The Great West Wing Rewatch: 2.15 "Ellie"

Joel: So exactly one episode after we have a very serious discussion about how the war on drugs isn’t working, and all the damage it’s doing and how something needs to be done about this, we have an episode that pretty much says marijuana probably isn’t all that bad, but thanks to politics there’s nothing we can do but stay the course, and anybody who goes against that is getting let go. I know that wasn’t exactly the main point of the previous episode, but it’s still kind of jarring to see these two different stances being made by the same show back to back like this.

Most of the focus here is on Bartlet’s relationship with his previously unseen daughter Ellie. We don’t get a whole lot of time with Ellie and this is the big episode where we really get to establish her relationship with her father. Storywise the big thing you can do with character like Ellie and Zoey are to tell stories about how your father being president can change your life. For Zoey, that’s mostly been about added security, or additional precautions that must be taken that inconvenience her. For Ellie on the other hand, the show takes the chance to show how Ellie’s relationship with her father can be strained when her father is trying to pretty much literally run the world. I’m glad that even though Ellie appears for a fraction of the episodes that Zoey appears in, time was still taken to create a character who was affected differently by the same circumstances.

Chris: I do enjoy how the show uses this episode to acknowledge how Zoey is the screw of the Bartlet’s and she’s not even in the episode because apparently Zoey is the only one that’s dumb enough to talk to the press. But the joke is on all of you because she’s NOT the only one dumb enough thanks to Ellie. And Joel is absolutely right about the pacing from the previous episode to show that our drug policies that were in place at that time (and still to this day) is not working and is only wasting the federal funds and unnecessarily filling up our prisons. And it was just a few episodes ago when the phrase “friends are honest with each other” was used in excess and yet that’s essentially what the Surgeon General did here as she was giving the correct response even if it is contradictory to the stance of the White House.

A good president does not accept the resignation of the Surgeon General.