The Great West Wing Rewatch: 3.00 "Isaac and Ishmael"

Joel: This is a bit of a strange episode to try and talk about. This episode first aired on October 3rd, 2001, less than a month after the September 11th attacks. This episode was written in about three weeks and doesn’t actually exist in the West Wing continuity. They came right out and said that in a video that played before the episode first aired which you can view here. They called the episode a play which may be the best way to describe it. It’s really strange to watch this episode almost fifteen years after it aired. A lot has happened in that time and to know that this episode aired when the events of September 11th were so fresh in everyone’s mind it makes it all the more interesting. This episode doesn’t really add anything to The West Wing story as a whole, in fact it feels out of place compared to the other episodes, and not just because it ended up airing in the middle of the biggest cliffhanger of the show so far. But it’s still something that I think you should watch when going through the show. It’s in many one of the best episodes for providing context for the state of the world when these episodes were being written and filmed.

Chris: It’s astonishing how something made that recently after 9/11 was done so in such a level-headed manner. In the weeks and months (and years) since the attacks, we remained in a society that was so comfortable with incorrect generalizations of entire religion and race in the name of being afraid, angry and vengeful which is, in a way, exactly what Islamic extremist sought out to do. Their goal (ISIS repeated as such following the Paris attack) is to separate Islam from the rest of the world because they believe that a society of pluralism and coexistence is a direct offense to their interpretation of Islam. It’s an amped up version of the Westboro Baptist Church in the belief that anyone that shows any form of tolerance deserves to be damned to hell for eternity. This episode does a great job of explaining all of this without being condescending because the questions being asked by the students were the questions all of us had except most of the answers we were getting in response were from the equally fearful and ignorant. This episode was, more or less, doing a civic service for those in this country that were keeping a suspicious eye on their Muslim neighbors while the Muslim neighbors were simply scared US citizens too. This special episode of West Wing was an attempt to bring us back to coexistence, which would be the true defeat of terrorism.