Inauguration: Part I - TWW S4E14

 

Original airdate: February 5, 2003

Teleplay by: Aaron Sorkin (76)
Story by: Michael Oates Palmer (2) & William Sind (2)

Directed by: Christopher Misiano (12)

Synopsis

• With Inauguration Day looming, a looming genocide in Africa spurs debate on a massive change in American foreign policy, as well as conflict between the President and the Secretary of Defense. That leads to repercussions for Donna and Jack Reese. 

"Why is a Kundunese life worth less to me than an American life?"

"I don't know, sir, but it is."

So we're doing this again.

Remember Season 1, when Aaron Sorkin's scripts kept telling us the Bartlet administration was adrift, directionless, unable to get traction on their issues with poll ratings stuck in the mediocre range (despite the fact we saw the White House get major wins on gun control, banking regulation, conservation, the census, etc., etc.)? Remember Let Bartlet Be Bartlet, when the staff and the President joined forces to pay less attention to political/poll considerations and do bold things, decide on what's right and pursue that in the face of cold political calculations?

Yeah, well, Sorkin has gone back to that well several times in the past three years, with the administration seeming to yo-yo from "we can't do that, it's going to cost us votes" to "we've got to step out and lead, even if it costs us votes." Remember 18th And Potomac, when Leo told the staff they'd continue to push their issues in the face of congressional investigations into the President's health? 

Leo: "We're not gonna stop, soften, detour, postpone, circumvent, obfuscate, or trade a single one of our goals to allow for whatever extracurricular nonsense is coming our way in the next few days, weeks, and months."

Remember The Two Bartlets and Hartsfield's Landing, when Toby and the President fought over being safe and folksy in the campaign instead of using his experience and intelligence as a positive? I could go on (in fact, I have gone on about this in past blog posts), but you get the point. Sorkin likes to fall back on the trope of the President being weak, unfocused, unable to move the needle on public approval - only to have an in-depth heart-to-heart over a specific issue or two that turns the tide and energizes the entire administration to forge ahead bravely and boldly, damn the polls. And then a few months later the cycle repeats itself.

So ... here we are. Let me add my opinion here: I think this shows Sorkin is starting to run out of gas. Sure, he's gone to this type of well before, but I just don't see any vigor or inspiration in this storyline. This stretch of episodes is, well, kind of lifeless - again, in my opinion. It's hard to blame Sorkin for this - he's written more than 75 episodes of this show (and counting) over four years, who'd be surprised to see him running out of inspiration - but as I mentioned last time, I believe we're seeing evidence of why he's going to leave the series at the end of this season. He does, in my view, pick up considerable steam to finish out Season 4 in a real run of high-quality, gripping episodes, but we have to slog through some of these to get there.

Enough of my point of view. As Toby and Will work on the President's second inaugural address, nobody is thrilled about the language on foreign policy (with good reason: "America cannot be the world's policeman. America cannot enforce its own values, its own standards across the world" is hardly a stirring call to patriotism and leadership). But, that language has been cleared by the State Department, and changing it will take plenty of coordination. Will is directed to meet with a public affairs bigwig from State to discuss it, which doesn't seem like a great idea to Will:

Toby: "Will, you're going to meet with my counterpart, the State Department Communications Director. He likes to have input into foreign policy language."

Will: "Isn't he going to be insulted that he's meeting with someone he's never heard of, who isn't a White House staffer?"

Toby: "I would really think so."

That meeting doesn't go well ("Apparently, I'm not done with the Baileys"). 

Meanwhile, Will has asked to pull together basically everything President Bartlet has ever said publicly, in order to find the President's "voice" as he writes his part of the inaugural address. Toby is less than thrilled, as the Communications Office fills up with boxes full of documents, but Sorkin plays a nice trick of taking an obvious cliche by Toby and making it happen right in front of him:

Toby: "Will - the idea isn't going to walk in here, announce itself as being important and take a place on the top of the pile."

Will: "I understand."

Staffer (knocks): "Excuse me, Will?" 

Will: "Yeah?"

Staffer (enters with papers): "This is from the Congressional Research Service. It's an old Bartlet speech on foreign policy."

Will: "Why wasn't it in the original?"

Staffer: "It was stricken from the Congressional Record at the President's request. Should I place it here on top of this pile?" 

Okay, that's funny stuff right there, Aaron.

More importantly for the overall course of the administration, though, is a crisis developing in Equatorial Kundu. Members of the governing tribe in that African nation have begun wholesale killing of a rival tribe, and the horror of that developing genocide grows along with the mounting number of casualties - first a few hundred, then five to seven thousand, the next day 15 thousand, then estimates of 25 thousand or more dead. Families taking refuge in churches are hacked to death by machetes. Radio broadcasts direct roving bands to where they can find their victims. It's a horrific story, made even more horrific by the fact that this all really happened in Rwanda in 1994.

President Bartlet isn't blind to the suffering. We've seen his essential moral goodness and quest for perfection many times in the past, and as calls to do something come in from the press and religious leaders, he feels the pull. On the other hand, he knows the options are limited. Humanitarian resources aren't going to stop the killing, and sending American military power into a sovereign nation is dangerously close to invasion - not to mention the public outcry over American lives being put at risk over something that arguably doesn't affect American interests.

Yet the killings hit him hard, as well as some of his staff, and particularly Will. He's already working on sprucing up the milquetoast foreign policy language in the address, and when he encounters a rousing House floor speech given by Rep. Josiah Bartlet 16 years ago (a speech given in reference to American interference in El Salvador, a speech Jed later had stricken from the Congressional Record), he thinks he may have found inspiration for a much more forceful view of using American power and influence:

Will (reading Bartlet's speech): "'America needs a new doctrine for a new century -'"

Toby: "Mr. Bailey ..."

Will: "'-based not just on our interest, but on our values, across the world.'"

Toby: "Define those values for me, please."

Will: "I don't have to. The President of the United States already has. (reading) 'We are for freedom of speech everywhere. Freedom to worship everywhere. Freedom to learn for every child.'"

Obviously making a move in this direction would be establishing a completely new doctrine, a sweeping reversal from "America cannot enforce its own values," and it's a move that would spur widespread opposition not only here at home, but across the world.

But are the issues at play big enough, moral enough, human enough to justify that change? Government-led genocide of an entire tribe in an African nation? The President, hearing talk of Will's energetic promotion of this more forceful policy, surprises him by stopping by his office. He looks over his old speech, referring to it as "spicy stuff," and wonders out loud about what might be stopping him from going that big:

President: "Why is a Kundunese life worth less to me than an American life?"

Will doesn't let that rhetorical question go by unremarked-on:

Will: "I don't know, sir, but it does."

In the course of considering all the options, Bartlet and Leo decide to get some facts. They want a force depletion report from the Pentagon, an estimate of the losses the American military might take should they be sent into Kundu. The problem, though, is that the Defense Secretary, Miles Hutchinson, has his own strongly held opinions about this kind of operation, and would almost certainly doctor the figures to make any such operation look much more costly than it might actually be. The President decides to go around Hutchinson by using Jack Reese, the naval officer assigned to Nancy McNally at the White House, to work up the report without Hutchinson's knowledge.

He does so, it shows losses would probably be minimal - but then Leo makes the mistake of telling Hutchinson they've seen a report, which leads to an outright argument in the Situation Room, with Leo pretty much calling the Secretary a racist:

Leo: "I said I don't give a damn what your problem is, Miles. The man wants to know if he sends troops, how many are going to die."

Hutchinson: "And if he wants to see force depletion, he asks me."

Leo: "He asks you and three days manage to go by before he sees it, Mr. Secretary. Yet miraculously, the Wall Street Journal, on day two, the numbers inflated all to hell. It's a hundred and fifty, not a thousand."

Hutchinson: "And that's acceptable to you in Kundu?"

Leo: "I don't know what you mean when you say, 'in Kundu.' Nah ... yeah, I do."

Hutchinson: "Go to hell."

Leo, angry with himself over revealing the report, takes it out on a poor glass of water.

Donna (who first met-cute with Reese as she tried to find someone to swap votes with in Election Night, then made the effort to fix his radiator in Process Stories, got Josh to help set them up on a date in Arctic Radar and went away with him on a romantic holiday trip in Holy Night) is excitedly anticipating spending the inaugural festivities with her new beau. She's really looking forward to Jack wearing his dress uniform complete with saber and thirteen buttons on the trousers (causing Josh to remark, "I don't want to know how you know that").

All Donna's excitement over Reese starts to get to Josh. We've known all along Josh and Donna have a special relationship (Janel Moloney said, in an interview, that from the outset she decided to play Donna with the subtext of being hopelessly in love with Josh, but unable to express it outwardly). Josh has his moments - the note he writes in her gift in In Excelsis Deo, the true appreciation of her outfit and appearance in The Portland Trip, the real concern he shows over her story about her car accident and her ex-boyfriend in 17 People - but while his affection and friendship is evident, he also takes Donna for granted, a lot. He also tends to (intentionally or not) undermine her romantic life, as he comes to realize and tries to address in Holy Night.

Back to my opinion here: I think the seven-year arc of the Josh/Donna relationship as it plays out on the series is actually really well done. The chemistry between Moloney and Bradley Whitford is obvious, right from Pilot, and they just are two characters that fit together really, really well. Josh is an ass, most of the time, and Donna may seem a little pathetic in letting him treat her the way he does, but in future seasons that power structure changes, actually a lot, and by the time the arc of these two characters finally resolves it feels right.

But for now ... Josh is still an ass. After Hutchinson learns Reese worked on the force depletion report behind his back, in a fit of pique he immediately reassigns Reese to a base in Italy. Obviously, while a very upset Donna doesn't know why that's happened, she knows it can only be because somebody very important asked him to do something. She goes to Josh to try to find out, and while he also doesn't know the reason, his impulse is to passive-aggressively lash out at her relationship with Jack:

Donna: "He said he was asked to do something for somebody. It can only be Nancy, Leo, or the President."

Josh: "Three doors you definitely want to knock on to complain about your boyfriend being transferred to the Italian Alps."

Donna: "Hey, I'm not Gidget, okay? Something -"

Josh: "Is he complaining?"

Donna: "He doesn't complain."

Josh: "I ask you that because sometimes people request transfers."

Oh, Josh. Insinuating that Reese asked for a transfer to get away from Donna. That is cruel. And it really pisses off Donna, rightly.

There's a couple of other storylines: the President's waffling over which Bible to use for the inauguration, which ends up with him using one from Donnie's Motel, is seen right at the beginning. Upon a bit of reflection, this back-and-forth indecision is a parallel with Bartlet's stalling over doing something in Kundu. Not only is he paralyzed by the various consequences of changing how the United States uses force and how they ought to impose their values worldwide, but he's also paralyzed by what each one of these Bibles he's considering might represent. I completely missed that connection in the first couple of watches (it only sank in later, as I mulled over this blog entry right here), but it's actually really obvious once you connect the dots.

And then there's CJ playing Danny like a fiddle, with her perfume and her blouse and Danny's flusterment over how she'd "have me."

But the big picture here is the role of American power overseas: should it be used only to protect American interests or to actually promote American values, and how does a President go about making such a massive change in the direction of foreign policy and the use of force? We get the outlines of where he's going to go. In the next episode we'll get the wrap-up of how he gets there.

Tales Of Interest!

- Rob Lowe is still seen in the opening credits, although this is the fourth straight episode he hasn't appeared in. 

- Right at the start, we see a title onscreen saying it's Inauguration Day and it's a Sunday. That poses a couple of conflicts with reality. The Constitution (specifically the 20th Amendment) sets the exact time a new presidential term begins as noon on January 20. In 2003 - which is where we are here, we've heard direct references to the presidential election being in 2002, there's no confusion about that - January 20 fell on a Monday, not a Sunday.

Also, in the past, when the official presidential term/inauguration date did fall on a Sunday, the public inauguration events have never been held on that Sunday. In 1957, 1985, and 2013, when January 20 was a Sunday, a private official swearing-in was held that day to satisfy the constitutional requirement. However, the public ceremony and the inaugural address and the parades and the balls were all held on the following Monday.

I really have no idea why Sorkin set this Inauguration Day on a Sunday. There's no obvious story-related reason for it.

- A small continuity error, where they used different takes for parts of the same scene: in the briefing room, when Toby brings up the Chief Justice's opinion written in trochaic tetrameter, he's standing by Will looking at the document while holding a coffee cup. As he brings the papers up to the lectern for the President to see, he's no longer holding it. Until he appears next to Bartlet with, ta-da, the cup in his hand again!

Toby has his coffee.

Now he doesn't.

Now it magically reappears!

- I have an issue with Sorkin portraying the President as ignorant about Equatorial Kundu ("I had to reach for an atlas"). President Bartlet met personally with President Nimbala of Equatorial Kundu in In This White House, who was there to negotiate on the price of AIDS drugs. Bartlet urged Nimbala to stay in the United States when his government fell in a military coup, but he refused, only to be assassinated at the airport upon his return - an event which struck Bartlet deeply. It's hard to believe he would have forgotten about the country in just a couple of years.

- Another little tidbit about the previous line of (fictional) administrations - Assistant Secretary of State Lilly tells Will he's worked under the last three presidents, to which Will responds he's worked for both parties. We already know Bartlet defeated a Republican in 1998, so this does confirm that. Also, we know Leo served as Secretary of Labor under a Democratic president in 1993, so the Republican Bartlet defeated was a one-term President.

- Sorkin's ongoing love of Gilbert and Sullivan gets a shout out with President Bartlet's "Talk about the very model of a modern major general," a quote from HMS Pinafore.

- Bartlet's House floor speech concerning El Salvador is placed at 16 years ago, so around 1987. That fits with the El Salvador civil war, which took place between 1979 and 1992, and had considerable American government involvement.

- Leo's comment about President Bartlet being in office "three years, 51 weeks, and three days" would place the date at Thursday, January 16, 2003 - but as mentioned above, Sorkin is futzing around with the dates here, since January 20 wasn't actually a Sunday in 2003. In fact, according to this script Leo said those words on Wednesday (January 15 in reality), which would place the 1999 inaugural on January 19 as well. Maybe The West Wing universe 20th Amendment puts the inauguration on the 19th? Yeah, no, that's not it ... in Arctic Radar Sam explicitly tells Will the big presidential speech Toby needs help with is going to be given on January 20. Does Sorkin even own a calendar?




Quotes    

(Charlie comes running up to the President, handing him a Bible)

Charlie: "Sir."

President: "Thank you."

(The President opens the Bible, sees the inside front cover)

President: "Donnie's Motel?"

Charlie: "Yes, sir."

President: "They didn't have one in the House library?"

Charlie: "This is the one from the House library." 

-----

Secretary Lilly: "This White House has to be careful about the use of force, it's a hostile Congress."

Will: "Well, personally I'd have no problem using force on Congress, but that's not my call."

-----

Carol: "CJ, Danny wanted to see you for a second."

CJ: "No way."

Carol: "Well ..."

CJ: "Stop trying to get us together, okay? If I wanted Danny, I could have him. And he's still a jackass from the foreign ops vote and many other things, so tell him I'm getting my hair done."

Danny: "Your hair looks great."

CJ (to Carol): "There was no way you could tell me he was right behind me? You couldn't fit that in?"  

-----

Toby: "You really comfortable going through life with a name like Elsie Snuffin?"

Elsie: "I've never been comfortable, but I'm not sure it's because of my name." 

-----

President: "So tell Jeff Tomlinson and Bibby-Bob to take a deep knee bend, would you? I'm just as big a cotton candy ass as they are."

Josh: "Yes, sir."

President (looks up): "You're just going to let that hang in the air?"

Josh: "Of course not, sir. You're a much bigger cotton candy ass than they are."

President: "Damn right." 

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

• Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs Bryce Lilly is played by Granville Van Dusen (lots of TV appearances including Soap and Judging Amy, long runs on the daytime dramas Port Charles and The Young And The Restless, the voice of Race Bannon in the 1986 version of Jonny Quest).

• Secretary of Defense Miles Hutchinson appears for the first time, and as a foil for President Bartlet in the Cabinet we're going to see him plenty more in the future. He's played by Steve Ryan (Crime Story, Wiseguy, Oz).

• I've been remiss in not mentioning Thomas Kopache as Assistant Secretary of State Bob Slattery. He's been seen many times in the Situation Room; here he gets a one-on-one with the President in the Oval Office.

• Also, here's Victor McCay as Peter, another recurring Situation Room advisor. He played a significant role in the Haiti crisis seen in Manchester, Parts I and II, and was mentioned as a State Department advisor dealing with the Qumari weapons being delivered to the Ba'hi terrorists in Debate Camp.

• Word of Jack Reese and his reassignment to Italy - leading to Donna's angry reaction - continues the thread of Reese's assignment to the White House and his romantic relationship with Donna. We first saw Reese (played by Christian Slater) in Election Night. While Reese's actions play a big part in this episode and the next, it all happens off-screen. Sorry, Mr. Slater.

• "Mr. Leader" - in Swiss Diplomacy we saw the Senate Minority Leader, Senator Triplehorn, played by Geoff Pierson. This guy is not that guy ... could Leo mean he's the Republican Majority Leader? He's credited as "O'Donnell" although his name is never said. I suppose Leo's short conversation with him doesn't rule out that he could be Republican and not Democrat (although we will see the Senate Majority Leader in Season 5 and it's not this guy, either).

Senate Minority Leader Triplehorn

"Mr. Leader"

• We hear the voice of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court greeting the President before the inauguration. Later on in the episode we discover the Chief Justice is writing opinions in verse, and may be showing elements of mental decline, a storyline which plays out in Season 5. When we eventually see the actor playing the Chief Justice next season, this is not that actor's voice. In fact, I think the voice actor that was used is meant to remind us of Edward James Olmos, who played Roberto Mendoza, President Bartlet's first nominee to the Supreme Court seen in The Short List and Celestial Navigation. Mendoza isn't the Chief Justice, though, and we did not see him among the full Supreme Court at The Red Mass, either.

• In He Shall, From Time To Time ... I noted a misspelling of "welfare rolls" as "welfare roles" on the teleprompter as President Bartlet practiced his State of the Union address in the briefing room. Here's another teleprompter misspelling, of "obliged" as "abliged."

• The fictional nation of Equatorial Kundu played a key part of the plot of In This White House. In that episode we heard of the United States' intelligence contacts in Sudan and Angola, and that the wife of the nation's president fled to Kenya after a military coup. Those facts would place the nation somewhere in central Africa, around Uganda or the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Now we are told Equatorial Kundu is near the Ivory Coast, which is in Eastern Africa and nowhere near Sudan or Kenya.

• Assistant Secretary Lilly makes it a point to say "especially this President" can't write a blank check for foreign policy, a reminder that President Bartlet never served in the military. That was first a plot point in "Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc" and was also important in Take Out The Trash Day, among other mentions.

• CJ calls Danny a jackass from the foreign ops vote, a storyline seen in Guns Not Butter.

• Will reveals he's on a three-week contract from the DNC, which doesn't really fit in with him getting Toby's offer in Arctic Radar and the obvious fact he was doing the work before Christmas in Holy Night (that's more than three weeks). In Arctic Radar Toby said there was no money involved (except for lodging). Maybe the DNC came up with some funding for Will and Elsie.

• Toby and his bouncing rubber "Spaldeen" returns, first seen in Ellie but made famous in the Season 2 arc including 17 People. It seems to have morphed from being a thinking device for Toby into a summoning device for whoever is working next door.

• Danny and CJ go round and round about the cricket-playing ramp agent from Bermuda who was Danny's source about the Sharif assassination, who was first brought up in Holy Night.

• Charlie talks about Jean-Paul (or, as he mockingly calls him, "Jean-Pierre") and the seating arrangements for the inaugural. Jean-Paul is Zoey's new boyfriend and Charlie's romantic rival, first seen in Holy Night.

• We haven't seen the logo of the fictional news network CND for a while, but here it is with footage of the atrocities in Equatorial Kundu.

• WHAT'S NEXT MOMENT - In the security briefing, President Bartlet moves on from the discussion of the new king of Bhutan with "What's next?" Twice, actually.

DC location shots    

• None.

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

• Josh calls the President's foreign policy shift the most massive in American history since the Marshall Plan, which helped rebuild Europe after World War II.

• The George Washington Bible plays a big part. The St. John's Lodge of the Masons in New York indeed does have physical custody of the Bible.

• Josh brings up the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue as something the President could take the oath on (technically correct, but probably not a good idea).

• Leo says the President's style of decision-making makes the Prince of Denmark seem reactionary, a reference to Shakespeare's Hamlet.

• Thomas Jefferson's quote about entangling alliances from his 1801 inaugural address is very real.

• The mass killings of one ethnic group by another in Equatorial Kundu is a direct reference to what happened in Rwanda in 1994. Members of the Tutsi ethnic minority were slaughtered by militias led by the majority Hutus, with estimates of as many as 500,000 to 600,000 slain. The use of radio stations to direct killings, widespread sexual violence, and the killings of those taking refuge in churches, things mentioned in this episode, all took place during the Rwandan genocide.

• CJ calls Mark and Katie "the Smothers Brothers" after their joking questions about the President taking the oath.

• Jonathan Edwards was a famous pastor and theologian. He is known for an outsized Bible, one that was sewn together along with his own notes on each page, but it's not quite the ginormous four-language folio seen here. Also, the President is quoting Edwards when he says to Leo, "Grace is but glory begun and glory is but grace perfected." (Coincidentally, given the connections between Lin-Manuel Miranda's Broadway hit Hamilton and The West Wing, Edwards was also Aaron Burr's grandfather.)

• Toby calls Will's idea for use of force to correct injustices as "like Mother Teresa with first-strike capabilities."

• The Confederate general Robert E. Lee is mentioned by Hutchinson.

• President Bartlet says the new King of Bhutan is someone old enough to marry Jerry Lee Lewis. Lewis famously married his 13-year-old cousin in 1957.

• Donna says she's not Gidget, the lighthearted surfer girl from the 1960s movies and TV show.

• After Josh tells Charlie Donna is upset because of Jack Reese's transfer, Charlie says, "I've got my own Beach Boys song going."

• Those Starbucks cups keep sneaking in. You can see there's an effort to use generic coffee cups more and more, but the real-world corporate cups still make their occasional appearances. (Toby is seen with those Starbucks cups quite a bit.)

End credits freeze frame: The President having the inaugural balls discussion with Ed and Larry.

Previous episode: The Long Goodbye

Next episode: Inauguration: Over There

The Long Goodbye - TWW S4E13

 

Original airdate: January 15, 2003

Written by: Jon Robin Baitz (1)

Directed by: Alex Graves (11)

Synopsis

• In a Very Special Episode of The West Wing, CJ travels to her hometown of Dayton for a class reunion, where her father is dealing with the ravages of the onset of Alzheimer's disease. Oh, and she gets frisky with an old classmate, played by Matthew Modine.

"Time matters."

This is an odd one.

People tend to find The Long Goodbye a bit divisive. Maybe it's the fact that it's just the second episode from the first four seasons that doesn't have Aaron Sorkin's name on the teleplay. Maybe it's the fact that a cynic might view this episode as nothing more than a vehicle to earn Allison Janney another Emmy (while it worked to get her her fourth Emmy nomination, for the first time in four years she did not win). Or maybe it's just that while it's a well-written and constructed episode of television, with outstanding performances from Janney and Donald Moffatt, dealing with serious topics of aging and responsibility and time slipping away from us all, it just doesn't fit into a West Wing-shaped slot in our minds.

And to me, that's the big one. It may be good television - but this is not a West Wing episode. Far from it. Now, there are some interesting reasons why this came to be (I'll go into that more later) and, in my opinion, this out-of-place episode serves as a bit of a harbinger of more changes to come (more on that, too) ... but it's simply not an episode of the series we've been following for over three and a half years.

More than anything else, it's a meditation on time. Think about how often "time" gets a mention in the script - CJ doesn't have time to get away from the White House to get to her high school reunion in Dayton, Carol doesn't make the airline schedules, Tal never gets to spend time catching up any more with all the "ticking clocks", "time matters," "I need a little more time" - and then, just to make sure we don't miss the theme, the author of this little piece, Jon Robin Baitz, makes CJ's classmate and touchstone for the weekend an actual watchmaker, giving us this little exchange as he listens to the workings of Tal's treasured old pocket watch:

Marco: "You're losing time, Mr. Cregg."

Tal: "That, son, I am."

We found out in The Two Bartlets that CJ's father was beginning to suffer from a failing memory. Now, as she comes back home for a whirlwind visit to speak at her high school reunion, we discover how bad things are. Talmidge Cregg is dealing with the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, where his memory starts to dissolve and his grip on his sense of self is loosening. The worst part, of course, is that the disease is at such an early stage that he knows what's coming, and there's nothing he can do about it except wait for it all to slip away. And that knowledge, that realization, spurs anger and frustration and rage at his inexorable destiny:

CJ: "I mean, tell me! You are holding on to something that -"

Tal: "What am I holding on to? My consciousness? My identity?"

CJ: "- can't be willed away by sheer force of personality, dad."

Tal: "Tell me, brilliant woman that you are, would you hand over those things without a fight? I need a little more time, CJ. If I let it in at its own pace, it'll just get dark faster."

As CJ travels to Dayton, she's still tightly connected with what's happening in the White House - she's on the phone with Toby as she goes through airport security, she's still talking to him waiting for her taxi home - it's as if her presence in the West Wing is totally indispensable and the administration can't survive without her there. Then we get to Tal's house - CJ's childhood home - finding it cluttered, with dirty dishes in the sink and barely lit cigarettes strewn all about. CJ has known (from a remove) the general outlines of what her dad is dealing with, but walking into the house, for the first time, she sees the stark reality of the situation. He miscalculates a basic math problem in his head - as a longtime math teacher, this knocks him for quite a loop. He's afraid to admit to CJ that his wife Molly (his second since CJ's mother died) has walked out in frustration.

CJ, with only a day to spare, does what she can to try to make things better. She goes to Molly's daughter's house to call Molly out for abandoning her father; she goes out to the river for a bit of fishing with her dad; she takes him to see a doctor, an old family friend; she takes over behind the wheel when Tal gets confused while driving on a busy street - and all of this before dressing up to go to her reunion to give a speech.

Of course it's all for naught, at least for the immediate term. Tal, knowing he's in a losing battle, refuses to give up his independence, refuses to give in to the onrushing darkness, and refuses to accept help. Molly bitingly complains about losing out on her time with Tal, time they put off through multiple marriages, and now that they're finally able to come together she discovers he's not going to be the person she knew for all those years. And she's ticked off about it.

Moffatt gives an achingly real portrayal of a husband and father fighting back against the inevitable. His anger, his frustration, his mental failings leaving him unable to recognize his daughter standing right in front of him ... it's truly heartbreaking. And Janney, of course, is outstanding - trying to reach out, trying to find the simple fix to make things better (in a single day), her deep sighs in private and her tears welling up when Tal admits he doesn't know who is in this photograph - a photograph of a young CJ.

(Speaking of which, while I'm just guessing that photo is actually of a young Janney, we definitely can recognize the high school photograph of Janney that we see in the class reunion decorations.)

It's understandable that CJ reaches out for solace with a high school classmate, Marco Arlen. They bump into each other at the airport as they arrive in Dayton, and after a moment of reminiscing, it's understandable that they agree to attend the reunion together to support each other. When they do arrive at the restaurant parking lot, just after the emotionally gutting moment when Tal can't recognize CJ as a child, she can't face it, she can't face giving a speech or putting on a brave face in front of her classmates. In fact now, for the first time, she can't even answer an (urgent) phone call from Toby. "I don't think I can ... face it right now," she tells Marco. Totally understandable.

Which leads us to a motel room; a couple of bodies intertwining, out of focus, in the bedsheets; a bit of post-coital pillow talk where Marco the horologist is able to point out that the motel clock is 20 minutes fast. 

(Again, CJ is making maximum use out of this single day in Dayton - she called out her stepmother, went fishing, took her dad to see a doctor, saved him from a car accident, got dressed up for a speech, went to the restaurant, left for a motel, had sex, and then still gets back to the restaurant after dinner to actually give the speech. That is one busy day.) Anyway, this plot choice is less understandable, to me at least. Having CJ fall into a "quickie" with someone she hasn't seen in 20-plus years, just because her nerves are shot from the situation with her father?

The West Wing has never been an overly romantic TV series, not in the traditional sense. Of course it's a very romantic view of progressive politics and humans striving to use the levers of government to do the right thing, but other than a bit of kissing here and there (and a very sexy tying of Josh's bow tie by Donna) there's never been any actual, you know, loving going on onscreen. But we have it here, with our CJ, falling into bed with a guy she barely knows, right there out-of-focus on our TV screens. I mean, as a play script about a high-powered political character finding herself lost from her moorings because of family drama and searching for momentary comfort in the midst of personal crisis, okay, it's good drama - but again, it's not really CJ and it's not really The West Wing.

Anyway ... CJ and Marco get themselves cleaned up and back to the reunion in time for her speech. And let's admit this, too, it's not a good speech, at all. It doesn't sound like CJ, it doesn't sound like anybody spent any time on it, it's a cliche-filled lazily written thing titled "The Promise Of A Generation." True, CJ didn't pick the topic, but her writing of the speech is just not very good.

(What I do like, though, is that topic. It ties right into the theme of time, of family, of promises we make to each other and promises we try and sometimes fail to keep. It works from two perspectives, at least as it applies to CJ in a very personal way: it's the promise of Tal's generation, the promise of fathers to always be there as the rocks for their children, a promise Tal is now finding unable to keep; and it's the promise of CJ's generation, of sons and daughters, to take care of their parents when they are unable to take care of themselves, a promise CJ is trying her best to uphold but finding very, very difficult. Anyway, I give Baitz credit for that speech topic, cause it really hits the mark.)

As CJ speaks, Tal and Molly and Molly's daughter appear in the back of the room, just as Molly had pictured being able to do before the crumbling of Tal's mental stability. That's a nice moment, perhaps the best plot wrap-up we could hope for ... Tal's never going to get any better, there isn't going to be a happy ending of this story, but at least for now, for this night, he gets to be the proud father watching his daughter speaking in front of a crowd.

Until the White House intrudes, again. But ... why on earth is CJ answering her phone while she's in the middle of giving a speech to her class reunion? That's just nuts (especially considering she refused to answer a call earlier in the evening while sitting in the parking lot). This is a cheap shortcut to get us to the end of the story - some urgent crisis with bomb threats to embassies overseas, which means the White House Press Secretary has to drop what she's doing and dash back to DC because the administration would cease to function without her there. I mean, they have people in place to handle things while she's gone. The fate of the embassies doesn't rest in CJ's hands. But, yeah ... that's what Baitz decided to do to close out the episode.

Is The Long Goodbye good television? Like even the unsteady Season 5, a poor episode of The West Wing is better than a lot of things on TV, so I'd say yes. There are problems with the plotting, shortcuts with the script, some howlers in characterization of people we've gotten to know over the past three-plus years ... but the depiction of Alzheimer's disease, its effects on those suffering from it as well as those who love and care for them, the performances from Janney and Moffatt, all lift this episode up and make it better than it has a right to be.

But it's still not an episode of The West Wing.

 

Tales Of Interest!

- About the Sorkin situation with this episode: By this point in the series, with cast expenses rising and the show's budget starting to strain the network and the studio, Warner Brothers was leaning on Sorkin to find ways to cut costs while still submitting a full slate of 22 or 23 episodes a season. Sorkin, always a perfectionist who worked on scripts until the last minute, rapidly fell behind schedule every year, with the shows at the end of the season often not having a full script until shooting was about to begin. This led to budget overruns on locations and crew costs, since plans couldn't be made until the last minute and then they had to be accomplished then regardless of the cost.

The studio basically gave Sorkin an ultimatum: If you're going to continue to lead this series, you're going to have to start letting other writers in on the action - you can't keep the responsibility of writing every single episode. Sorkin, being Sorkin, couldn't really stomach that, which led (in part) to his leaving the series at the end of this season. During Season 4, though, he had to accept having two episodes written by others - Swiss Diplomacy and The Long Goodbye. Knowing he needed an episode to fill out the order for the season, and not having the time himself to take it on, Sorkin reached out to a fellow playwright he knew from working on Broadway in the 1990s, Jon Robin Baitz. Baitz did a quick catch-up on the overview of the show, and wrote ... well, he wrote a play, a play about Alzheimer's and children dealing with their aging parents and regret and time - overall, this is a play about time, time slipping away from us and time stretching ahead of us.

- This is just my opinion, mind you, but I think this episode is sort of a harbinger for the unsteadiness and loss of focus of the series that we're going to see in Season 5. Obviously, losing Sorkin's voice and commitment and overall control of the characters and the show was going to be apparent, but I think this episode - along with the next several, which were written by Sorkin - already show a loss of steam. I'd say this indicates it was probably time for Sorkin to step away; while he's not really running out of ideas, per se, he might be starting to drift a bit. He got Bartlet reelected, he's been through almost one entire term, how can he keep the drama and the political maneuvering and the forward action of optimism and hope going into another term? I'm not sure if he could. The next few episodes, while not quite lifeless, just don't live up to the crackling Guns Not Butter or the giddy drive of Election Night/Process Stories, let alone the incredible ride of Season 2 and the more intimate crises of Season 3. I will say this, though - Sorkin will wrap up Season 4 and his time with The West Wing with another outstanding crescendo of tight, gripping, engaging television. Once we get to Evidence Of Things Not Seen we are in for one wild ride.

- Rob Lowe continues to appear first in the opening credits, as he has done for every episode of the series. While he doesn't appear in this one (and hasn't appeared since Arctic Radar), that's not all that remarkable for this episode. Only Melissa Fitzgerald (Carol), Bradley Whitford (Josh), and a couple of the reporters actually have a speaking role in this episode, in addition to Janney and Richard Schiff's Toby. There's no Donna, there's no Ed or Larry, no Amy or Abbey, heck, not even Leo (except for seeing him in the background as he, Josh, and Toby wait to go into the Oval Office) ... and also, for the first time ever in the course of the series, no appearance by President Bartlet. Anyway, Lowe will show up in two upcoming episodes this season before leaving the series, although we do see Sam return at the end of Season 7.

- This episode appears to be out of order chronologically. When Tal asks CJ to go fishing with him in the morning, she responds, "Dad, it's February." Yet the next two episodes to air involve President Bartlet's second inauguration, which of course happens on January 20. I don't know if it was tone-wise, or story-arc-wise, or simply an issue of when the episodes were ready, but by the calendar the events of this episode occurred after Inauguration: Part I and Inauguration: Over There.

- Allison Janney was born in Boston but did indeed grow up in Dayton, Ohio. Interestingly, Martin Sheen is also a Dayton native. Janney did not attend the fictional "West Dayton" high school, but graduated from the Miami Valley school district.

- Also, what school has their class reunion in February, anyway? In his appearance on The West Wing Weekly podcast, Baitz says this episode was filmed in December, which explains the fall leaves blowing about at the Cregg house and the Christmas holiday lights we see at the restaurant.

- The West Wing is famous for shots of characters being seen through camera lenses and TV monitors. We get some of that right off the bat here, with CJ at her press briefing being shown on multiple screens as she speaks to the press in front of us.

- Before she leaves the White House, we get a bit of a look at Gail's fishbowl, but what's in there is unclear. It looks like a heart, which fits the father-daughter theme. It could also be a pretzel, signifying Tal's mental state, maybe?

- Pagers continue to be a thing in this White House ... we see CJ having to take a couple of pagers off as she goes through airport security.

- Some speculate a big reason for this Very Special Episode was to give Allison Janney an acting showcase to win yet another Emmy Award. She did earn a nomination for an Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series Emmy for this episode (her fourth nomination for the series, with wins for Supporting Actress in Seasons 1 and 2 and Lead Actress in Season 3). However, Janney did not receive an Emmy this time - Edie Falco took home the award for her work in The Sopranos.

Quotes    

Tal: "Tell me everything. I want to know everything. Let's sit up all night and catch up. I don't seem to do much of that anymore. Ticking clocks, you know, and so much to do."

-----

CJ (on phone): "I want to be clear about the briefing, Toby. What I meant when I said that you need to know who to look at and when to ask certain questions is avoid the calm ones. Get the anxious ones out of the way first, to give the pros room to figure out what it is they really want. And avoid the ones who don't blink. They're power devils."

Toby: "I don't know what that is." 

-----

CJ: "You were a wonderful teacher, Molly. You should be ashamed of yourself."

Molly: "Well, I am." 

-----

Tal: "Who are you? All these damn women hounding me! My mother, my mother calls this morning to remind me to fold the socks when I get back in. And my daughter just abandoned me! Mothers, wives, daughters, and none of them stay! All these damn women!"

-----

Tal: "I'd much rather see you on TV, darling, than sitting opposite me, watching the demolition derby going on in my brain."

-----

Tal (watching Toby on TV): "That man lacks grace and charm."

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

• Matthew Modine (Full Metal Jacket, Birdy, Vision Quest, Stranger Things) appears as Marco Arlens, CJ's punk-rock baseball-playing high school classmate who is now a watchmaker in Paris.

• Donald Moffatt (The Thing, The Right Stuff, Clear And Present Danger) is outstanding as Talmidge Cregg, CJ's father.

• Verna Bloom (National Lampoon's Animal House, High Plains Drifter) appears as Molly, Tal's third wife struggling with his disease and his loss of self.

• Okay - why is the Communications Office even entertaining the idea of Josh briefing the press? In the opening scene we hear CJ tell the reporters that, unlike what had been announced, Josh will not be doing the press briefings while she goes out of town. We can't help but remember Josh's disastrous performance in the briefing room in Celestial Navigation and his revealing of the President's "secret plan to fight inflation" - a performance so bad the President himself banned him from ever doing it again. Yet, here we are ... although Josh makes sort of a reference to that experience in mentioning the reporters' "sadistic, anticipatory glee" at having him at the podium.

• CJ's father has been mentioned twice before: In The Stackhouse Filibuster CJ was writing an email to him, apologizing for being late for his 70th birthday party in Napa that weekend. In The Two Bartlets for the first time CJ refers to her father's struggle with remembering things, while also blaming affirmative action for holding back his career and perhaps contributing to his failing mental health.

If Tal had been turning 70 in The Stackhouse Filibuster, which was set in late March of 2001, that means he'd be 71 in this episode, nearing his 72nd birthday.

• Tal makes a comment about a "nice lady from Catholic Family Services." We first discovered CJ was Catholic in The Crackpots And These Women, when Josh asked her if she was familiar with Ave Maria. 

• We found out in The Black Vera Wang that CJ has two older brothers (and at least one niece). There's not a mention of the brothers or any other siblings at all in this episode, which seems a bit odd considering the stakes of what's happening to their father.

• WHAT'S NEXT MOMENT - Somewhat surprisingly in an episode without an appearance by President Bartlet, we actually do get a "What's next?" moment, this time from Marco.

Marco: "No, I think the best day's gotta be the next day. Life is all ... 'what's next?'"

DC location shots    

• This episode was actually shot in the Chicago area, mostly in the Oak Park and Elmwood Park suburbs. Original plans were to film in Dayton, but it turned out to be cheaper to film in Chicago instead. Here's the Cregg family house, which is somewhere in Oak Park (I wasn't able to find the actual address in my sleuthing):

• The street scene with CJ and Tal driving was filmed mostly along West Taylor Street, just west of the University of Illinois-Chicago and near the Illinois Medical District (south of the Eisenhower expressway and west of the Kennedy). The scene where they drive off after CJ takes the wheel is near the intersection of Taylor and Loomis, looking east on Taylor.

• Horwath's Restaurant was located at 1850 North Harlem in Elmwood Park, Illinois. A mainstay of the area since 1931, it apparently closed in 2004, just over a year after this episode aired. It appears there's now a diving and swim school located at this spot.

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

• Seeing Marco at the airport, CJ is reminded of the Violent Femmes, among other things. 

• Tal says, "You could blast (Edward) Elgar in here with 25 speakers, you wouldn't wake up Molly." Later, while fishing with CJ, he quotes the mathematician Blaise Pascal ("We sail in a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end").

• Tal's cat is named Archimedes, after the ancient Greek mathematician and inventor.

• Tal mentions the drug Reminyl, which is indeed the brand name for a form of cognition-enhancing medication.

• We see the C-SPAN logo on the television as Tal and CJ watch Toby's frenzied press briefing ("That man lacks grace and charm").

• Hamilton continues to be a well-esteemed watchmaking company, although their operations moved out of the United States in the 1950s.

• CJ brings up F. Scott Fitzgerald's pessimistic view of the future to Marco.

• We hear the Ramones song I Wanna Be Sedated playing while CJ and Marco sit in the parking lot outside the reunion. If that's a song from their high school days, it was released in the fall of 1978, so that would place this graduating class around 1979 or 1980.

• The "motel" where CJ and Marco have their dalliance is actually the Wyndham Drake hotel (as we can tell from this shot of the telephone in the room), which was located in Oak Brook. The hotel was sold in 2009 and is now called the Drake Hotel Oak Brook.

End credits freeze frame: Tal and CJ sitting on Tal's bed with Archimedes.

Previous episode: Guns Not Butter

Next episode: Inauguration: Part I

Guns Not Butter - TWW S4E12

 

Original airdate: January 8, 2003

Written by: Eli Attie (6) & Kevin Falls (7) and Aaron Sorkin (75)

Directed by: Bill D'Elia (2)

Synopsis

• Josh pulls out all the stops to try to squeeze a foreign aid bill through the Senate. Charlie's effort to show off in front of Zoey and Jean-Paul backfires. CJ sets up a presidential photo op with a goat.

"I want to be the guy. You want to be the guy the guy counts on."

We're into the second half of Season 4, and therefore the second half of the series as a whole, and that means we'll start to see episode titles that don't ring much of a bell for me. For the folks who think I'm a true Wing-nut, that may sound crazy, but while I do consider myself a big fan of the show, I'm far from a super fan, if you know what I mean. I'm really interested to see what my reaction is when this blog advances to Season 5, and I watch episodes I've literally seen only once before in my life (and that was about four years ago - while I did watch the series when it originally aired almost faithfully, there was a swath of Season 5 where I lost interest).

Anyhow, this is one of those titles that doesn't bring back much of a recollection of what happens, but it turns out it's a really enjoyable episode. I think the writing is tight, the storyline following Josh and the administration fighting to get the last votes they need to pass a bill is gripping and cleverly plotted, and there's a lot of humor (mixing up Will Bailey's name in various ways never gets old). I can't explain why that doesn't stick with the title Guns Not Butter, but it just hasn't with me, anyway.

We've actually had something like this story before, in Five Votes Down, although that was told in a different way with a different outcome. The basic plot outlines are similar, but I think these are vastly different stories. 

We start the show with Josh being told the administration has lost one of the 50 Senate votes he thought  were in the bag to pass a foreign aid bill. The outlines of the bill are expressed eloquently by the President at a couple of speeches during the day, as well as discussion about the bill in the White House - Aaron Sorkin and his writing staff make a very good argument about the importance of American aid to foreign countries, and how it's an overall benefit for the nation as well as the world. 

But Senators are falling back on the results of a new poll - 68 percent of respondents think foreign aid spending is too high, and 59 percent think it should be cut. Josh repeats that stat over and over as he goes back to the drawing board to try to find someone else to flip, knowing if they can get to 50 votes they have Vice President Hoynes ready to break the tie. He settles on Grace Hardin, a newly elected Democratic Senator from Georgia whom Josh thinks would be unable to turn down a direct request from the President. 

Trouble is, they can't get hold of her. She's traveling back to Washington from Atlanta, and when an aide tells Josh she'll agree to vote yes if the President asks her directly, he assigns Donna the task of catching her at the airport and putting a cell phone directly in her hand, which gives Janel Moloney a great storyline in this episode. Hardin is pretty savvy, though ... when Donna arrives at National Airport with the flight information she was given, she finds out the Senator actually came back secretly on an earlier flight. With a bit of envelope-related subterfuge and the batting of her eyes, she tricks a staffer into revealing where the Senator is.

That brings us to a scene in a hotel kitchen, where we discover Donna is on a first-name basis with the squabbling chefs (that's pretty funny, with Giuseppe's encouragement to get her to eat something)

 - but she's been tricked again, as Senator Hardin sent a subordinate to speak in her place at that event. Donna tries to fool the Senator's aide, pretending to receive a phone call saying they've located the votes elsewhere, but by dropping the names of those Senators into the conversation she makes it simple for Hardin to verify that it was a ruse.

Hardin plays both sides perfectly, telling the administration she'll change her vote if she gets the call from the White House, but then skillfully avoiding any way of actually taking the call. Meanwhile Toby gets an offer from a Tennessee Republican - he'll change his vote to yes if the administration will sign off on a study of the effectiveness of remote prayer. (The repeated confusion about the amount of his request - "$115 thousand." "Million. You mean million." - is more funny stuff in the episode.)

Josh is willing to take the offer mixing the federal government with religion, which shows his desperation about getting the bill through the Senate. The other staffers and the President, though, aren't onboard with the notion of federal funding for a study involving religion and prayer, even though it's only $115,000.

Josh: "$115,000 is what Commerce spends on Post-Its."

President: "Toby?"

Toby: "Threats to civil liberties only ever come a few dollars at a time."

I think Josh actually makes a good argument - the study could look at prayer of various faiths and creeds, so it's not funding a dedicated Christian religious point of view, and such studies were, in real life, actually funded by the NIH at about the time of this episode - but the President is firm. He's not going to devote taxpayer dollars to a study on the effectiveness of prayer (which, as a matter of fact, needs to be taken on faith alone anyway).

President: "Well, in my faith, we've known it's worked for two thousand years. I never knew there was data available, but okay."

The President hits the nail on the head with why Josh is so insistent:

President: "You're not willing to toss it overboard to win. You're willing to toss it overboard to avoid disappointing Leo. You know what the difference is between you and me? I want to be the guy. You want to be the guy the guy counts on."

So they agree, the vote is lost, they'll go to another continuing resolution to keep foreign aid funding (although at a lower rate), and they'll try again. Josh and Donna cross paths in the President's outer office:

Donna: "Is it me or is this getting harder?"

Josh: "It's getting harder."

Donna tells Josh the story of Fish Hooks McCarthy, a New York politician in the early 1900s who was credited with the prayer, "O Lord, give me health and strength. We'll steal the rest."

Donna: "You've got health and strength, both of which, coincidentally, I prayed for after hot lead was shot into your body."

Josh: "Yeah ... you're going to need some kryptonite, by the way."

Donna: "Okay, settle down."

Josh: "All right."

Donna: "So you've got health and strength."

(pause) 

Josh: "And we'll steal the rest?"

Donna: "Bet your ass."

And that conversation leads us to Josh talking to Will Bailey, who asks him why he's so obsessed with the poll showing public opinion against foreign aid:

Josh: "So, if we're lucky, foreign aid's going to be funded for another 90 days at 75 cents on the dollar. No one who's ever said they wanted bipartisanship has ever meant it. But the people are speaking, because 68 percent think we give too much in foreign aid, and 59 percent think it should be cut."

Will: "You like that stat?"

Josh: "I do."

Will: "Why?"

Josh: "Because nine percent think it's too high, and shouldn't be cut! Nine percent of respondents could not fully get their arms around the question. There should be another box you can check, for 'I have utterly no idea what you're talking about, please, God, don't ask for my input.'" 

There's really just one other storyline in the episode, but it's also about wanting to be "the guy the guy counts on." Charlie is feeling resentment toward Zoey's new boyfriend, Jean-Paul, and when Jean-Paul mocks Charlie for just sorting the President's mail without having any power to get anything done, Charlie goes a bit rogue. You see, one of those messages being sorted was from a service member handed to Charlie while the President was greeting the public at a rope line, a plea for the government to help members of the military who are paid so little they qualify for food stamps.

Charlie wants to show off a little for Zoey, particular when Jean-Paul calls him out for being "powerless" even when people see him standing next to the President.

As Charlie and Zoey exchange looks, Charlie determinedly says no, he's not powerless, and he's directed the note to the attention of the Pentagon.

Which he only then proceeds to do, calling a buddy at the Pentagon he plays basketball with. Trouble is, he tells the assistant in that office that he's calling from the office of the President, and instead of getting some ideas from a sergeant he knows, he's directed straight to a colonel - and now this is a big thing. At the colonel's request, Charlie sends the note over.

Which results in a thick memo being dropped on Charlie's desk:

"The table of contents is six pages long!"

... a memo that's also cc'ed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of State, the Vice President, Leo - and President Bartlet himself. And now Charlie's effort to show off in front of Jean-Paul, to get a little attention paid to a service member who asked Charlie for help, has ended up in a huge Pentagon report listing all the things that would need to be cut in the military budget in order to pay soldiers more.

President: "There are a couple of thousand military families on food stamps. I can't stand it; the Pentagon knows it. Some families are eligible, some aren't. To change it, they'd have to raise everyone's pay, which they can't do, and this memo's a reminder. It's a get-off-our-backs memo. And you thought you were done with turf wars."

Charlie: "Did it cause any damage?"

President: "You decommissioned two aircraft carriers."

Charlie (incredulous): "Really?"

President: "No."

But Bartlet does ask Charlie to drop the note in his bag, so he can take a look himself.

Charlie's renewed interest in Zoey in the face of Jean-Paul's involvement brings us some funny stuff, too. The President is no fan of Jean-Paul himself, but as a father he's not that big of a fan of Charlie's romantic interest in Zoey, either. He baits him with this:

President (to Charlie): "Boy, Zoey's growing up nicely, isn't she?"

Charlie (smiling): "Yesss, she is."

President: "I'm on your side in this thing, but just barely. Just by a little bit, because he's French and royal. These are very special, very limited circumstances under which we're allies, you and I." 

This leads to the President's later discussion with Josh, with Josh ending up in hot water, too:

President: "Hey, Zoey's growing up very nicely, isn't she?"

Josh (too happily): "Man, I'll say."

Those two looks by Martin Sheen are just priceless.

The storyline with the photo op for Heifer International - supposedly with a cow, but then it turns out to be with a goat - is humorous in itself, but Sorkin uses President Bartlet to speak eloquently about how efforts like Heifer International to improve the lives of the impoverished around the globe ought to prove the worth of American aid to foreign countries. Before we get there, though, we get Leo's face when the goat arrives outside the White House:

And his hitting the nail on the head about how this goat photo op ever got approved:

CJ: "Well, first of all, that's not a cow. It's not! It's a goat. Yeah, I may have agreed to something about a goat."

Leo: "Did the First Lady get you drunk and take you shopping?"

CJ: "Leo ... yes."

And, of course, Will's reaction to finding a goat standing in his office:

The struggle of a second term in the face of congressional opposition really kicks off here, but the true theme is: Why do we do what we do? Is it for self-aggrandizement? Is it to please those whose opinions we respect and whose trust we crave? Or is it for the greater good, for the betterment of those around us, whether in this country or around the world? It's obviously that last one, but we're all human here with our own human frailties and needs and wants, and sometimes that gets in the way.

That's part of why I love The West Wing; maybe it is simplistic and hokey and overly trusting, but at its heart it makes us want to be better.

 

Tales Of Interest!

- This is the second straight episode with no Rob Lowe, not even a Seaborn For Congress poster. He's still in the opening credits, but he's only got a couple of appearances upcoming before he departs the show (SPOILER ALERT: Sam does return at the very end of the series).

- It's both refreshing and a little sad to see the give-and-take of politics from the early 2000s; legislators are willing to horse-trade for votes, helping someone (even from the other party!) to get their bill passed in exchange for a vote supporting one of their own pet projects. With the removal of earmarks from the lawmaking process, that has nearly disappeared in today's government. It's also oddly quaint to see Josh considering going to Republicans to try to sway their votes - today's entrenched partisanship almost always sees Republicans voting in a bloc against any kind of Democratic proposal (it happens the other way, too, but  today's Democrats don't seem nearly as monolithic as the anti-everything GOP).

- Jean-Paul is one of the least-liked characters in West Wing lore, and the performance of Trent Ford is just one of the many reasons why, but this barely stifled yawn as he and Zoey walk along with the President is actually a great little insight into his character.

- A little Easter egg here; at the airport baggage claim, we see a driver holding a sign reading "B. D'Elia." Bill D'Elia was the director of this episode.

- CJ actually talks to Gail ("What's up, there, Gail?" after Danny leaves); in the fishbowl we see some cows, a reference to the Heifer International photo op.

Quotes    

President: "And is there a cow on my schedule today?"

CJ: "It's called Heifer International. Don't worry about it."

President: "I'm meeting with a cow. I shouldn't worry about it."

CJ: "It's a photo op with a cow, sir. It's not a sit-down."

President: "I like your sass."

CJ: "You've got a very nice sass yourself ... sir."

President: "What, are you touring?" 

-----

President: "Please, my daughter's dating a kid who's better looking than my wife."

-----

President (yelling): "Zoey!"

Zoey: "I don't respond when you shout."

President: "Yeah, I think you'd respond if I stopped feeding you."

Zoey (to Jean-Paul): "Ignore him."

Jean-Paul: "Oh, yes, I do." 

-----

Leo: "If the President's wearing a hat, or that thing's wearing a Bartlet button, I'm hiding snakes in your car."

CJ: "Come on, don't say that! Not even to joke!"

Leo: "You're never gonna know where they are -"

CJ: "Leo!"

Leo: "Or if you got them all out. ... gonna lay their eggs right in the glove compartment."

-----

CJ: "I didn't put the goat in your office, someone else must have."

Will: "You didn't."

CJ: "I put it in the office that's being used by a new guy Toby and Josh are trying to give a hard time to - (spinning around to Will) oh, wait!"

Will: "You understand I'm working on the inaugural address, right?"

CJ: "How's that going?"

Will: "There's bicycles and goats in my office!"

-----

CJ: "So, I think this will work. I think it says, 'Well, you're impoverished and while we don't care, we don't want you to go away empty-handed, so we offer you this goat, Ron, to give you milk.'"

Will: "Do male goats give milk?"

CJ (considers): "No, no, of course they don't. So, we offer you this thing that'll just gnaw on your stuff." 

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

• Danica McKellar's Elsie Snuffin, Will's half-sister and joke-writing assistant, pops up for the first time since Swiss Diplomacy.

• Will and Josh make an inside joke about Aaron Sorkin's reputation for "walk and talks" with Will telling Josh, "You get a pretty good aerobic workout talking to someone in this building," to which Josh replies, "I've heard the jokes."

• Charlie's past romantic relationship with Zoey (which we saw at the end of Season 1 and the beginning of Season 2) and his newfound rivalry with Jean-Paul is a key plot point.

• The President also refers to Charlie's past growing up around street gangs with his comment, "And you thought you were done with turf wars." Charlie spoke personally about gangs in his neighborhood in Isaac And Ishmael.

• Danny continues to dig into the story of the Shareef assassination from Posse Comitatus. We also discover the pilot's name was listed as Jameel Bari - if you recall from that episode, Admiral Fitzwallis said the plan would rely on putting one of "our people" on the plane as Shareef's pilot, and Danny is trying to follow that trail.

• Bartlet makes a remark about his memory having "only so much RAM" - Bruno Gianelli made the exact same remark ("I have only so much RAM in my head") about Title IX in College Kids.

• In the conversation with Senator Hoebuck Toby brings up CJ's experience as the focus of a remote prayer brigade "a few months ago"; while the story was told in Debate Camp, aired about four months before this episode, that story was actually a flashback to the early days of the administration in 1999 - four years ago.

• The Senator responds with a rude reference to Simon Donovan's death in Posse Comitatus.

• References to Will's office being filled with bicycles and Seaborn For Congress posters come from Holy Night.

• Donna tells Josh she prayed for his health and strength after he was shot (In The Shadow Of Two Gunmen). She later tells Senator Hardin's aide that, among other things, she went to North Dakota at Josh's request (We Killed Yamamoto).

DC location shots    

• None. The building we see the President and his entourage coming out of at the beginning of the episode is, I believe, the Los Angeles Convention Center (the sign for Compass Cafe led me to that, and the architecture checks out).

(Here's what the Convention Center really looks like on the outside.)

 

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

• Presidents Benjamin Harrison and Warren Harding get mentioned right out of the gate.

• Heifer International is a very real and very worthy organization that helps impoverished farm families around the world become more self-sufficient. They don't just provide animals for milk, though, they also contribute other agricultural supplies, including animals to start herds to supply meat (which would be Ron's role, to help start a herd of goats).

• A shot of the phone on Charlie's desk shows it's from Nortel Networks. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2009 and went out of business in 2013.

• Will tells Josh that Senator Cantina voted against Kosovo peacekeeping - in reality, the US military joined a joint UN peacekeeping force in Kosovo in 1999, under the Clinton administration; in The West Wing universe President Bartlet took office in January of 1999 and therefore this operation would have occurred under his watch (although it's never really been mentioned in the show; in Season 1 background TVs often depicted real-world cable news coverage of the crisis in the Balkans, however).

• Duke University Medical Center indeed exists (remember, Sam was a graduate of Duke Law). There have been several studies on the medical effects of "remote prayer" over the years, including a study tracking 150 AIDS patients between 2000 and 2003 that was, indeed, partially funded by the NIH.

• There are several mentions about Senator Hardin or her staff being at Dirksen; that's the Dirksen Senate Office Building, named after former Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen.

• Charlie is seen drinking from a can of Hansen's soda.

• British Prime Minister Winston Churchill gets quoted several times, as well as a mention of posing in a photograph with Will and Elsie's grandfather.

• President Bartlet calls Toby, Leo, Josh, and CJ The Temptations.

• Donna quotes "Fish Hooks" McCarthy's prayer to "Give us health and strength. we'll steal the rest." McCarthy was a real New York City political figure around the turn of the 20th century, though the prayer may be apocryphal.

• In the scene with CJ and Danny watching the vote and eating Chinese food, they're both drinking beer. I couldn't quite see Danny's bottle, but CJ is clearly drinking a Corona.

• Will brings up "101 Dalmatians" as he complains about bicycles and goats in his office; a clear reference to the Disney film.

• Will refers to himself as Eton valedictorian.

End credits freeze frame: Everyone gathered for the photo op with the goat.

Previous episode: Holy Night

Next episode: The Long Goodbye