The Great West Wing Rewatch: 3.20 "We Killed Yamamoto"

Joel: You know who I love in this episode? Sam. Previously on The West Wing, Sam made a major mistake handling a possible attack ad on the Bartlet campaign. Sam trusted someone that he shouldn’t have and as a result, the campaign ad was leaked, and it became a news story, playing over and over again on news media, meaning that it was out there without the competition having to pay a cent for air time. In the campaign so far, this was one of the worst missteps anyone had taken and the blame is squarely on Sam. So in this episode we get angry Sam, a Sam that’s trying to make up for the mistake and get back in the game.

We get a scene near the beginning of this episode where a couple of staffers come to Sam with an idea that they want to take to Leo and Bruno. Sam shoots it down almost immediately as a bad idea, and the scene comes across as Sam making a knee jerk conservative decision after having been burned so recently. Toby even confronts him about the idea later in the episode. I love that at the end of the day, Sam is supporting the idea that he shot down earlier in the episode. Far too often we get stories where somebody makes a mistake and tries to get back into the game with one gigantic play, only to make another mistake in their attempts to outshine the first one. What we have here is Sam being upset. There’s no question about that. He’s mad and embarrassed about what happened in the previous episodes and he should be, but he’s still a smart guy. He picks himself up and doesn’t let past mistakes have an effect on his current job performance. He’s still Sam Seaborn.

Chris: This is why there was absolutely zero talk of firing Sam after the negative ad screw-up from before, because even though it was a mistake, he's still the guy you want on your side when he's fired up. Nobody understands Sam like Toby and Leo and there was no worry among them about whether Sam would recover or not. Also, this episode brought me back to a few episodes ago when the staff was discussing the possibility of replacing the Vice President and Fitzwallace's name was thrown into the discussion and ever since then, I realized how much I would've liked to have seen that. Sure, Fitz reaches a pretty extreme solution to put up on the table but, as we know from earlier seasons, he doesn't even entertain the thought of something this extreme until all other options have been explore and weighed which adds an element of seriousness when he finally does suggest that killing Shareef, especially if he continues to secretly be plotting terrorist attacks against the U.S. All the talk about the Shakespeare event in N.Y. has me both excited and terrified for the finale as I remember more and more about that episode.

A good president waits an entire year before even considering to find a replacement secretary.