Eppur si Muove - TWW S5E16

Original airdate: March 3, 2004

Written by: Alexa Junge (2)  

Directed by: Llewellyn Welles (1)

Synopsis

• A conservative Congresswoman goes after federal funding for a controversial medical study by using Ellie Bartlet's involvement as a wedge, but it turns out the idea didn't start with her. Josh tries to pull strings to get some federal judicial candidates installed, including a law school friend. Abbey's plan to volunteer at a free medical clinic gets a boost by appearing with the Muppets. And CJ comes to a decision about Ben, but following through seems to be a problem.

"Somebody's out for blood and they're targeting Ellie Bartlet." 

Yes, this is the one with the Muppets. At least, that's how this episode seems to be remembered by everyone, and it's hard to not think of it that way given how this image sticks in everyone's mind:

Yet, the Muppet storyline is a minor part of the episode, and certainly one of the least important. This goes back to Abbey's decision in An Khe to volunteer at a free clinic, helping to vaccinate kids, and the White House's attempt to tamp down the controversy of her getting back into medicine after voluntarily giving up her license in order to avoid the negative publicity of having it suspended in Dead Irish Writers. And that's about all there is to that, with the hilarious exception of Elmo bringing up that whole issue when Abbey is trying to give him a shot:

Elmo (as Abbey is about to give him a vaccination): "But Mrs. Doctor Abbey, First Lady Doctor, will it hurt Elmo?"

Abbey: "Well, maybe just a tiny little bit, but it's very important."

Elmo: "Wait a minute, didn't you give up your medical license? (everyone laughs) Do you have a diploma you can show Elmo?" 

The other fairly minor (although long-running) storyline involves CJ and Ben. CJ has finally come to a decision; she wants to try to make a serious go of things with Ben. To recap, CJ and Ben went to college together, were a couple for a while, lived together for six months, but whenever they reconnected they always get on each other's nerves after a few weeks and break up again. They haven't seen each other for six years, Ben was a park ranger in Alaska, got married but is now single again, and now that he's been assigned to a Park Service post near Washington he's been trying to call CJ and meet with her since Constituency Of One. With Carol's encouragement, CJ has doused herself in perfume and is prepared to take the leap and commit to Ben, for real this time.

Which kind of comes as a surprise to Ben, because he hasn't even been able to have much of a conversation about anything with CJ, and we're not sure this is actually what he was after in the first place.

But Carol is getting a kick out of it.

But as the day progresses, every time Ben and CJ get a minute to talk more about a possible future, CJ is pulled away by the day's events.

Here comes Toby to break it up, that killjoy.

Which, of course, is the entire point. CJ's job is always going to come first, anybody who wants to be in her life is going to have to accept that, and at this point we're not sure that's really what Ben wants in a relationship.

On to the title storyline ... a conservative Republican Congresswoman, Barbara Layton, has come out with a list of medical studies she deems as morally unsuited for federal funding because they involved sexually transmitted diseases, including those researching the human papilloma virus (HPV) or HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. By publicizing the fact some of these studies involve sex workers, she hopes to rile up public anger against their funding - and then she goes a step further by exposing the fact that Ellie Bartlet, the President's daughter, is one of the researchers on one of these studies. It's a blatant attempt to link the Bartlet administration to reckless spending on prostitute health and the sinful gay lifestyle, insinuating Ellie's project is getting funded only because the President's daughter is involved.

Of course this is all political gamesmanship, as Toby and Josh know (and as their discussions about the unknown future value of such research, and the benefits gleaned from research studies that may not have a specific objective in mind in the first place show). But getting Ellie's name involved publicly stirs up some anger in her dad.

Ellie comes to the White House to try to get away from the press at Johns Hopkins, where Jed actually tries to convince her to come out and fight back, to defend this research and its quest to discover a vaccine for HPV (which can lead to cervical cancer, so it's not just a sexual-transmission-only-affecting-those-with-loose-morals kind of thing). Ellie is reluctant, just wanting to do her work in private like always ... but she eventually comes around to holding a press conference and speaking out in support of unfettered medical research.

Meanwhile, Toby gets to work on what's behind Congresswoman Layton's attack, and with Rena's help discovers an identical list of projects online from the Traditional Values Alliance, a conservative religious group. Naturally, the idea of one specific religion's beliefs being used as a cudgel against scientific study makes Toby even more driven to fight back. But then the Congresswoman says something that makes it a little less cut-and-dried:

Toby: "You got your list from the Traditional Values Alliance."

Layton: "I didn't."

Toby: "Your lists are identical."

Layton: "There's a lot of people who care about this issue. A lot of prominent people, on both sides of the aisle. You'd be surprised, Toby." 

Then again, thanks to Rena studying the fine print, she discovers a $14 discrepancy in the funding lists between what the Alliance had and what the Congresswoman put out. Toby figures out that the list Layton got her hands on, a list that hadn't been made public, must have come from Will getting research ready for Russell's campaign run in 2006. He confronts Will, who defends the Vice President making plans for his upcoming run, but denies knowing how Layton got the list.

Suspicious, Will goes to the Vice President - and we discover it was Russell behind that leak all along.

Russell's wife serves on a breast cancer foundation board, along with Congresswoman Layton, and their dismay about what they see as breast cancer research losing out on funding to projects involving those "sinful" sexually transmitted diseases led to the Vice President slipping that list to Layton.

This news, and the realization that Russell actually was behind the public exposure of Ellie's involvement in this research, bringing the President's family into this political fight simply for Russell to curry favor with conservatives, causes Will to consider the ruthlessness of it all.

Josh's storyline here actually turns out to hold the most weight, because it's going to carry over into the next episode (generally considered one of the standouts in Season 5, if not the series as a whole). He's working to try to get a law school friend, Eric Hayden, to hold off on taking a position at Georgetown University so the administration can get him nominated to a federal judgeship. Hayden's already been waiting for a while, and he just doesn't feel like he can sit around anymore while the Republicans bottle up all the judicial nominations put forth by the Bartlet administration.

Josh knows this is a problem, but he has an idea - he wants to use recess appointments to get a bunch of judges placed in federal courts. Recess appointments can be used by Presidents to fill posts without the need for Senate confirmation, if he makes them while the Senate is in recess (although those terms only last until the end of the current Congress, when they expire and the posts must be filled again by confirmed nominees). Leo is reluctant, but Josh has a long list of Supreme Court recess appointees who later were confirmed and had stellar careers on the bench.

But then, just before the plan gets taken to the President, news breaks ... Owen Brady, an associate justice on the Supreme Court, has died. Everything else involving judicial nominations now takes a back seat to the fight the administration is going to have on its hands about whomever they name to replace Brady. We can recall the efforts it took the White House to get Roberto Mendoza confirmed to SCOTUS in Season 1; now that this Republican Congress is even more obstructionist (we've seen the power of Speaker Haffley to unite opposition to the President in Shutdown, and that power forcing the White House to completely cave on their choice of a Vice President in Jefferson Lives), it's going to take everything the administration can pull together to get any decent nominee through this confirmation process.

Which will be discussed ... well, just watch the next episode to see what actually happens.

Tales Of Interest!

- The Thanksgiving weekend marathon on HLN of the series' first four seasons brought some things up that we should be scratching our heads about:

* Whatever happened to Anthony, whom Simon Donovan was Big Brother to before his tragic end in Posse Comitatus? CJ tried to mentor him, then Charlie stepped up as a replacement Big Brother in 20 Hours In America Part Two. I think we last saw Anthony in Election Night (when Charlie helped his football player friend vote).

* Speaking of Charlie, whatever happened to his desperate love for Zoey, which caused him to go to great extremes at the end of Season 4? You might think with the storyline involving one Bartlet daughter here, Charlie might be spurred to reflect on feelings for another Bartlet daughter, but no.

* Speaking of desperate love for another, why haven't we heard anything about Toby's kids, Huck and Molly? If this episode is happening in the spring (not a sure thing, considering the new team's adjustments to time), they'd be coming up on their first birthday, which ought to be a big deal, plus we do remember Toby pledging his complete and total devotion to them in Twenty Five. In this episode Rena lets him know she's a single mom with a daughter and that doesn't bring any mention of (single) fatherhood from Toby?

- Perhaps the first fleeting mention of what's going to become a "time skip" of sorts, when Abbey sarcastically tells CJ they need "a photographer and seven years' worth of yarn" to fix her image as the "traditional hat-knitting President's wife." This is the spring of 2004; President Bartlet took office in January of 1999; the administration is only six years along. We'll start to get plenty of more in-your-face mentions of "seven years" coming up pretty soon, as the show tries to jump ahead and get its broadcasts off the actual real-life calendar.

- Let us praise Richard Schiff for his intricately effective acting work to portray the amount of perfume CJ is wearing.

Waving the paper to waft the scent away.

- When Josh refers to the Supreme Court as "nine guys" and Donna corrects him by saying, "Seven guys and two highly qualified female jurists," that fits the actual makeup of the real Supreme Court in 2004 (the men were Rehnquist, Stevens, Scalia, Kennedy, Souter, Thomas, and Breyer, with O'Connor and Ginsburg as female members of the Court). The last time we actually saw the Supreme Court onscreen (The Red Mass), that also showed the Court with seven men and two women - although the shot in that episode showed neither Justice Mendoza (confirmed to the bench in Six Meetings Before Lunch) nor Chief Justice Ashland (shown suffering serious health issues in Separation Of Powers). 

- We find out new information about Rena (she has a daughter), and we're left wondering what's happened to Ryan (Donna can't find him and his roommate has no idea where he is). We also learn Rena makes $650 a week (about $34,000 a year, which would be about $54,000 in 2022 dollars). That rate of pay in 2004 puts her around the GS-6/GS-7 payscale, which is probably about right for a White House assistant.

- We get a look at Gail's fishbowl, but I can't really tell what's in there. A website that tracks each appearance of the fishbowl says it's a telescope (in honor of Galileo), so ... okay? I guess?

- Why'd They Come Up With Eppur si Muove?

After the Catholic Church in 1633 forced Galileo to recant his claim that the earth moves around the sun, instead of the long-held dogma that the sun rotated around the earth, a possibly apocryphal story holds that Galileo muttered under his breath, "and yet it moves" (eppur si muove in Italian). The President brings up that story while talking to Ellie and encouraging her to stand her ground and continue her research despite any outside pressure to stop.

Quotes    

CJ: "Now that you've slept on it, the call to Dr. Foy wasn't about Ellie Bartlet and I get to have a happy quiet day?"

Toby: "Now that I've slept on it I think it's worse." 

-----

Toby: "Not the President. Us. Some overeager NIH lackey trying to curry favor and this whole conversation might be a little bit easier were I not fighting my way through a cloud of Obsession."

CJ: "There's no cloud."

Toby: "It's about to precipitate out. It's about to rain Obsession." 

(later)

Leo (to CJ): "Are you wearing White Shoulders? My piano teacher used to wear White Shoulders. (CJ walks away) Not as much." 

----- 

Josh: "Did you get Leo?"

Donna: "He's booked."

Josh: "Tell Margaret I can talk so fast it won't actually take measurable time." 

-----

Abbey: "So, what was it? Was it the tube top to meet the Queen of England or the low rise jeans for the North Korean delegation?"

CJ: "Mrs. Bartlet, the press didn't know what to make of you before the MS became public. You've never been the traditional hat-knitting President's wife."

Abbey: "Oh, shoot. Was that in the handbook? Maybe just get me a photographer and seven years' worth of yarn."

-----

Leo: "I'm sorry, but can we really justify spending $800,000 on A Bio-Cultural Approach to the Study of Female Sexual Fantasy and Genital Arousal?"

Toby: "How can we afford not to?"

-----

Will: "What do CJ and Big Bird have in common?"

CJ: "This'll be fun because no one's ever made a joke about me and Big Bird before."

Will: "Your heads are in Ohio and your feet are in Florida."

CJ: "Wouldn't that make us not so much tall as crooked?"

 

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

• North Carolina Representative Barbara Layton is played by the wonderful actress Cherry Jones (24, The Handmaid's Tale, Succession, two-time Tony Award winner on Broadway).

• Of course we get to see several of the Muppets, including Big Bird, Rosita, Zoe, and Elmo.

• The Muppets were also a topic in Take Out The Trash Day, when Toby was fighting with congressional aides over funding for PBS and he corrected an aide who called Fozzie Bear "Fuzzy Bear" - although as Abbey tells Debbie in this episode, Fozzie Bear was never a part of Sesame Street/PBS, but only a member of The Muppet Show in syndication.

• Ellie's (Nina Siemaszko) status as a medical student at Johns Hopkins was first revealed in the episode in which we met her, Ellie. In that episode Ellie was in hot water for speaking to the press about the Surgeon General; in this episode the press is in hot water for involving Ellie (now a research fellow) in the story about HPV/sex worker research.

• The idea to get Abbey on Sesame Street to promote her volunteer clinic work takes us back to An Khe, where she casually mentioned to CJ she was going to start volunteering as a doctor again, which reminds us of Dead Irish Writers when she gave up her medical license "for the duration of our stay in the White House," which leads us back to the legal issues Abbey found herself in for secretly treating Jed's MS, explained in The Fall's Gonna Kill You and 18th And Potomac, which of course is based on the President's health issues first revealed in He Shall, From Time To Time ...

• CJ's past with Ben has been an ongoing plotline since Constituency Of One, when we first discovered they'd lived together for six months, back around the time they both attended/graduated from Cal.

• Sam's former office next to Toby's, the one Will used before Toby kicked him out when he went over to the Vice President's staff, is still empty.

• Representative Layton tells Toby, "I won't even mention the supercollider," to which Toby responds, "No, you guys pretty much took care of that one already." Sam's maneuvers to try to get a Senator to allow a vote on a supercollider project, even knowing it was doomed in Congress, were seen in Dead Irish Writers.

DC location shots    

• Josh's outdoor conversation with Eric Hayden was filmed outside the E. Barrett Prettyman Federal Courthouse, on Pennsylvania Avenue across from the National Gallery of Art. We got a better look at that courthouse in a scene with the special prosecutor arriving outside it in Ways And Means.

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

• The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where Ellie is doing research, is located in Baltimore, not far from Washington, DC.

• The perfumes Obsession and White Shoulders are mentioned.

• An actual HPV vaccine became available in 2006, a couple of years after this episode aired.

• Of course the Muppets, Sesame Street, and The Muppet Show are all referred to, including Kermit, Miss Piggy, and Fozzie Bear, while Big Bird, Rosita, Zoe, and Elmo actually appear.

• We get mentions of Meet The Press and the Today Show, as well as reporters Tim Russert and Diane Sawyer. There are also sightings of the C-SPAN and MSNBC logos.

• Leo's reference to Republicans "blocking our nominations since Roe" indicates the Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision exists in The West Wing universe.

• Former Senator Joe McCarthy is brought up by CJ, comparing Rep. Layton's list of NIH research projects to him and his lists of "known Communists."

• Debbie says she saw Judy Garland perform live at Carnegie Hall, which happened in April of 1961.

• We see a package of Quaker Oats cereal at the coffee stand near Josh and Donna's desks; CJ is seen with a Starbucks cup.

• Leo thinks Josh's idea to use recess appointments to the courts would cause a "Whiskey Rebellion of our own" in the Senate; Josh defends his idea with the actual recess appointments of Chief Justice Warren as well as Justices Brennan and Potter Stewart.

• Albert Einstein and President Thomas Jefferson are mentioned, as well as, of course, Galileo.

• Josh defends the worth of scientific research with no objective in mind with the discoveries of penicillin and the hair-growth drug Rogaine.

End credits freeze frame: The President and First Lady watching Ellie's press conference on television.

Previous episode: Full Disclosure

Next episode: The Supremes