendees called him a socialist. How much progress have we made, in any of these areas, in the past 18 years? Sad to say, not much.
Quotes
CJ (whispering): "I have a tip."
Danny (whispering): "You do?"
CJ (whispering): "Yes."
Danny: "Okay."
CJ (whispering): "I have a tip and I'm going to give it to you before the others."
Danny: "Are we being watched right now?"
CJ (looks around, whispers): "No."
Danny: "Then why are we talking like this?"
-----
Sam: "I'm also not wild about that hand-held mic, can we get him wired?"
President: "No, cause with the mic and the stool and the jacket over my shoulder I can do the town hall meeting and then do a couple of sets at the Copa."
-----
Josh: "It looked, like, you wanted to hug me."
Leo: "Man, did you read that wrong."
-----
Story threads, callbacks, and familiar faces (Hey, it's that guy!)
- Say farewell to Cathy, the Communications Office assistant (the one whom Sam looks on like a sister). Suzy Nakamura got a part on another series and left the cast after this season. Here's her final appearance:
- Speaking of farewells - Mandy, Mandy, Mandy. You've had so little to do over the past six or eight episodes, and what you've done, you haven't done well. You never had any chemistry with Josh, you screwed stuff up all the time, and you were just generally annoying. Your final scene on The West Wing had you musing about whether or not the President should take off his jacket during the town hall:
And this is the final time we see Mandy, heading down a corridor, disappearing forever (never to be even mentioned again, which is pretty odd when you think about it):
- Back in 20 Hours In L.A., when the President meets Gina and asks her some questions, she tells him, "I know what I'm looking for in a crowd, if that's what you're asking me." Here, as she scans the crowd and notices something odd, she says to herself, "I saw something. I saw something."
- CJ continues to give Carol a hard time about her spelling. Back in Take Out The Trash Day, she got after her for misspelling "Senator." Here, after briefing the press about the military rescue operation:
CJ: "I want to congratulate you, Carol. I really thought I was going to see Saudi Arabia spelled with a Y."
Carol: "CJ, I am a much better speller than you give me credit for."
CJ: "Yes. One L in Tel Aviv."
- Gail's fishbowl has a space shuttle in it:
- So what's the deal with Josh and Hoynes, exactly? If Josh was helping Hoynes "two years ago," that would have been late 1997-early 1998. What are some other things we know about Josh? We know Donna started working for him "during the campaign" in early 1998, so he was on the Bartlet campaign then. We know he and Mandy had a thing during the campaign, but they broke up in a July (probably 1998, as it was before the election). So could Josh have changed teams from Hoynes to Bartlet around the first of 1998? It's possible.
- A couple of Presidential callbacks: Zoey notices Jed is sweating when she talks to him in the hallway during the town hall prep. He brushes it off, but does it have something to do with his multiple sclerosis?
Also, in "Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc" and A Proportional Response Leo was the one who had to hold the President back from a devastating military strike on Syria. Here, it's Jed who puts a hand on Leo's arm when Leo bristles at the idea of waiting before going after the downed pilot.
Leo does tell Josh he flew planes "in the war" - in Season 5's An Khe we'll learn during the Vietnam War Leo had firsthand experience of what it's like to be shot down in hostile territory (this also helps explain Josh's deference and deep respect in his apology to Leo for bringing up a political upside to rescuing Hotchkiss during his talk with Hoynes).
- Remember those two skinhead-looking dudes who made Gina nervous outside the restaurant in Los Angeles in 20 Hours In L.A.?
Sorkin confirms in the DVD commentary that they used the same two actors, flying them to Virginia, as the shooters in the assassination-attempt scene.
You never get a really good look at them during this episode, but it is indeed those same two guys from Episode 16.
DC location shots
- The exterior shots of the Newseum, in Rosslyn, Virginia (the site of the town hall meeting) were indeed shot there, on North Kent Street.
The Newseum has since moved to downtown Washington, on Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and the Capitol (and I highly recommend it as a site to visit). This area in Rosslyn is now called Freedom Park.
- Here's the building where the shooters were set up:
And here's what that building actually looks like today:
- The jogging meeting between Josh and Hoynes took place on the Arlington Memorial Bridge over the Potomac. That's the back of the Lincoln Memorial in the background:
References to real people
- Jed is looking forward to a televised softball game between Sacramento State and the University of the Pacific, both real universities.
- President Bartlet is seen drinking out of a Dayton Flyers mug, from the University of Dayton. Martin Sheen is from Dayton.
- Hoynes is wearing a U.S. Naval Academy T-shirt while jogging, implying he's a graduate of the USNA.
End credits freeze frame: The establishing shot outside the Newseum from the beginning of the episode.
