The Great West Wing Rewatch: 4.13 "The Long Goodbye"

Joel: This episode sticks out from the rest of the show. For the first time we get an episode without any scenes with The President at all. In fact only three of the main cast members appear in this episode. The bulk of the episode takes place far away from Washington, and except for the few phone calls between CJ and Toby, there’s no real discussion about world events, politics or any of the things you would expect in a show about The West Wing. It’s also an episode that wasn’t written by Sorkin, but instead by a guest writer.

I’ll admit, that usually when I’m going through The West Wing again, this will be one of the episodes I skip. It’s not that relevant to the parts of the show that I love, and it’s not exactly an easy episode to sit through. But it’s still an important episode. While not as high numbers as the third season, the West Wing was still reaching easily over ten million views per episode, and it took advantage of being able to reach an audience of that size. The episode doesn’t exactly end happily either. Yes, Molly comes back, and CJ’s father isn’t alone anymore, but CJ is still needed in Washington. There’s a moment where she tells her father that she will come back next week, but he says she can’t, and they both know that he’s right. She has a big job, an important, all consuming job that she has to do. It’s a once in a lifetime kind of job, and he knows that she has to be in that job 100%. And she knows it too. But that doesn’t make the moments that end this episode any less heartbreaking.

Chris: This is one of those episode in which if this was a typical watch-through of the show, I would just skip over after I realized what episode it was. Not saying that it's a bad episode, it's far from it but it's not exactly an easy one to sit through. It's never easy to watch someone you love deteriorate and begin to lose pieces of their identity. We had heard previously about her father's illness but this is our first real glimpse at it and this might be the first major moment where CJ realized the weight of the situation. And I can understand both why Molly wouldn't want to stay around anymore and why CJ would be furious at her but I feel like it's more of situation where CJ was angry that this illness was taking her father and she couldn't be mad at him and she needed someone to express her anger at.

A good president takes a week off.