The Hubbert Peak - TWW S6E5

 

Original airdate: November 17, 2004

Written by: Peter Noah (4) 

Directed by: Julie Hébert (3)

Synopsis

• The failure of a bill increasing fuel efficiency standards, coupled with Josh's SUV colliding with a Prius, brings about increased talk of alternative energy sources at the White House. Charlie half-heartedly looks for a job to fulfill his promise to move on from tending to the President, Annabeth helps Toby get better at briefing the press, and playing chess becomes a medical necessity.
  

"Then maybe we can stop thinking of it as something to fool people and think of it as a way to maybe get something done." 

This episode boils down pretty simply - just make the least possible effort you can and hope your favorable intentions will carry you along when the results can't.

 

From the administration making a half-hearted effort to look like they're supporting higher fuel efficiency requirements even though they know Congress will never impose them, to Charlie "looking for a job" by handing out his resumes only to his friends in the West Wing, to Annabeth convincing Toby to stand up straight behind the briefing room podium, that's the lesson we're apparently given. Just half-ass it, it's okay, people will give you credit for trying, even a little bit.

 

It also doesn't help that the main storyline of the episode is pretty wonky, even though developing renewable energy resources is more important now in 2023 than it was even in 2004. Kate's talk of the Hubbert Peak and a nightmarish world where the increased demand for fossil fuels coupled with a disappearing supply of that finite resource leads to war and misery ... not a feel-good storyline of sunshine and rainbows! Josh's online-publicized mishap of driving a giant fuel-hog SUV into a hybrid Prius right on the dealer's lot puts the White House into a tough spot, particularly as a bill that would force automakers to make their vehicles more fuel-efficient goes down in Congress with the administration only putting up token support.

So CJ orders Josh to put together an alternative energy task force, with a statement to be ready by the end of the day, to show the country that the administration is really, truly, honestly cross-our-hearts-and-hope-to-die behind renewable energy and conservation. Huh. All that leads to, though, is representatives from the solar, wind, ethanol, and hydrogen energy fields talking up the benefits of their own particular industries while poking holes in all of the others.

One funny little bit, though, comes as the meeting begins and Josh says he's going to have trouble remembering who is arguing for what:

Josh: "I'll try to keep everybody straight. Should've made little symbols - a picture of the sun, ear of corn, cloud blowing out its cheeks, and for hydrogen ..."

Anders: "The Hindenburg?"

And what's funny is when we check in on the meeting later in the day, there are indeed little signs exactly like what Josh had described:

(No Hindenburg, though, I don't think the hydrogen guy gets a sign.)

Nothing comes of this meeting. Josh is resigned to the fact that every alternative energy source has big problems of its own, there's no magic bullet. The President, though, decides he's going to veto the transportation bill - even though it will easily be overridden - just to make a point about higher fuel efficiency standards. Which means ... nothing really comes of this storyline. They make a point, they lose the battle, and there's no real progress in the war. Least possible effort.

Charlie has finished his studies at Georgetown and will get his degree, which means according to his agreement with President Bartlet he's now going to have to go out and get a job on his own. Charlie has been serving as the President's "body man" since he was asked to come aboard in A Proportional Response - basically the go-to assistant and handler for Bartlet in matters big and small. The President knows Charlie is cut out for bigger things than just being a glorified servant, so he's pushing him and his new degree out the door to make a career for himself.

Charlie's resumes, from the President himself

Charlie is reluctant. He likes his job, the President is a father figure to him, and with Leo out of the picture he doesn't think it's the right time for him to move on. So his big effort to get a new job is to ... hand out his resumes to Josh, Toby, and CJ, while asking them to not really consider hiring him at all. Toby has no problem with that request:

Which leads to quite the side-eye from Charlie:

I really do not think President Bartlet's idea of Charlie going out into the world and doing great things meant he should look for a new job right there in the same White House he's been working in for five years (or is it six now? It's not seven as we're told multiple times in this calendar-shifting episode, not for Charlie, because he didn't come on to the staff until almost a year into the administration). But there's no sign Charlie has any interest in actually looking for work outside.

That ends up paying off for him when CJ offers him a position as Deputy Chief Assistant to the Chief of Staff. It's actually a good idea for CJ - she's overwhelmed with the amount of work on her plate every day after taking over for Leo, she could use a capable, sharp assistant like Charlie - but it's still not really fulfilling the President's wishes. Once again - least effort possible, hoping "good intentions" carry you the rest of the way. Charlie seems inordinately proud of this new job, steps away from the desk he was working at, and the move spurs him to ask Zoey out to dinner, hoping to rekindle the spark they had back in Seasons 1 and 2.

Toby is still carrying on with the press briefings after CJ left the press secretary post. Much like in Liftoff, things aren't going very well, as the press has pretty much abandoned even listening to Toby's bland, information-free briefings:

CJ - who was totally onboard with the Annabeth/Toby plan from Liftoff to slow down the press secretary search - now wants to kick that into high gear.

CJ: "Where are we on finding a new press secretary?"

Toby: "Getting up to speed."

CJ: "Time for a turbo boost. No one, and I don't mean this unkindly, no one is anxious to have you keep briefing."

Toby: "Just curious, but how would you have put it if you meant it unkindly?"

Annabeth, though, insists Toby can be serviceable if he just ... I don't know, stands up straighter and delivers some funnier lines. Weirdly, that seems to work. Least possible effort, you know.

The element that doesn't really fall into the least-possible-effort theme comes from Leo. 

 

 

He's home in his apartment recovering from heart surgery, a nurse by his side, but sending word that the President needs to be reminded to play a weekly game of chess. CJ gets the brush-off when she mentions it, and doesn't think it's all that important, but at a lunch with Leo he illustrates why it's vital for Jed to keep those weekly matches:

Leo: "MS is a disease of the central nervous system. It can affect cognition, perception, reasoning, judgment - what the doctors actually term 'executive function.' As President of the United States this needs to be monitored on a weekly basis. You need to get the President to play chess."

CJ, who isn't much of a chess player, brings in a government employee who was on the Stanford chess team and clears an hour of the President's schedule to get him a match. Bartlet, naturally, turns the tables on CJ and makes her sit down to play, with some help from the Stanford guy. This chess-playing, and its connection to President Bartlet's multiple sclerosis, is the opening salvo of that MS playing a more important role as the final seasons of the series play out. (We haven't heard much, if at all, about the effects of the disease on Bartlet since Election Day of 2002, and here we are in 2005, apparently.)

There's also Kate's efforts to reach out to Donna and give her some support (a minor yet nicely played PTSD storyline by Mary McCormack and Janel Moloney) and Gail Addison's attempts to redecorate CJ's office and Vice President Russell needing briefings from Kate to keep his countries straight and his acting kinda creepy toward CJ ... but no matter to all that.

Lip service to alternative energy and higher fuel standards; a token effort to comply with a promise to the President to find a new job; standing up a little straighter to talk to the press. That's the kind of bold, energetic, outside-the-box action we're used to seeing out of the Bartlet administration ... wait, no, it's exactly the opposite. This is a weak, overly talky episode showing a lot of weak motivations and weak decisions by our heroes, with weak outcomes they just seem to be resigned to. I like the show better when these folks are trying to make big things happen with big, unexpected tactics. Is that too much to ask?

 

Tales Of Interest!

- I hadn't mentioned this yet, but Stockard Channing has joined the regular opening credit cast list, instead of just showing up for episodes she appears in. That brings the number of actors pictured in the sequence to 11 (12 when "with Jimmy Smits" appears, which for now is only the episodes he's actually in). That compares to just eight in the first season opening credits sequence. Remember, the opening credits music doesn't change, so they're adding more people in the same amount of time - and they're not done adding yet.

- The West Wing timeline has now officially become unhinged from the actual calendar. For the past five-plus seasons, events depicted in the series have tracked with when the episodes actually aired: Christmas shows were seen in December, a couple of good Thanksgiving episodes ran in November, we had unusual tropical storms and graduations and baseball games and Memorial Day in springtime episodes. We also know the years tracked along with the actual year of airing, from talk of the upcoming millennium in 1999's In Excelsis Deo to Toby's question about a possible change to the  2002 presidential ticket in 2001's 17 People.

Well, that's now changed. I mentioned in my recap of the last episode that even though there were references to "five years" (CJ saying Toby should have told the press about her involvement in foreign policy decisions for that long) and "six years" (Toby said he'd been doing his job that long when he handed in his prank resignation, and CJ told the press she'd been talking to them for that long), we also had the weird revelation that somehow we'd skipped the midterm elections that would have been held in November of 2004, and now we're just a year away from the 2006 presidential election. That five and six year stuff is no longer the case ... we are seven years into the Bartlet administration, and we know that because it gets pounded over our heads time and time again:

Will: "This administration's had seven years to make better fuel efficiency a priority --"

Toby: "Seven years --"

Will: "Don't take your guilt out on me."

Toby: "Seven years of a hostile Congress."

And:

Annabeth: "What CJ did for seven years wasn't combat, it was charm and disarm."

And:

Josh: "Thank you all for coming. Particularly on such short notice."

Anders: "I've been wanting to have this meeting for seven years."

And:

Leo: "So, how's it going?"

CJ: "It's overwhelming. The amount there is to tend to. I ... I thought I was busy before. How in the world did you manage it for seven years?"

So yeah ... we have now officially skipped an entire year. Even though Donna is still on crutches for her injuries that happened in May 2004, and Leo is still recovering from his surgery that happened in June 2004, we're now past the midterm elections and somewhere in 2005. Just go with it, I guess.

- Car dealerships don't have actual, regular license plates on the vehicles on their lot. They use temporary dealer plates for test drives, and the usual state-issued plates aren't put on until after a vehicle is purchased and registration is complete. So the DC plates on the SUV Josh is taking for a drive shouldn't be there.

 

 

- Speaking of that SUV, it's said a couple of times that Josh "totaled" the Prius when he ran into it. When you see the actual collision, the damage doesn't appear that severe - in fact, the only body part we see break loose and go flying is the SUV's license plate frame.

 

- Josh’s talk about gas prices was in the ballpark of being correct. In 2004, when this episode was shot, average gasoline prices in the U.S. were $1.92 per gallon, on their way to an average $2.34 in 2005. The price of gas in 1981 ($1.35) adjusted for inflation to 2004 was still only about $2 per gallon. As he says, though, 1981 does appear to be the adjusted peak of gasoline prices prior to 2010 or so (1981 gas prices in 2022 dollars would be $4.46 a gallon). The new peak, according to what I found online, appears to be 2012’s $4.69 (in 2022 dollars). That year, remember, was when gas prices skyrocketed mainly due to speculation and market manipulation leading up to the 2012 election. 

- There's a pretty good look at Gail's fishbowl on CJ's desk, but I can't tell what kind of decoration is in there.

- Why'd They Come Up With The Hubbert Peak?

Kate explains the Hubbert Peak theory to Josh, which basically says the supply of a finite resource like crude oil will eventually run out, and that available supply will look like a bell curve - there will be some point at which the remaining amount of oil available to extract will begin to fall, and it will continue falling as the resource is exhausted. The theory was named after geophysicist M. King Hubbert, who developed a method for modeling such a curve and predicted the beginning of the drop in global oil production would come around the year 2010 or so. As it turns out, development of new technologies to extract oil in unconventional ways (such as fracking and use of tar sands) has made Hubbert's predictions inaccurate.

Quotes    

Josh (on the phone): "You should see this thing I'm driving. It's a monster."

Donna: "What?"

Josh: "My testosterone is flying."

Donna: "Try not to get any on anyone."

-----

Kate: "What kind of SUV?"

Josh: "A humongous one."

Kate: "Excursion, Expedition, Escalade, what?"

Josh: "One of those ... I just wanted to drive it. Like a Hummer. Wouldn't you want to experience that once?"

Kate: "Yeah, I've had the pleasure. It's less of a giggle when you're taking automatic weapons fire."

----- 

Toby: "Not counting today, today was, uh -- I don't know what today was, but the briefings?"

Josh: "Yeah, they're getting better."

Toby: "Good. On a scale from one to ten, ten being CJ and one being a chimp throwing feces, where do I rank?"

Josh: "You're getting better."

-----

Annabeth: "Smart and funny, seduce them. It worked on your wife."

Toby: "We're divorced."

Annabeth: "Living with you is a whole 'nother ball game. I get that already."

-----

Toby: "How do you get women?"

Josh: "Huh?"

Toby: "Smart and funny? Right?"

Josh: "Plus I got that, you know, boyish thing."

Toby: "I don't have that."

 

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

• The Bartlet daughter Zoey (Elisabeth Moss) is back, and we discover she's the one who told President Bartlet about Charlie finishing up his studies at Georgetown. Zoey, of course, was first seen in The Crackpots And These Women and began dating Charlie soon after, which led to Charlie being the target of white supremacist assassins in What Kind Of Day Has It Been. They broke up sometime after the 2000 midterms, Charlie was trying to win her back around the 2003 inauguration, she was dating French layabout Jean-Paul and graduated from Georgetown in the spring of 2003 (either one or two years prior to this episode, it's getting hard to tell), after which she was kidnapped, rescued, recovered, and was last seen at the Bartlet family Christmas gathering in Abu el Banat. That Christmas it did appear she and Charlie were still on somewhat warm terms, and Charlie is trying to rekindle their relationship now.

• Wallace Langham (The Larry Sanders Show, Veronica's Closet, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation) pops up as solar energy proponent Terry Anders.

• Rachael Harris is another one of those character actresses who works steadily and has been seen in shows like Modern Family, Suits, and Lucifer and movies such as The Hangover and Best In Show. Here she's Corinne McKenna, the wind energy expert in Josh's meeting.

• This unnamed reporter was seen in the background as part of a group of reporters in Access. I know from an earlier rewatch that she plays a small but integral role in a Season 7 episode. So I guess she's kinda part of the White House press corps now.

• Gail Addison from the Office of Administration appears, trying to convince CJ to redecorate. Played by Bonita Friedericy (Chuck, Preacher, Christmas With The Kranks), we'll see Gail again in about a year.

• Josh tells CJ "I don't wear jammies" - yet we saw him wearing the too-big pajamas CJ gave to him in The Midterms and again when Amy shows up at his apartment early one morning in The Two Bartlets. So he used to wear jammies, even if he doesn't any more.
  

• The longtime press corps reporters seen in this episode include Steve, Mark, and Katie.

• Will and Josh, and later Josh and Toby, talk about a "Governor Baker" who they think is the frontrunner for the Democratic Presidential nomination, even though he hasn't announced his candidacy yet. Governor Baker will be a presence through the upcoming campaign.

• Josh's heedless urge to respond to anonymous online blog comments about him remind us of The U.S. Poet Laureate and his reaction to the LemonLyman website, which led him into a rabbit hole of escalating attacks and responses. He was severely chewed out by CJ for that - surprising she doesn't go after him again here.

• Donna is still in a wheelchair, or in crutches when she ditches the electric wheelchair for energy conservation reasons. She tells Kate she'll be out of her cast "soon." Given that broken bones generally heal in around six weeks, and Donna was injured in the blast in Gaza just before Memorial Day, this still would be summer - even if we give her extra time to heal due to the severity of her injuries and her consequent surgery, we couldn't really be much into August at the latest. But again, as we've discussed earlier ... time is getting pretty flexible here, what with skipping the midterms and the constant references to seven years passing and everything being done to rush us into the upcoming presidential campaign. So maybe Donna's bones take a year to heal, who knows.

• Annabeth is seen settling into what was originally Sam's office, then Will's before he left to go work for the Vice President (but is he really gone if he's still hanging around the West Wing all the time?). The office has been empty since Toby moved Will's stuff out in Abu el Banat, which means - since we are apparently in 2005 sometime now - it's been vacant for over a year.

• Toby's ex-wife Andy Wyatt gets a quick mention, as Toby is gobsmacked that Annabeth had asked her what had originally drawn her to him ("smart and funny").

• When CJ visits Leo, he mentions he's on the painkiller Vicodin after his recovery from heart surgery. It was a different V-drug, Valium, that he had abused (along with alcohol) back in the mid-1990s, a huge storyline in Season 1.
  

• President Bartlet's multiple sclerosis pops up as Leo tells CJ she has to insist the President play chess every week, as a way to monitor the disease's effect on his executive function. We first learned of the President's diagnosis in He Shall, From Time To Time ...; the public revelation of that disease and the coverup during the 1998 campaign played out over the last episodes of Season 2; and we noticed Bartlet suffering some symptoms in Election Night. There's been little talk of the disease since then, but this chess-playing story is laying the groundwork for more progression of that MS on the way.
  

• President Bartlet has been seen as an active, enthusiastic chess player before, in episodes like Hartfield's Landing. So it seems a bit odd that he'd try to pass on the opportunity to play when CJ first brings it up.
  

DC location shots    

• None. I figure the car dealership scene at the opening was filmed in southern California somewhere, although when I search automobile dealers with "Kira" in the name (as that's what I can see on the signage) I only find what looks like a somewhat disreputable used car dealer in Los Angeles.
  

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

• The Toyota Prius gets talked up a lot, with a starring role in that opening sequence. The Prius (a gasoline/electric hybrid vehicle) has been available in the United States since 2001, and the 2004 model (shown here) was the new second-generation redesign.

• SUV models that get mentioned include the (Ford) Excursion, (Ford) Expedition, (Cadillac) Escalade, (Toyota) Land Cruiser, and Hummer, which was still manufactured by the builders of the military HUMVEE, AM General, in 2004 while the brand name was owned by GM. The show removed the badging from the grill of the vehicle Josh drove, so you can't obviously see the car brand ... but in the shot of Josh colliding with the Prius, you can freeze the screen and see the "Excursion" badging on the fender.

Just ignore the arrow pointing to the license plate, note that there's no grill badging

• Toby satirically wonders if it's the birthday of Baltimore journalist and scholar H. L. Mencken  when he wonders why most of the reporters have abandoned the briefing room.
  

• CJ is seen carrying a Starbucks cup when she's ambushed by those reporters in her office.

• Birkenstock shoes gets mentioned (as shorthand for liberal eco-loving hippies, I guess) in connection with Josh's meeting with alternative energy proponents.

• Josh makes a comment about "rats of an unusual size," which is almost identical to "rodents of unusual size" seen in the 1987 movie The Princess Bride.
  

• A mention is made of not having time to learn to program a TiVo at Charlie's graduation celebration.
  

• We see a CNN logo and former CNN reporter Aaron Brown on the TV in Josh's office.

• Later in CJ's office, in the background we see Bill Hemmer, who at the time was a CNN anchor. Hemmer now works for Fox News.

• Annabeth brings up the looks of the actors Jude Law and Denzel Washington in comparison to Toby's methods of getting women ("smart and funny").
  

• The German zeppelin Hindenburg and its unfortunate explosive demise in 1937 are criticisms of the hydrogen alternative energy possibility at Josh's policy meeting. 
  

• A can of Diet Pepsi is seen on the table of the alternative energy meeting.

• The Italian restaurant Terrazzo in Chevy Chase, Maryland, was listed in Washingtonian magazine's 2004 list of the 100 best restaurants in the DC area. So at the time of this episode, it was a real restaurant that no doubt featured gnocchi that was "very gnice."

• Dolley Madison and her desk get mentioned by the designer hoping to de-militarize CJ's office.
  

• The ringer CJ brings in to play chess with the President was a member of the Stanford chess team in college.
  

End credits freeze frame: President Bartlet, CJ, and the guy from the Stanford chess team settling down to their match.

Previous episode: Liftoff

Next episode: The Dover Test