The Great West Wing Rewatch: 4.19 "Angel Maintenance"

Joel: The concept of having a whole episode where The President is trapped on Air Force One the entire time seems like a good gimmick to go with in theory. But somewhere in the execution, the whole idea just falls apart for me. We’ve already had episodes that almost entirely took place on Air Force One, so the marvel of how much work can get done while flying isn’t as big of a deal as it had been in previous episodes. So what ends up happening in practice is we get a very segmented episode where half of the cast is on the ground and half is stuck in the air. I know that it’s very common for an episode of the show to have different characters in different storylines, but usually they get a moment or two to cross paths and compare. Now, whenever they’re talking to each other it can’t be to compare whatever they’re working on, but instead focus on whether or not the plane’s going to be ok. The gimmick of the episode hurts more than helps and the story has to struggle to work around the gimmick instead of it helping to propel the story in a new and interesting direction. It’s not that it’s a terrible episode, but I don’t feel like this one really accomplished what it set out to do at the end of the day.

Chris: Thanks to this episode, I now have something specific to show people whenever they ask me why I have a fear of flying. I would be absolutely terrified because all of this is going on but everyone has that safety net of assurance that they're on a jet with the president who has the entire American government as a resource to land a plane safely. That's a luxury the common flight does not have and the common flight is the one I'm more likely to be on should an event like this take place. Sure, I'm not dumb enough to ignore the fact that this is a work of fiction but it's a work of fiction that directly plays into my personal phobia and doesn't encourage me much to get onto an airplane at all ever. So you all enjoy your metal death tube that spits in the eye of God every second that it's in the air, I'll just stay right here with both feet firmly planted on the ground to likely die of a natural disaster, the way Jesus would have wanted.

A good president fails at commanding that his plane should land at that very moment.