The Great West Wing Rewatch: 5.3 "Jefferson Lives"

Joel: So Zoey gets kidnapped right after graduation (something I’m assuming happened in May) and now, just seventy-two hours later, it’s somehow the Fourth of July. I get that at some point in this show we should have a Fourth of July episode, and I get that can be tricky because the show is always on hiatus in July, but I feel like the time inconsistency here is difficult to ignore because of the kidnapping storyline. This strange time jump also means that the country has been without a Vice-President for almost two months. But now I don’t know if it’s actually been two months in the show or just a week or so. So what kind of tone is the VP storyline supposed to have. One where they’ve only been at it for a week or so and are worried that they’re not vetting enough candidates, or one where the country has been without a VP for two months now, and they’re desperate to get somebody back in the job. It seems that the only reason to have this episode be set on the Fourth of July was to get the “Jefferson lives” story in there. (And they didn’t even get that right, as the real quote is “Jefferson survives.”) But it’s well established that Bartlet is a history nut, and he would probably be just as likely to tell that story on a date in the middle of May instead of July 4th.

Chris: This episode is a bit of a head-scratcher because we get an annoying amount of quick flashbacks depicting a young Zoey riding around on a horse and we're suppose to believe she's displaying a false sense of bravery for her dad and somehow the equals the experience of being kidnapped and held prisoner for several days. I get they're trying to thread the story to tell she has a history of putting on a brave face for her dad but he walks in on her in a wide-eyed trance instead of sleeping at the beginning of the episode and we're suppose to believe someone with the observational skills of the president are so shoddy that he wouldn't think was wrong until later? Even if he was that dense mentally, one would just assume that a couple days removed from the kidnapping, she would probably not be alright while the wounds were still fresh.

A good president has the observational skills of an especially dumb rock.