The Fall's Gonna Kill You - TWW S2E20

Original airdate: May 2, 2001

Teleplay by: Aaron Sorkin (41)
Story by: Patrick H. Caddell (7)

Directed by: Christopher Misiano (4)

Synopsis

• The senior staffers are told about President Bartlet's condition, and tensions run high as CJ and Abbey meet with Oliver Babish. Josh asks Joey Lucas for a poll to help the administration figure out how to deal with reaction from the eventual public revelation. Sam tries to walk a fine line while writing a speech on tax cuts, and Donna freaks out over news of a falling Chinese satellite.

"The President has this disease and has been lying about it, and you guys are worried that polling might make us look bad? It's the fall that's gonna kill you!"

If you thought the President and Oliver Babish were getting pissy in the previous episode, that hardly compares to the thinly veiled hostility we see between Babish and CJ (and Babish and Abbey) this time around. The stakes are getting bigger, there's a clear notion that revelation of the coverup of Bartlet's MS could crash the entire administration, and people aren't happy.

CJ, for one, has some pretty solid grounds to be upset. She still remembers how it felt to get left out of the India-Pakistan crisis in Lord John Marbury and how her credibility with the press was damaged from "the guys" misleading her. Now having to face the press corps with the knowledge that there was another huge thing that the President and Leo kept from her? No wonder she's snapping at Babish:

All Babish is trying to do, of course, is find out what the staff knew and if they knowingly participated in covering up the President's condition. With CJ, he wants to know if she ever lied to the press about Bartlet's health, specifically the difference between her asking the President if there was anything else she "should know" or if she asked if there was anything else she "needed to know" about his health. To Babish she says she doesn't remember ... but later, talking to Abbey, she recalls a moment on the campaign trail in Manhattan, Kansas, when she came into the Bartlets' hotel room and saw Abbey injecting Jed with something. After that, she'd only ask if there was anything she "needed to know" ... because she had an awareness of something in the shadows that wasn't supposed to be out in the light.

Abbey, too, is peeved at Babish and his questions:

She feels like she's getting the third-degree from the White House Counsel and she doesn't appreciate it. However, in her case, she's carrying a lot of guilt. She's been treating Jed on her own, in secret, in violation of several medical ethical tenets. She's been keeping the secret of his MS for years, a heavy burden, to be sure. But Babish makes it clear why he needs to grill her in this way:

Babish: "Well, I've got a pretty good-looking resume already, Mrs. Bartlet. And it's not a big thing because I say so, ma'am; it's a big thing. You're going to get all the questions I just asked you, and quite a few more. And then they're going to ask the President if he was in the room when you signed it. And that's when he's going to give everyone's favorite answer from a President who has just announced that he has MS: 'I. Don't. Remember.'"

Abbey is peeved at Jed, too, just like we've seen ever since Bartlet's Third State Of The Union, when she realized he was thinking about going back on his promise to her to only serve one term. She returns from a trip and immediately goes after Jed about not being in the loop while word of his condition spread amongst the staff and the Counsel. Jed doggedly tries to keep some of the regular familial niceties intact:

Jed: "Welcome back."

Abbey: "How come I just found out about this?" 

Jed: "How was the flight?"

Abbey: "Jed ... how come I just found out about this?"

Jed: "When Leo talked to you on the plane, he thought you already knew."

Abbey: "You think I'm saying this is Leo's fault? I'm asking how come you didn't tell me last week?"

Jed: "And I'm saying, we still do this. We're husband and wife and parents, and before we launch into palace intrigue, we do, 'Welcome back, how was the flight?'"

The tension between the Bartlets has been a key element of this whole story, and adds a lot of depth to the purely political angles we see everyone else playing. I think it helps ground the issue for viewers, who may not be able to relate to how a President stays in office in this situation, but can relate to the ups and downs and secrets and lies of a marriage under stress.

As far as those political angles ... Josh wants to get an idea of what voter reaction will be when the President goes public. He thinks the administration needs to get a poll out, but how to frame the poll question so as not to give away too much? And what polling group can they trust? Josh turns to Joey Lucas, first seen as a congressional campaign manager in Take This Sabbath Day and then becoming a poll expert from 20 Hours In L.A. onward. Josh calls Joey, telling her they want to develop a poll on why Americans are eating more beets, and then meets her at the airport.

But she's not staying. Josh has her booked on a flight back to California in an hour, and he has a private meeting with her (without her interpreter) where he tells her what this poll is really about and explains the President's health issue. Can they come up with a question that can get them what they need without letting on it's about President Bartlet?

Joey: "We make it a governor."

Josh: "A governor?"

Joey: "Of an industrial state."

Josh: "I don't ..."

(Joey writes on a napkin)

Josh: "The governor of an industrial state."

Joey: "Michigan."

Josh: "And you give him a degenerative illness."

(Joey nods)

Josh: "Joey, you understand that before this is over we're probably all going to be spending some time in front of a grand jury."

(Joey nods)

And in a signal to us about how important secrecy is and the stakes involved in this entire affair, Josh takes the napkin they've been using to pass notes back and forth and dunks it in his water glass.

A bit of humor comes up in the episode when Donna learns of a fax from NASA saying a Chinese satellite is about to fall out of orbit and come crashing into our atmosphere, somewhere. She freaks out about the possibility of a school-bus-size satellite landing on her head. The rest of the staffers disregard the entire subject (we find out at the end that this sort of thing happens all the time, every ten days, in fact, as Josh tells CJ), but Donna's naivete about it has her unable to relax.

Donna: "... and now it's dropped off their radar, suggesting it's begun a rapid fall towards the Earth's atmosphere."

Charlie: "Cool."

Donna: "No, it's not! What's the matter with you people?"

Charlie: "What'd I do?"

Donna: "A thing the size of a garbage truck is going to be in a 2,000-mile-an-hour free fall and no one knows where it's going to hit."

Charlie: "I'm rooting for Zurich."

Donna: "Charlie -"

Charlie: "I've had it up to here with the Swiss."

Turns out, though, it's not just a humorous subplot. The idea of something crashing down on you, out of the blue, out of your control, directly reflects on what the entire administration is facing with the President's health coverup, as is made clear by Abbey's response (and her expression) as she greets Donna in the hallway.

 Abbey: "How are you?"

Donna: "I'm fine, but there's a giant object hurtling its way towards us at devastating velocity."

Abbey: "Tell me about it."

And the Josh/CJ discussion at the end, where Josh says man-made things fall out of the sky every ten days and nobody's ever been hit ... yet. Well, he's not really talking about being hit by satellites here:

Josh: "Since the first year we started putting man-made objects in space, 17,000 have come back and remarkably, not one person has been hit. (beat) So I suppose there's an argument to be made that we're due."

CJ: "Yeah. You picked me right up there, Josh."

Meanwhile Sam is working on an economic speech the President is going to give, which is why Toby is holding off on revealing the big secret to him. The administration wants tax cuts, but they want them targeted to the middle class, while the Republicans want tax cuts for the wealthy, too. When word comes in that the federal budget surplus is going to be lower than expected, Sam sees that as good news (now they can't afford big tax cuts across the board). Sam still runs into trouble with congressional Democrats who want to add language to the speech spanking those who want to give more tax breaks to the well-off:

Sam (reading): "'We want a real tax cut for working families to help them pay for higher education and housing, while our opponents want to help the rich pay for bigger swimming pools and faster private jets.' No, I don't think so."

Jane: "They want it in."

Sam: "No, no, no."

Jane: "Why not?"

Sam: "Well, for one thing, it's very bad writing."

We find out later, in his meeting with congressional Democrats, that the writing isn't his only problem (even though he thinks "it sounds like it was written by a high school girl."). Sam spells out the tax burden he carried as a well-paid attorney at Gage Whitney before he joined the campaign, and while as a Democrat he's in favor of helping balance the economic scales, he also doesn't think demonizing the rich is a worthwhile path to go down. It's an interesting take from what's generally seen as a left-leaning TV series, and it's the kind of thoughtful discussion we'd be better off seeing more of today. (Not that I'm against taxing the uber-rich, I am for that ... they got that way thanks to the benefits of American society, and they need to return some of their financial takings to help that society continue to thrive. Our current gap between the rich and the disappearing middle class is unsustainable - go Elizabeth Warren! And that's my current affairs take of the week.)

The best thing about Sam's contribution this episode, though, is his utter cluelessness at what he's about to discover when Leo summons him to the Oval Office. Toby tells him he'll be there in the office when he's done; Sam has a confused look, then happily grins and says, "Yeah. Okay."

He just has no idea how things are about to change for him. As we, the viewers, have no idea what's about to come ... two of the finest episodes in American television history, next on The West Wing.


Tales Of Interest!

- I know many of you probably think my continuous ponderings about timelines on The West Wing gets old, so if that's the case for you, jump ahead. I'm just thinking, in this instance, since Aaron Sorkin insists on using very specific phrasing about the passage of time, it'd be a simple thing for him to make it all actually make sense. Check this out:

- The Stackhouse Filibuster clearly takes place on a Friday night in late March. Perhaps Toby's late-night ball-bouncing carries over into early Saturday morning, maybe.

- 17 People is set 6 days after the previous episode (the pre-credits scene explicitly lays out the passage of time, plus Toby says it took him "six days and 23 minutes" to figure things out). It's also clearly stated it's now April, so this would be the first Thursday of April. Again, if we grant the end of Stackhouse was early Saturday morning, we could be talking about early Friday morning for when Toby finds out. Maybe.

- Bad Moon Rising is on the following Monday (Donna asks Josh how Mexico's economy could just collapse on a Monday morning), and that's when Babish is told. 

- In this episode Babish tells CJ he learned about the MS two days after Toby; even if we stretch Stackhouse into early Saturday and 17 People into early Friday, Monday is not two days after Friday. He also tells CJ he was told six days ago - since that was a Monday, this must be the following Sunday, but we've seen in past episodes everybody clears out of the West Wing on the weekends, so we're scratching our heads at why CJ would be sitting in Babish's office at 5:30 on a Sunday morning, or at why Leo told her about the President's MS late on a Saturday night. Josh was told two days after Babish, so that must have been the Wednesday prior to this episode.

Anyway ... you're writing the damn thing, Sorkin. The least you could do is have your math work out right.

- We are still seeing plenty of pagers in use by the West Wing staff, with Josh and Charlie specifically using them (and we've seen one on Sam's belt several times over the past few episodes). Motorola, the largest manufacturer of pagers at the time, actually began to pull out of the pager business in 2001, the year these episodes were made.

- Abbey says the Presidential physician is now Admiral Leonard Morrow. That's the fourth official physician we've heard of - in "Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc" it was Terry Wyatt (with poor, doomed Morris Tolliver taking over while he was away); in He Shall, From Time To Time... it was someone named Hackett, and in In The Shadow Of Two Gunmen Part I the doctor was Admiral Jarvis.

- Zoey's Georgetown forms (and the plot necessity of her being a minor when they were filled out) bring talk of them being signed "over a year ago" and the statement that she "wasn't 18 yet when she started." As discussed previously, she was already 19 by the time of Mr. Willis Of Ohio in 1999, and started at Georgetown the January following that. She hadn't been 17 since late 1998 at the latest, so that seems early to fill out forms for spring semester 2000.

- In a nice moment, Joey Lucas follows up her discussion with Josh about the President's condition by asking if he's okay. She then reaches out to pull Josh's face up so she can read his lips and his response, "He's fine." It serves as a contrast to Bartlet's anger at Toby showing no concern about his well-being when he finds out in 17 People.

(This whole airport scene is really good, with Josh dealing with Joey's speech and trying to clearly communicate with his lips ... then he actually signs the letters "M" and "S" to explain what's wrong with the President. The directorial choice of zooming in tight on the faces for this secretive little meeting is also perfect.)

- A good bit of writing and character development for Toby - CJ somewhat bitterly tells Babish about Toby's line to her that he'd be in his office when she got done with her meeting with Leo and the President, before she even knew what she was about to find out. Toby gives Sam the same line: "I'll be here in the office when you're done." That's Toby, ever the moral compass for the administration, feeling responsible to help out the rest of the staff after he had to carry that secret alone for several days. And then Sam, with his puzzled look passing quickly as he happily heads off to be told news he has no idea is coming, his last little moment of innocence:

- EDITED TO ADD: Oliver Platt was nominated for an Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series Emmy Award for his role as Oliver Babish in this episode. That award ended up going to Michael Emerson for his appearance on The Practice.


Quotes    

CJ: "I don't know you."

Babish: "I'm sorry?"

CJ: "I was told to report to you. I don't know you. You've been here, what ...?"

Babish: "Three months."

CJ: "Three months, so why should I trust you?"

Babish: "I don't care if you trust me or not."

CJ: "Imagine my shock."

Babish: "I've got better things to do with my imagination."

CJ: "I think this is going really well so far, Oliver. It's almost hard to believe that four different women have sued you for divorce."

-----

Toby: "You trust this person?"

Josh: "I gotta trust somebody, right?"

Toby: "Good, 'cause I don't trust anybody right now." 

-----

CJ: "Well, at first glance, I thought he might have a virus contracted from a rare African tsetse fly, possibly tropical sprue. I'm not an expert, but I did meet a man once in India."

Babish: "Yeah."

CJ: "It could be anything with these Presidents. James Polk had diverticulitis."

Babish: "Yeah."

CJ: "Couldn't digest nuts. I'll tell you what else. One in forty American men wear women's clothing, and we've had well over forty Presidents."

Babish: "Yeah."

CJ: "I'm just saying, one of these guys was dancing around the Oval Office in a prom dress. Now let's get to the bottom of that."

Babish: "CJ?"

CJ: "Yeah?"

Babish: "In my entire life I've never found anything charming."

-----

Toby: "He calls you and me the Batman and Robin of speechwriting."

Sam: "Well, I don't think he does -"

Toby: "He doesn't, but he should, 'cause that's what we are."

Sam: "Okay."

Toby: "We're Batman and Robin."

Sam: "Which one's which?"

Toby: "Look at me, Sam. Am I Robin?"

Sam: "I'm not Robin."

Toby: "Yes, you are."

Sam: "Okay, well, let's move off this ..."

Toby: "You bet, little friend."

Sam: "Listen, we're really not Batman and Robin."

Toby: "No, we'll keep those identities secret. I'm Bruce Wayne and you're my ward -"

Sam: "Toby -"

Toby: "Dick something."

-----

CJ: "You guys are like Butch and Sundance peering over the edge of a cliff to the boulder-filled rapids 300 feet below, thinking you better not jump 'cause there's a chance you might drown. The President has this disease and has been lying about it, and you guys are worried that polling might make us look bad? It's the fall that's gonna kill you!" 

Story threads, callbacks, and familiar faces (Hey, it's that guy!)

• Marlee Matlin returns as super pollster Joey Lucas! It's nice to see the close relationship between her and Josh, and knowing that Josh feels comfortable trusting her.

• Josh's early meeting with Martin Connelly spells out the administration's lawsuit against five tobacco companies. The fight against Big Tobacco - and Josh's role in it - is going to come up again and again.

• As Babish grills CJ over whether or not she's lied about the President's health, there's a callback to Pilot and Jed riding his bicycle into a tree (and here we find out he sprained his ankle in that incident).

• Gail's fishbowl features a metal chair, the kind one might have to sit in for an interrogation similar to what CJ and Abbey faced with Babish, or what many administration figures might face in the future.

• I'd say it's no longer product placement but more an ongoing thread, as the President's Notre Dame coffee mug shows up on his desk again.

DC location shots    

• Josh's meeting with Joey Lucas was filmed in the terminal at Reagan National Airport in Washington, DC. Here they are meeting (along with Joey's temporary interpreter) in the main hallway:

(The actual story of why Joey had a "temp" rather than Kenny is that the show didn't have money budgeted to fly Bill O'Brien - the actor who played Kenny Thurman - from Los Angeles to Washington. They brought in another actor/interpreter from New York, Jon Wolfe Nelson, to play Dale, at a lower travel cost.)

And here's a couple of actual views of that terminal at National Airport:

Their cafe meeting was on a floor medallion designed by Joyce Scott, one of several floor medallion artworks in the terminal:

(It appears the show created the cafe at that site for purposes of filming, as it just appears to be a regular hallway seating area in actuality):

• The closing scene with Josh and CJ walking outside the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on 17th Street NW was filmed at pretty much exactly the same spot as Josh and Danny's scene in The Short List (when Danny found out CJ liked goldfish):

And then there's a good shot of CJ crossing Pennsylvania Avenue at 17th Street, with the bonus of the Pennsylvania Avenue street sign marking the 1600 block:

Here's the Google Street view of that intersection, with the direction Josh and CJ were walking marked with an arrow (note that vehicle traffic can't get on the 1600 block of Pennsylvania Avenue now):

They Do Exist! It's The Real Person, or Thing    

• CJ refers to President James Polk in one of her sarcastic tirades at Babish; there's no evidence that he actually suffered from diverticulitis, though.

• Toby has a whole Batman and Robin discussion with Sam; obviously Batman and Robin aren't real people, but the Batman DC comics must exist in this universe.

• I can't verify this for sure, but that certainly looks like a signed photograph of former Vice President Dan Quayle on the wall (as Charlie is taking Abbey into the Oval Office). That begs the question of why ... it's doubtful that George H.W. Bush was ever President in this universe, meaning Quayle would not have been VP, but even if he had been, why is a former VP's photo on a West Wing wall?

• Abbey mentions the movie (or play) Arsenic and Old Lace while talking to Babish. 

• Abbey also brings up famous law figures of the past Daniel Webster and Benjamin Disraeli.

• In talking about going public with the President's health, Babish refers to newscasters Jim Lehrer, Tim Russert, and Barbara Walters.

• CJ's line about Butch and Sundance on the cliff and "the fall's gonna kill you" is a direct reference to the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

End credits freeze frame: Abbey and Jed facing off in the Oval Office.