The Great West Wing Rewatch: 3.2 "Manchester Pt. 2"

Joel: Because of the way that this episode and the last one are structured (and because they are basically parts one and two of the same episode) we are introduced to a few new characters halfway through this episode long after we’ve seen them in action already. I’m talking about Bruno along with the two people he brought with him, Connie and Doug. These three have been brought on board to help run the campaign because this time around, in addition to running for President, our main guys also have a country to run. It’s interesting that we still get to see the introductory meetings between Bruno and Leo and the President. We already know that Bruno will be working with the campaign. We’ve seen it in the segments that take place four weeks later. We already know that there will be issues with the strategies that he and his people are presenting. But it’s important we get to see Bruno’s introduction. He’s about the be working with a lot of very smart people in a very fast paced environment and we need to see that he’s up for the challenge.

This is where his bit with Josh comes into play. In a single scene we get to see how he breaks down for Josh the poor choice he made on the tobacco issue. Josh presented the idea to a lot of people before executing it, and everyone universally told him it was a bad idea, but it was Bruno, and only Bruno, who was able to make him see exactly why. It shows that Bruno has the ability to look at the big picture of everything and that he knows what he’s doing. This is important, because we’re going to get a lot of arguments between Bruno’s people and the staff over the next several episodes, and we’re used to seeing our guys be the ones that are right. But it’s clear that these three new characters might also be right, even if their ideas and plans don’t exactly line up with everyone else’s.

Chris: There’s a game on Steam that I like to play call Game Dev Tycoon, I’m not going to go into full detail about the premise of the game but there’s a point where you need to hire additional employees but there’s a period after their hiring where everybody in the company has to get use to this new person and it takes a few minutes for them to find that new dynamic in the office that works for everyone. That’s essentially what the Manchester series is, you’ve got the regular staff that’s just feeling off their game for whatever reason because there’s an entirely different army of staff that’s been brought in by Bruno and nobody seems to know exactly how to handle all of this. It’s like when the president was just kinda off his game until Leo encouraged everyone to let Bartlet be Bartlet. Luckily, Bartlet was the one to finally get everyone focused at the end by finally talking to them about the MS situation and apologizing for not telling them sooner and putting them through all of this. So essentially the solution to this series was “let the staff be the staff.”

A good president eventually gets their significant other to vote for them.