The Great West Wing Rewatch: 1.3 A Proportional Response
Joel: There is a recurring feeling you get when watching this show. Every couple of episodes a thought will pass through your mind as you watch the events of the show unfold. A thought that is always the same. That thought is “Boy, am I glad that I’m not the president.” This episode picks up pretty much where the previous one left off with Bartlett and company having to deal with the fallout of the deaths of 58 US military healthcare workers that we learned about at the end of the previous episode. We have seen the respect that the office of the president holds but this is the first time we see the potential power of it as well. We an entire table full of we educated men with years of military experience come up what an appropriate response and we see that all can be changed just because the president says “No, do it this way.” This isn’t even close to the hardest decision that Bartlett will have to deal with in the show. The show makes it very clear that in this case the...