Wednesday, December 6, 2023

Ninety Miles Away - TWW S6E19

 




Original airdate: March 16, 2005

Written by: John Sacret Young (4) 

Directed by: Rod Holcomb (1)

Synopsis
  • Leo tries to make up for the mistakes of the past with a long-shot bid to negotiate an end to the embargo with Cuba. Kate's past in the CIA (and with Leo) catches up to her, sort of. Charlie has to deal with exterminators and entomologists in the White House.


"Cuba ... it scums everybody it touches." 



Well, here we are. The episode widely regarded as one of the worst in West Wing history - if not the worst. Sure, people hate Access (but at least they were trying something different format-wise, I give partial credit for that) and others hate The Long Goodbye (which is a decent episode of TV drama, it's just not really a West Wing episode). Others dislike Eppur si Muove (the Muppets!) or Jefferson Lives (ooh, fireworks! And Jed sullenly refusing to push back on his VP choice!) or Abu el Banat (weird CGI Christmas trees! And the Bartlet grandson getting miraculously younger!) or An Khe (Vietnam flashbacks!) for various reasons (usually because they're kind of boring and the plotlines really don't matter) ... but for my money, nothing sinks quite so low as this one.
 
To quote Saturday Night Live's Stefan, this episode has everything - from an unnecessarily convoluted setup to get Leo to Cuba, to the President making an unnecessarily politically toxic decision at maybe the worst possible time of his administration, to superspy Kate with her sort-of-clandestine meetings with an old CIA compatriot, to CJ realizing even she doesn't have the clearance to see Kate's FBI records, to termite guys snooping around the Oval Office and trying to drill holes in the Mural Room for comic relief, to the unintended hilarity of John Spencer and Mary McCormack wearing ridiculous wigs in an attempt to look like it was 1995. Not only that, we get a retcon of when Leo was Secretary of Labor and when he went to rehab (it was 1993 since Season 1, all of a sudden it's now 1995 and under an entirely different administration) - and, once again (as in the Gaza/NSF Thurmont/The Birnam Wood arc), we're treated to this fictional show trying to solve complex real-world political problems in a highly simplified and unworkable scenario that hardly even makes sense in a 48-minute TV drama writing framework.
 
Now, we do get the wonderful Brian Dennehy in a couple of scenes as a boozy Florida Senator, and Charlie getting baffled at the choice between exterminating termites or studying them (leading CJ to tell him, "Just kill the damn bugs"), but that's not even close to saving this mess of an episode.

Let's start with the convoluted setup to get Leo to Cuba. Word is leaking out that Fidel Castro's health might finally be leading to his removal from power soon, and the President and Leo decide on a high-stakes trip to Havana to meet with the Cuban leader over easing embargo restrictions on the island. Okay, that's fine ... but the cover story is basically an homage to Ernest Hemingway, as we discover both Jed and Leo are big fans of his writing, and Leo read all of Hemingway's works while he was in rehab in 1993 (oh, sorry, 1995, I guess), and so Leo is going to Cuba to visit Hemingway's house there outside Havana. Which might be a decent cover if Leo was actually permitted to travel to Cuba at all - it wouldn't matter if his stated purpose was visiting Hemingway's farm or touring the sugar cane fields or actually meeting with Castro, he wasn't supposed to be going there legally in the first place. So that whole Hemingway setup in the cold open was just kind of dumb.

Although it did give us the chance to get a lovingly composed shot of a typewriter:


(Obviously the show didn't go to Cuba to film at Hemingway's actual house, so this isn't actually Hemingway's typewriter, so what's the point of this shot?)

Naturally, somebody blabs about Leo, and when word gets to the population of rabidly anti-Castro Cuban emigres in Florida it's going to be a whole thing. They're going to attack the Bartlet administration for being soft on Castro and Communism, and with the Florida primaries right around the corner, the Democratic candidates are going to bear the brunt of that furor. We also get the blustery, boozed-up Florida Senator Rafe Framhagen on the scene, threatening Cliff (and later Leo) over making any concessions to the Cuban dictator ... and he also makes some sideways references to Kate being involved somehow.

How is Kate involved somehow? Good question - and it's never really resolved. What we do kind of find out through conversations with one of her fellow CIA spies is that her first CIA assignment was in Florida in 1995, apparently monitoring either a meeting of veterans from both sides of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion or the ongoing vote recount of an anti-Castro Representative Cabrera's election to the House, or both. When Leo brings up the necessity of reaching out to Cuba and trying to improve relations by easing the embargo, and how he feels he messed it up in 1995 by getting drunk and missing some important meetings, Kate lets him know it didn't matter - the CIA would never had let it happen then. So, some pretty important high-level secret skulduggery was going on with Kate and the CIA subverting some administration initiatives back then ... but again, not much resolution or closure on that.

This does bring us to the closing flashback, back to Florida in 1995. A pre-rehab Leo (Secretary of Labor at the time, he says) is stumbling drunk, looking for his car, and missing an important chance to make some kind of deal with the Cuban government, given the attendance of Cuban military types at the Bay of Pigs reunion. Kate just happens to be hanging around in the parking lot, smoking a cigarette and nursing a black eye, for some reason. And this is where we get the unintentional hilarity of some freaking awesome wigs, with the scene shot mostly in shadow to help hide the fact they're trying to make Kate and Leo look so much different ...


Not to mention the attempt to make John Spencer look ten years younger (which is difficult, given the fact that Spencer looked 58 years old for most of his life).


By the way, this is what John Spencer actually looked like when filming The Rock in late 1995/early 1996 ... not much different from how he appears in The West Wing, but they decided to give Leo a much shaggier head of hair in this flashback.


Anyway, even with the Florida Cuban-Americans up in arms over this rapproachment with Castro, and the Presidential candidates having to deal with the fallout, and the CIA maybe not on board with the plan, President Bartlet goes on TV to tell his story about Kennedy's cigars and make his pitch for improving relations, and ... well, that's it, I guess. The entire Hemingway/Castro/Framhagen/1995 sneaky spy flashback thing just lands with a wet thud, and it's over. Ugh.

Let's not forget Charlie's dealings with the termite people, either. Wait ... the script and the show itself seems to want to forget Charlie's dealings with the termite people, as that B plot exists for absolutely no reason. So yeah, we'll forget that, too.

From here on in the series we turn mostly to the campaign trail, which is far more engrossing and entertaining than whatever this is. We also get quite the turn of events with a leak of classified information within the White House, with earthshaking results for some long-time staffers. That's all to come, as we bring Season 6 to a close and roll into the final Season 7.

 


Tales Of Interest!

- At the beginning of the episode we see Leo change the number on his white board from 330 to 329. 
 

Remember, as we first saw in 365 Days, he's using the board to count down the remaining days of President Bartlet's presidency, until January 20, 2007. That means this episode is around February 24 or 25, 2006 ... which makes no sense when the previous episode showed us the events of the Super Tuesday primaries, which seem to have been set in early March. The Florida primaries (where we are told the candidates are apparently campaigning) have not been part of Super Tuesday since about 1996, and generally take place a week or so later, which would be mid-March. Toby later says the South Carolina and Florida primaries are a couple of weeks away, which again would fit with a late-February setting ... but we can't ignore the fact that Super Tuesday has already happened.
 
Of course that doesn't mean there can't be a different primary calendar in The West Wing universe. BUT ... things like this are simply unforced errors. There's nothing in the script or the plot that requires the numbers 330 and 329 be shown on Leo's white board - they could be anything. 329 days before January 20, 2007, was not even a Monday morning, as we're shown here, but Saturday, February 25, 2006. All they had to do was have Leo change that number from 314 to 313, and we're at Monday, March 13, 2006 - a simple fix, but they couldn't even be asked to look at a calendar and do that.

- Real-life political leaders are only rarely mentioned on The West Wing - there's been Qaddafi and Yassir Arafat and Queen Elizabeth, that's about it - but they're never shown. Until now, with the shadowy image of a man obviously meant to be Fidel Castro smoking a cigar in his military fatigues waiting to meet Leo.


- The timing of Leo's drunken meeting with Kate and his eventual decision to go to rehab does not match up with what we've been told before. In The Short List we learned he had been in rehab "six years ago," while he was Secretary of Labor, and in Take Out The Trash Day he told Karen Larson he hadn't had a drink in "six and a half years" (which turned out not to be true when we saw he had relapsed and gotten drunk before the final Presidential debate in 1998 in Bartlet For America). Both of those descriptions put his rehab stint in 1993. Now we are told Leo was still drinking during the Bay of Pigs veterans' reunion in 1995, where an undercover Kate saved him from trying to drive drunk, and he was still Secretary of Labor (as he tells CJ) - and that it was this drunken few days and his failure to make a deal with Cuba that convinced him to "dry out for 30 days" in rehab.

I don't know why the discrepancy. Again, don't these writers keep a bible of things that've already been told in the series, so they don't mess up timelines? Was it just because 1993 was too early for Kate to have started her CIA career? Or was it because they didn't think they could make John Spencer look 13 years younger, but they'd settle for trying for 10?

(This also really complicates the backstory of where previous Presidents and administrations fell before Bartlet was elected in 1998. When we were originally told Leo was Secretary of Labor in 1993, that made sense with a Democratic President who was replaced by a Republican in 1994. Now, with Leo still apparently in the Cabinet in 1995, that would have to be under Bartlet's predecessor, who was definitely a Republican, as noted by Supreme Court Justice Crouch in The Short List - "I waited five years for a Democrat.")

- President Bartlet and others are concerned about how news of a possible lifting of the Cuban embargo might hurt the candidates in the upcoming Florida vote. "If this comes out, we can bring out the shovels and bury the Democratic candidates in that little fiesta," Jed says. It's the primary, not the general election, and while this news might buoy the Republicans over the Democrats, that shouldn't matter as much in a primary. 

- When Toby sees Rep. Cabrera on the TV, he says he's served seven or eight terms. Later we hear about the controversy over the recount of Cabrera's election in 1995, which would be from the 1994 election - if that had been his first term, he'd be running for his seventh term now in 2006.

- The show used copies of actual FBI files to stand in for Kate's files. The first pages refer to Judith Campbell, who claimed to be a mistress of President Kennedy and several mobsters and referred to here an associate of "underworld figures" Sam Giancana and John Roselli, and her phone calls to the Kennedy White House in November 1961.
 

The heavily redacted page has handwritten references to 1944.


Clearly odd for someone whose first CIA posting wasn't until 1995.

- While there's not a lot of directorial magic going on in this episode, we do get a split-diopter shot of Kate and CIA director Rollie in the Situation Room. A split-diopter shot is kind of like having two lenses in the same camera, so subjects both near and far can be in focus.


- Gail's fishbowl appears to just have white gravel in the bottom, which may be a reference to white-sand beaches in the Caribbean.


- Why'd They Come Up With Ninety Miles Away?
While it's actually 94 miles from Key West to the northern shore of Cuba, rounding down to 90 miles makes things simpler. Also when CJ asks Kate how she found out about Leo being in Cuba, she responds, "It's 90 miles away, it's like driving to Baltimore." And President Bartlet, in his speech to the nation, emphasizes that Cuba is only 90 miles away.



Quotes    
CJ: "See? You do know the Senator."

Cliff: "What's not to know? Brilliant, bilious, impossible - fires staffers for putting paper clips backwards on briefs."

CJ: "Which way on a paper clip is backwards?"

-----

Framhagen: "When Leo was Chief of Staff, I could heckle him a little. We used to bend our elbows together right in this room, down home, back when. Now he's gone ... probably only that NSA gal."

Cliff: "Gal?"

Framhagen (sharply): "You like repeatin' things, son?"

Cliff: "I seem to be getting good at it."

----- 

CJ: "You saw the Senator."

Cliff: "I'm full of vitamin C."

CJ: "Nothing stronger?"

Cliff: "I think his orange juice was spiked."

CJ: "What'd he want?"

Cliff: "I'm not really sure."

CJ: "Not really sure."

Cliff: "This repeating thing must be contagious."

-----

President: "Let's put together a fail-safe response on how and what to announce about Castro's health, about Leo's trip, then find out public reaction, Congressional reaction, and the candidates - what to do about its impact on the primaries and the general election, and Cuba's response, for that matter."

CJ: "How soon?"

President: "How about the end of the day."

----- 

Leo: "Younger Cuban-Americans don't care. The Cuba effect on Florida's going away, too much utilizing."

Framhagen: "Mmm, so for the younger Cuban-Americans, your solution is to have an old man with MS send another old man who's had a heart attack to check on the health of a third old man, a man who could be, should be, and God willing soon will be, dead."

-----

Framhagen: "We were close once ... back then."

Leo: "No ... Senator, we just drank back then. We were never close."

  



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

  • Brian Dennehy (First Blood, Cocoon, Silverado, F/X, The Blacklist, etc, etc) is seen as Florida Senator Rafe Framhagen. Oddly, IMDB credits the role as "Framingham," but he's clearly called "Framhagen" in the dialogue.

  • The bug guys looked familiar to me: Kevin West (The O.C., Scrubs, Gone In 60 Seconds) is the one holding up the pictures:


And P.J. Byrne (Babylon, Big Little Lies, The Boys) is the fellow with the ant anatomy chart.

  • The older background actor with the white hair and the buzzcut that shows up in many, many episodes is seen once again.

  • Leo's whiteboard from 365 Days is back ... and the first two columns on the board are indeed the same ones we saw written back in that episode (Health Care and Latin America).

  • Reporters Katie, Mark, and Steve are all seen in the briefing room.
  • Leo's rehab stay at Sierra Tucson comes up (that's where he spent his time reading all of Hemingway's works). We first learned of his rehab in The Short List ... although, as mentioned above, the timing doesn't exactly work out with what we see in this episode.
  • The President tells CJ that he had started secret exploratory talks in Canada with representatives of the Cuban government "before you were Chief of Staff." Earlier, with Leo, he says that groundwork has been being laid for "a year, but who's counting." CJ became Chief of Staff in Liftoff, which was the summer of 2004. This is February/March of 2006, which is a full year and half since then, and the talks with the Cubans had to have been ongoing before that, so ... again, the timelines don't match up. 
  • Leo says Castro had seen President Bartlet pitch at the Orioles game. We saw the President throw out the first pitch at Camden Yards on Memorial Day 2004 in the aptly entitled Memorial Day.
  • The reporters bring up some facts we saw in La Palabra - Katie says that "Hoynes' campaign may be collapsing" and Mark mentions Santo's "surprising victory in California." Again, this is clearly after Super Tuesday, so we must be into March, which is fewer than 329 days until January 20.
  • CJ tells Margaret to make the request to get Kate's top-secret file and "forge my signature - you can do the President's." It was In The Shadow Of Two Gunmen Part II where we learned that little fact:

Margaret: "I can sign the President's name. I have his signature down pretty good."

Leo: "You can sign the President's name?"

Margaret: "Yeah."

Leo: "On a document removing him from power and handing it to someone else."

Margaret: "Yeah! ... Or, do you think the White House Counsel would say that was a bad idea?"

Leo: "I think the White House Counsel would say it was a coup d'etat!"

Margaret: "Well. I'd probably end up doing some time for that."

Leo: "I would think. And what the hell were you doing practicing the President's signature?"

Margaret: "It was just for fun."

Leo: "We've got separation of powers, checks and balances, and Margaret vetoing things and sending them back to the Hill."

  • Kate told us in 365 Days that she'd been married and divorced "a couple of times" - in Drought Conditions we discovered one of her ex-husbands went to the same gym as Charlie, and now her former CIA partner says he'd ran into another ex-husband who is "still down there" - in Florida, I guess.
  • With the campaigns still going on, we see a TV graphic about Vice President Russell having a six-point lead over Santos in Florida, and that Senator Vinick and former Speaker Walken are still competing for the Republican nomination. There's also a mention of Santos' California win and Hoynes' flame-out, which solidly places this episode after the events of Super Tuesday in La Palabra.
  • Framhagen brings up the point that President Bartlet is suffering from MS, a plot point that has been with us in varying degrees since He Shall, From Time To Time ... He also refers to "an old man who's had a heart attack," by which he means Leo - we saw his heart attack at Camp David in The Birnam Wood, and his medical rescue in Third-Day Story.



DC location shots    
  • None. I don't know where the scenes supposedly at Hemingway's Cuban residence were shot, or why that one typewriter gets a lingering lovingly framed shot ... IMDB lists only the Warner Brothers studio lot for filming of the episode.


They Do Exist! It's The Real Person, or Thing    
  • The Hemingway quote President Bartlet reads in the open - "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those it will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially" - is from A Farewell To Arms.
  • When Leo arrives at Hemingway's house in Cuba he is welcomed to "la finca de Senor Mr. Hemingway." "Finca" means "farm" in Spanish, and Hemingway's residence outside Havana is called Finca Vigia. Charlie later mentions Hemingway homes in Idaho and Key West "with the six-toed cats," both of which do exist.
  • President Bartlet's story about President Kennedy dispatching Pierre Salinger to secure 1200 Petit Upmann cigars from Cuba just before imposing a trade embargo actually happened.
  • Cliff tells Sen. Framingham that he'll take a Diet Coke instead of the (spiked) orange juice offered.
  • Cliff compares the constant reports of Castro's poor health to a Marx Brothers comedy.
  • MSNBC and CNN are referenced. 

  • The burning of the White House in 1814 comes up with the termite researchers, although the mention of Abigail Adams doesn't make sense when Dolley Madison was the First Lady at that time.
  • Speaking of discovering the mysteries of the White House by going inside the walls, the entire interior of the building was gutted and rebuilt between 1948 and 1952. There'd be little to discover from any time before that.
  • Kate says she and her mother were living at the Key West Naval Base when her father was off with the Pacific Fleet. There's a Key West Naval Air Station, that must be what she's referring to.



End credits freeze frame: CJ and Leo talking in CJ's office.





Previous episode: La Palabra
Next episode: In God We Trust
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