The Great West Wing Rewatch: 4.20 "Evidence of Things Not Seen"

Joel: There was a whole episode worth of story all set up here. The President is going to have to negotiate to try and get the remains of a downed spy plane back. Josh is going to have an interview with someone for a position at the White House. Plus the staff is going to have a poker game going on throughout the night to blow off some steam. That’s your A, B and C story right there with the egg trick being the recurring lighthearted conversation that’s going to recur throughout the show. Pretty much everything you need for your standard West Wing episode. Then, pretty much out of nowhere there is gunfire. The shots take place about a third of the way through the episode. Not at the beginning to let us know that this is going to be a shooting episode, no we’ve got the episode all ready to go, and the gunfire interrupts that. It’s actually a really clever little piece of storytelling, because when the shots go off in the show, it’s so unexpected that your first reaction ends up being more of confusion than surprise, just like the reaction of the characters on the show. I was watching this episode on Netflix and actually thought the gunfire may have been coming from a different tab on my computer because of how out of context they were. This is the second time we’ve have someone shooting at the President on the show, and the moments leading up to the first one were full of dramatic build up with shots and music designed to make sure you knew what was coming. I like that this time around it was portrayed differently. It caught me very much off guard here, but really served the feeling of the episode well.

Chris: About as busy of an episode for West Wing on what is supposed to be an off-day. The episode circles both a literal and figurative game of poker in the sense of the Russian president calling Bartlet's bluff on the true purpose behind the drone that found it's way into Russian territory. All of that coupled with a suicidal shooter whose bullets found their way into the press room where CJ, Toby and Will were. And if that wasn't enough, Josh is trying to hire a male Ainsley Hayes played by Matthew Perry. The chemistry between Brad Whitford and Perry is about as smooth as it gets and it's like I'm seeing the cast of Sorkin's Studio 60 form right in front of us.

A good president lies to the Russian president about erosion.