Holy Night - TWW S4E11

 

Original airdate: December 11, 2002

Written by: Aaron Sorkin (74)

Directed by: Thomas Schlamme (11)

Synopsis

• As a huge Christmas snowstorm shuts down most of DC, the arrival of Toby's estranged father spurs tension between Toby and Josh. Will is tested on his ability to stand up to power, and doesn't do very well. Josh tries to figure out his feelings for Donna. Danny Concannon surprisingly returns, tracking a story about suspicious dealings in Bermuda in May. Both President Bartlet and Leo, feeling guilt over that May assassination, try to solve unsolvable problems to make amends.

"It's four years later and there are things that are worse and things that are exactly the same. Where do you start?"

"By fixing a roof."

"The past is never dead. It's not even past." William Faulkner's line from Requiem For A Nun pretty much sums up our episode here. The past that our characters thought was dead and gone, whether it be a father's involvement with mobsters in the 1950s or a reporter who might have been a love interest once upon a time or a political assassination thought to be securely kept under wraps ... they're not even past.

Pretty much every character here is dealing with echoes from the past, whether they be obvious in-your-face memories (like Toby's dad just showing up in his office) or a bit more subtle ones (like the return of Zoey with her new boyfriend bringing Charlie up short). From Josh thinking about how his past sabotage of Donna's private life may have had motives he wasn't even aware of (something he talked about openly in The War At Home, telling Sam about Donna's dating "I don't like it and usually do everything within my considerable capabilities to sabotage it"), to the specter of a dismantled airplane popping up in President Bartlet's head during a session with Stanley Keyworth - the memories are like little Christmas presents showering over the West Wing. Just a lot less welcome and joyous.

As heavy snow shuts down most of Washington, Donna is hurrying to get away to spend the Christmas holiday with Jack Reese at the Washington Inn (remember, they only met on Election Day in early November, their first date came three weeks ago on the day before Thanksgiving, so things are zipping right along in DonnaJack land). Josh is supportive, even after Jack's comments in the previous episode opened the window into the fact that maybe, just maybe, Josh has some deep romantic feelings for Donna himself. But then a directive from the President lands on Josh's desk - he wants to rewrite the budget for the Department of Health and Human Services to provide more funding for early childhood programs, and it has to be done right away. Josh apparently can't hardly do anything without Donna's help, but she knows that and willingly delays her departure. "It's not what it looks like," Josh tells her, and she answers, "It's really okay. Where do we start?"

But what Josh said does stick with Donna, leading to this later conversation.

Donna: "What did you mean when you said it's not what it looks like?"

Josh: "Jack's already down there?"

Donna: "Yeah."

Josh: "I'll call him and apologize."

Donna: "What did you mean?"

Josh: "I meant that I wasn't keeping you here on purpose."

Donna: "Why would I think you were doing that?"

Well, if she remembers The Portland Trip, for one, when Josh sabotaged her date with unnecessary make-work, and there's been other examples, too (even if Josh's aversion to Donna seeing Cliff Calley in Ways And Means and War Crimes actually had solid practical foundations). Jack's remarks in the previous episode about how much Josh talks about Donna hit Josh pretty hard - and now he's dealing with the way he's tried to stop Donna from having romantic attachments in the past.

Donna does get away at last, thanks to a TV news helicopter that Leo arranges (how many ethics rules got violated for that?), but we're left knowing that Josh's denials of treating Donna differently than the past may not be completely honest.

Also in West Wing romantic soap opera plots, Presidential daughter Zoey pops up. We haven't seen her since The Midterms early in Season 2, and at that time she and Charlie were still quite an item. Charlie was just working out his unease about being a target for white supremacists gunmen because of their relationship, but near the end of that episode they happily walked off together as Charlie went to vote.

Things have changed since then. Zoey has brought her new boyfriend, Jean-Paul, to the White House to meet her father. Jean-Paul, it turns out, is French royalty (and also ends up being one of the more loathed characters appearing on The West Wing, but you'll need to stick around to find out why).

Zoey: "Jean-Paul Pierre Claude Charpentier Vicomte de Conde de Bourbon. He's the 22nd Vicomte de Bourbon, though obviously that got interrupted by the French Revolution."

President: "Yeah, that was a setback for the Bourbons." 

She's also hoping to convince the President to allow Jean-Paul to tag along to Manchester for the holiday, so things must be getting pretty serious between them. Charlie is, to put it mildly, not enthused to meet Zoey's new beau. We also get a little bit of a clue that things may not have ended very smoothly between Charlie and Zoey, whenever and however they did end, with a bit of a passive-aggression exchange between the two, with Charlie's snide "you've got a lot in common" definitely meant as a slam on Zoey:

Charlie: "But I wish you all the luck in the world. I like Jean-Paul. You've got a lot in common."

Zoey: "You are the worst kind of snob."

Charlie: "Well, I think there's snobs who are way worse. But thank you."

How about Will? As we discovered in the previous episode, Toby agreed to bring him in to help work on the President's inaugural address. However, Toby is frustrated with the logistics of Will working in his hotel and refusing to cross the "holy line of demarcation" in the White House lobby. Toby installs Will in Sam's office, which is currently unused as Sam is in California running for Congress in the special election. Will deduces that move will not go over well with the other speechwriters on the staff, as they will resent the move as a poor reflection on Sam's past legacy in the West Wing. His prediction appears to come to fruition when he find bicycles piled into the office and Sam Seaborn posters all over the windows.

 Will: "Who rides a bicycle to work when there's going to be a foot and a half of snow?"

It's all part of an elaborate test, though. Toby brings Will the President's notes on a section of the speech, saying he agrees with all three. Will doesn't agree with one of them, he wants to push more action, and Toby sets up an Oval Office meeting for them. Which turns out to be just two when Toby doesn't show up, and things don't go well when Will declines to take the meeting without Toby:

President: "Well, thanks for stopping by."

Will: "Thank you, Mr. Justice - Mr. Bartlet - Mr. President, actually."

(The President returns to the Oval Office)

Will: "Oh, my God."

Charlie: "You know what? I've seen worse."

Will: "Really?"

Charlie: "Well, no." 

When they finally do have the meeting, and the opportunity is given for anyone to speak up about potential changes to the speech, Will is reluctant to say anything - and it turns out he's fallen into the trap set by Toby and the President. The bikes were a planned distraction, the note Will didn't agree with was planted to see if he would catch it, and Toby bailing on their original meeting was a setup to see if Will would take some iniative, and, well:

Will: "You said that I caught the bad note?"

Toby: "Yeah, that was planted there to see how well you'd do telling truth to power."

President: "Not very well so far."

 Will: "I have no difficulty, sir, telling truth to power."

President: "Okay, except when I asked you to come into the Oval Office you said, 'No, no, no. No, no, no, no.'"

Will: "I was firm in my convictions."

President: "And you called me Mr. Justice."

(This does seem a bit of an odd performance considering what we've seen of Will before, standing up to Sam about how he ran the Wilde campaign with a dead candidate, then standing up to him again about staying on for Sam's run, then standing up to Toby and criticizing his writing style. I suppose the office of the Presidency and the importance of the Oval Office itself was just a bit too much.)

So Will has to deal with not only Sam's past shadow looming over the office space and his speechwriting role, but also his own past reputation for being a straight shooter and brutally honest fizzling under his awestruck respect for the White House itself.

Toby and his father ... that's quite a story. We've heard a bit about Toby's family past previously, from his brother being a NASA shuttle payload specialist in What Kind Of Day Has It Been to his sisters taking him to protests in 1968 in Somebody's Going To Emergency, Somebody's Going To Jail, but we know nothing about his parents. This episode changes that in a very unusual way, with a flashback to 1954 Brooklyn Heights and characters speaking in Yiddish, where we discover Toby's father, happy about his son being born the day before, is involved in some kind of criminal gangland activity.

Back to the present, Toby's dad is waiting for him in his office. Josh has set up the meeting, which pisses off Toby royally - because as we discover, it turns out his father served prison time for being a part of the mob group Murder Incorporated back in the '50s and Toby does not want to have any kind of relationship with him. His father, Jules, though, has heard that Toby and Andy are expecting, and he would love to have some contact with his grandchildren.

It's an icy back-and-forth between the two, but given that it's Christmas and that all the city's hotels are booked up, Toby eventually melts just enough to offer his apartment as a place for his father to stay for the night. It doesn't hurt that Josh brings up his own familial tragedies as a contrast for Toby to think about:

Josh: "All right, it was desperation. It wasn't out of a desire to do evil. He had a young family and he barely spoke the language. He went to jail. He went to jail and you went to school, and it was all a half-century ago. Look what he did in two generations. What room did you just walk out of?"

Toby: "I appreciate that that's what you think. Do I get to think what I think?"

Josh: "No, you don't, cause you don't know what I know."

Toby: "What?"

Josh: "That I would give anything to have a father who was a felon, or a sister with a past. That's it."

Finally, the big shadow hovering over the episode, a shadow of a momentous secret decision made last spring at the end of Season 3, President Bartlet's call to take out a Qumari government official who was sponsoring terrorism against the United States. While the beginning episodes of Season 4 had some references to the Shareef assassination, with Qumar reopening the investigation and blaming Israel for it, it's been a while since the topic has come up in our episodes. So it caught me unawares, really, when the President unknowingly and unexpectedly says the word "airplane" in his therapy session with Stanley, when he's supposedly talking about how he can help children's health and well-being:

President: "The President can't do anything about nature or bad luck. I ought to be able to do something about the airplane."

Stanley: "Uh-oh."

President: "Wait, what'd I just say?"

Stanley: "It's hard to figure, sir, but you've introduced a new word into the conversation."

President: "What do airplanes signify?"

Stanley: "Death."

Just seems like a weird misstatement in context, especially when Bartlet goes on to explain that he's been spacing out in meetings lately ... but Sorkin is too good of a writer to plant that nugget there in the script without it meaning a lot more.

Apparently the Christmas season has caused the guilt felt by the President and Leo over the assassination to fester. Bartlet focuses on children's health and infant mortality, directing Josh to rewrite the HHS budget before the new year, as a way to atone for the killing, apparently. Leo explodes over the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem being closed on Christmas Eve for what he sees as petty reasons, with his fervor to fix the problem and reopen the church his way of reacting to his guilt.

This guilt about the secret is an interesting psychological plotline in itself, but things get really dicey when Danny Concannon returns (after a nearly two-year absence) to his position as a White House correspondent. He first pops up in the guise of Santa Claus, giving CJ a gift of a goldfish pin from the press corps, along with a little something else:

(A smooch. It was a big smooch, which hearkens back to Danny talking about CJ's "randomly grabbing me and kissing me" in Season 1.)

Danny (who hasn't been seen since The Portland Trip in Season 2) has spent some time working overseas, but now he's back - and he has a little tidbit of information for CJ. He tells her in the course of enjoying cricket matches in Bermuda, one of the players who is also a ramp worker at a small airstrip had an unusual situation come up in May. The airport staff was told to take a day off, with a training crew coming in to replace them for that day, but when this fellow realized he'd left something in his locker and went to retrieve it that "training staff" refused him entry.

Danny puts things together and tells CJ he believes these were U.S. Army Rangers, clearing a Bermuda airstrip of local workers for a day, the same day Abdul Shareef's aircraft supposedly disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle - and he knows there's some kind of connection there. And he's working on the story.

CJ believes him.

Josh: "Danny thinks we somehow got a Gulfstream in land in Bermuda, assassinated Shareef, then disassembled the plane and distributed the pieces throughout the Bermuda Triangle?"

CJ: "Yeah."

Josh: "I think he spent too much time in the Africa hot."

CJ: "Thing is -"

Josh: "Yeah?"

CJ: "I'm absolutely certain that's what happened."

And then we get a clear callback to the private and eventual public disclosure of President Bartlet's health issues and the staff's involvement in that during Season 2:

Josh: "We're not supposed to talk about this."

CJ: "If it is true, we need to say so before Danny does. We've been here before."

And that's the biggest example of past not being dead, not even being past, as the Shareef assassination isn't buried under the waves of the Atlantic but struggles to be revealed, as such things almost always eventually are.

The episode ends with a skillfully presented montage, scenes of the characters striving towards truth and closure as the Whiffenpoofs sing "O Holy Night." We first see Danny, hard at work on his story digging at the events in Bermuda and Shareef's disappearance:

Then CJ in her office, turning over Danny's story in her mind and thinking about the consequences:

Charlie leaving for the night, followed by Zoey and Jean-Paul heading out for Manchester:

(There in front of Zoey and Jean-Paul I'm pretty sure we see a gingerbread White House, something that has been shown in all the Christmas episodes, but never quite in this blink-and-you'll-miss-it way before.)

Those shots lead us to Sam's office, where Will continues to work on the inaugural address among the bicycles (this after Leo sent him away from the Oval Office, saying surely Will had somewhere to be for Christmas - he doesn't):

Meanwhile, in the Oval Office, President Bartlet gazes out at the snow, deep in thought over his past decisions and making moral amends:

Speaking of amends, here's Leo, working the phones to try to get a roof fixed so a church can be open on Christmas Eve:

Josh, helping his friend and mentor with his moral struggles, working those phones alongside him:

And as Josh looks through his office window, he sees Toby and his father, listening to the Whiffenpoofs sing, perhaps signs of a bit of thawing in that icy relationship:

A terrifically put-together montage to close the episode - the pictures tell us so much without words, laying out the emotions and truth behind the stories we've been told over the past 40 minutes. It's Christmas, it's a season of hope and forgiveness ... and yet, the past won't stay dead.

Tales Of Interest!

- This episode marks the exact midpoint of the series, 3 1/2 seasons into the 7-season run. Holy Night is the 78th episode (including Documentary Special), and there are 78 episodes still to come. Meanwhile, it's taken me close to four years to blog my way through those 78 episodes (my first entry was posted in April 2017). Here's hoping I'll be able to pick up the pace somewhat for the second half.

- For the third time in four seasons, the title of the Christmas episode refers to a Christmas hymn (In Excelsis Deo in Season 1, Noël in Season 2 - only Bartlet For America in Season 3 broke the pattern). I do think this is the first time, though, that the song referenced in the title is actually heard in the episode. At the end of In Excelsis Deo the children's choir sang The Little Drummer Boy, and at the end of Noël we heard Carol Of The Bells sung by the choir outside the White House gates. This time we actually do hear the Whiffenpoofs singing O Holy Night.

- This episode marks Toby's 48th birthday (born December 23, 1954, this episode is set on December 23, 2002). Richard Schiff was born in May, 1955, so he's just five months younger than his character.

- Joshua Malina appears in the opening credits for the first time. Rob Lowe also remains in the credits, but for the first time he does not appear in the episode ... unless you count the Sam Seaborn for Congress posters that the irritated West Wing workers use to cover the windows of the office while Will is trying to work there.

- It's always great to see the lights and set decorations used to set the holiday scene in the Christmas episodes:

- Check out the long, one-take shot with the camera slowly pushing in on Danny as he tells CJ the story he heard from the Bermuda ramp agent. It's one minute and 15 seconds, uncut, with the camera starting in the hallway and ending up in a tight shot of Danny's face. Awesome work by Tommy Schlamme. Here's where that unbroken shot begins and ends:

- There's some kind of round glass object in Gail's bowl. Is is a Christmas ornament? Is it a bowling ball? Are the holes a reference to, perhaps, bullet holes? Who can say?

- You of course recall the heavy use of pagers in the early episodes of The West Wing - mixing up pagers, in fact, was a key plot point in the Sam/Laurie story in Pilot. Pagers seem to have drifted out of favor (as they did in real life) as cell phones become more common and useful. Here we can see Josh's flip phone attached to his belt, which is fairly typical for high-powered people in the early 21st century:

- This is the first time the Christmas episode did not earn any Emmy nominations; the previous three seasons all had performances that ended up as Supporting Actor Emmy wins (Richard Schiff for In Excelsis Deo, Bradley Whitford for Noël, John Spencer for Bartlet For America), while In Excelsis Deo also won the Writing Emmy for Aaron Sorkin and Rick Cleveland.



Quotes    

(Carol and CJ are listening to the Whiffenpoofs sing 'Bye, Bye Blackbird') 

Carol: "You think they should wrap it up?"

CJ: "Well, one more after this."

Carol: "I know. Aren't they great?"

CJ: "You just want them to take you to their place and ..."

(A rather sultry look comes over CJ) 

 

Carol: "They're 20 years old, ma'am."

CJ: "Yes. Sing ... is what I was going to say. Take you to their place and sing." 

-----

Will: "Seriously, Toby, you put me in that office and everyone who works on the speechwriting staff is going to resent me."

Toby: "Don't be ridiculous. It's a West Wing office. Everyone who works in the White House is going to resent you."

Will: "That's right."

Toby: "Yet curiously, I don't care." 

-----

Zoey: "This is Jean-Paul. Jean-Paul, this is Charlie Young."

Charlie: "How do you do."

Jean-Paul: "Ah, Zoey talks about you all the time. She talks about you so much I think sometimes I want to kill you."

Charlie: "Hey, that's nice of you. Thanks." 

-----

Zoey: "My dad's going to love him."

Charlie: "Oh, yeah."

Zoey: "Well, I love him, so my father will love him."

Charlie: "That's absolutely the way it works." 

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

• John Diehl (Miami Vice, Jurassic Park III) returns as Larry Claypool, the guy from Freedom Watch who grilled Josh in a deposition over the investigation of drug users in the White House in Lord John Marbury. Now he's grilling Toby over Andy Wyatt hiding her pregnancy from the voters before the election.

• Danny Concannon (Timothy Busfield) returns! Last seen on Air Force One in The Portland Trip, he apparently spent some time in Africa (at least according to Josh's comment "I think he spent too much time in the Africa hot") and is now back as a White House correspondent. At the time, Busfield actually had a role on the TV series Ed, which is one reason why he hadn't shown up here for a while. 

• Speaking of returning, here's Dr. Stanley Keyworth (Adam Arkin). He first appeared in Noël as a psychological trauma specialist helping Josh. This marks the third time we've seen him working with President Bartlet on some of his issues (Night Five and Posse Comitatus being the others) - and it's unfortunately the last appearance for Dr. Keyworth.

• And Zoey is back. We haven't seen Elisabeth Moss since The Midterms, when Zoey and Charlie were still dating and Charlie was struggling with the fact their relationship made him a target of white supremacist gunmen at the end of Season 1. Somehow, unseen by us in the 51 episodes and over 2 years since that appearance, Zoey and Charlie are no longer together and Zoey has found some French royalty to date.

• Toby's father Jules is played by Jerry Adler (The Sopranos, The Good Wife, Mad About You, Rescue Me).

• President Bartlet's comment to Dr. Keyworth drops a couple of callbacks.

President: "Stanley, the width and depth of what I haven't done about it yet ... you know you can't do anything about hurricanes? The President can't do anything about nature or bad luck. I ought to be able to do something about the airplane."

Keyworth: "Uh-oh."

President: "Wait, what did I just say?"

Keyworth: "It's hard to figure, sir, but you've introduced a new word into the conversation."

First, of course, the mention of hurricanes and being unable to do anything about it recalls Hurricane Sarah from The State Dinner, which unexpectedly changed course and hit a carrier battle group off the coast of Virginia resulting in the loss of the USS Hickory. The introduction of "airplane" into the conversation seems odd at the moment, but as the episode develops we realize both Bartlet and Leo are having internal moral struggles with last spring's assassination of Qumari Defense Minister Shareef. We saw that play out over the end of Season 3, with the actual killing of Shareef and destruction of the evidence - the airplane - happening in Posse Comitatus.   

• That story thread gets pulled some more by Danny Concannon and his source from the airstrip in Bermuda. We do find out that event happened on May 22 ... which happens to be the very day Posse Comitatus aired on NBC. Go figure.

• Toby says his full name is Tobias Zachary Ziegler. In Ways And Means when the special prosecutor read off the list of names subject to subpoenas in the investigation into Bartlet's MS coverup, his name was read as "Toby Zachary Ziegler."

• Toby's father is seen looking at the framed newspaper that was used to confirm Toby's identity to the Wesley, Connecticut, police in Celestial Navigation.

• The Bartlet jacket flip appears. Martin Sheen's left shoulder was injured at birth and he's unable to raise his arm above the shoulder, so this is how he puts on a jacket.

• Will's speech he wrote for the Governor of California at the Stanford Club is mentioned again (it first came up in Game On).

• Josh tells Toby "I would give anything to have a father who was a felon, or a sister with a past." Josh's father died the night Bartlet won the Illinois primary (seen in In The Shadow Of Two Gunmen Part II) and we learned his sister was killed in a house fire when Josh was a little boy in The Crackpots And These Women.

DC location shots    

• None.

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

• There's a quick glimpse of Bob Hope on a television and we can hear his voice in the opening 1954 scene. Hope began hosting TV specials in 1950, with the first Bob Hope Christmas Show airing in December, 1953. However, his 1954 Christmas special did not air on television until January 9, 1955 - so it would not have been on the air on December 24 as seen here.

• Cole Porter is mentioned in the opening 1954 flashback, as well as his membership in the Whiffenpoofs, a Yale a capella singing club. The actual Whiffenpoofs then appear, singing songs in the lobby of the White House (including the songs Bye, Bye Blackbird, Girl From Ipanema, and O Holy Night), with one of the members prominently wearing a Yale sweatshirt in their final scene. The singing group was also mentioned by CJ in "Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc" when she said the President's knowledge of Latin would have had them rolling in the aisles at the Whiffenpoof dinners (of course, Bartlet never went to Yale, being a graduate of Notre Dame and the London School of Economics, but Sorkin may not have had that figured out yet in the second episode).

• The Washington Inn - or, more precisely, the Martha Washington Inn - is a historic hotel in Abingdon, Virginia. Abingdon, though, is in far southwestern Virginia, a good 5 1/2 hours away by car in good weather (and probably a lot further than a news helicopter would be flying from DC). So perhaps that's not actually the inn they are referring to - although Donna's reference to I-66 checks out, as she would take Interstate 66 west out of DC before heading southwest on I-81 to get there.

• Leo is all wound up about the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem being closed on Christmas Eve.

• Ebenezer Scrooge, a character in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, gets a mention, since it's Christmas.

• The snowstorm shutting down travel and keeping people somewhat trapped in the White House has President Bartlet thinking of Agatha Christie murder mysteries.

• Charlie tells Jean-Paul he read 150 words about him in US Weekly.

• There are Coca-Cola bottles visible as part of the refreshments provided for the Whiffenpoofs stranded by the snowstorm.

• A CNN logo is seen on a TV screen, as well as former CNN weatherperson Flip Spiceland (Spiceland left CNN in early 2001, so he actually was not at the network at the time of this episode):

• All the Murder Inc. references are from real life. Albert Anastasia (who did indeed die in October 1957), the Brownsville candy store, Louis Amberg, the sixth floor of the Half Moon Hotel on Coney Island, Dutch Schultz - all of those relate to mob activity in New York.

• Josh has a Starbucks cup (with the red holiday design).

• Josh says he'll take Donna to the Hawk 'n' Dove. That was a famous hangout for Democratic politicians near Capitol Hill (although not very convenient to the White House). While the name of the bar wasn't said in Dead Irish Writers, you could see a neon sign reading "Hawk 'n' Dove" in the window of the bar where Toby and Lord Marbury were meeting.

• As Josh and CJ go over what Danny thinks might have happened in Bermuda, Josh says how ridiculous the idea is that Shareef's Gulfstream would have been forced to land there and then taken apart and dumped in the ocean. During the events leading up to the killing of Shareef at the end of Season 3, his private jet is referred to as both a Learjet and a Gulfstream - but the scenes of the shooting at the airstrip in Posse Comitatus clearly show it's a Learjet.

End credits freeze frame: President Bartlet contemplating at the Oval Office window.

Previous episode: Arctic Radar

Next episode: Guns Not Butter