Irrelevant But Awesome

Chris: What a year its been, am I right? It's been amazing to relive the Bartlet administration and witness the excitement of the Santos campaign once again. The last episode I talked about how resolution is more important than surprise to the ending of a show like West Wing but they still managed to hold onto one surprise and that being the pardon for Toby. However, it doesn't feel like a total surprise especially when Bartlet never seemed to be one to hold a grudge especially when Toby did what he did in the service and well-being of others. Add all of that and the personal relationship President Bartlet has with all of his top staff members and you get this notion where we all knew he was going to sign the pardon. Bartlet has a lot of great one-on-one moments with different members of the show but none felt more gratifying to watch than the one he has in the car with the First Lady as they leave when she says "you made it, you're still here." Typically the...

Joel:  I mentioned in yesterday’s recap that there was really no way around having Leo’s death come when it did. It couldn’t happen too early because it would impact the election storyline. But it had to happen before Santos was declared victorious because we couldn’t have the image of the new President elect and VP elect raising their arms victoriously. That left the very small window of on the actual election day for Leo to die. And while that was the right choice for them to make I feel, it does come with the negative side effect of only getting a moment or two to mourn the loss of this character before we’re right back into the fast paced, nonstop world of the election. But now, one epsiode removed from the election we really get some time to sit back and reflect on the loss of Leo. Yes, there is a little bit of political talk here and there as Santos starts to figure out what his first few days in office are going to look like, but for the most part, this episode is abo...

Joel:  This is what it’s all been leading up to. For the past season and a half, we’ve been largely focused on the election, so when the election day is finally upon us, it’s a pretty big deal. On one hand, of course the election plot is going to be two episodes long, it’s the biggest storyline since Bartlet got elected for a second term. On the other hand, election day for the most part seems like it’s going to be people sitting and watching the news all day, and you have to wonder how that gets stretched into two hours worth of content. Well they successfully make that stretch. Honestly I feel like there was a storyline that never fully developed here. For much of the first episode we have Josh and Bruno each talking about how the numbers aren’t adding up right while everyone else takes the numbers at face value. Josh and Bruno are supposed to be the smartest guys in their respective rooms, so it felt like this was all leading up to a big reveal, of something that had bee...

Joel:  I can only imagine what it would have been like to try and put this episode together. Just the choreography of the episode is impressive. Figuring out who goes where, who says what when, and making it all flow smoothly while see seming hectic and disjointed is a feat all on its own. At some point watching this, you have to stop trying to follow every single storyline that’s going in every possible direction, and just sit back and let the chaos of the episode wash over you. There are scenes on the bus in this episode where five or six different topics are being discussed at the same time. People are talking over each other, holding a conversation with someone while simultaneously talking to someone else on the phone. Most of what is discussed are topics that could easily fill a full storyline on a different episode, but here they only get a handful of lines before we’re on to the next topic of discussion. On top of that, Bon Jovi keeps randomly popping up when you least ...

Chris: Being on the campaign trail for this long, it's understandable that it takes it's toll on the candidates but it never would've crossed my mind the toll it would take on your hand from all the handshaking. And to follow up on what I said about the Santos campaign being unable to capitalize on their momentum, we get it again when Santos goes full force in California at the last minute only for Vinick to come up with a strategy that steals from Santos' California media day. Again, this is of no fault of anyone in the Santos campaign and it's not even from bad luck, it's due to Vinick making a good chess move to stop the momentum leak had been experiencing and find a way to move beyond the nuclear leak. Also, with the briefcase, the scandal that Bruno stumbles upon sets up the entire episode to make the audience see Santos is a different, negative light only for it to backfire and cause the audience to see Vinick in a negative light for making the assump...

Joel:  For the second time in the campaign storyline, Santos gets and incredibly lucky break when things seem to be at their worst. The first time was in the primaries when Hoynes got in trouble again for an extramarital relationship, and then this time a nuclear disaster happens to take place just a few weeks after Vinick talked about how important nuclear power was to the country. On top of that, the plant was in Vinick’s home state and it was a plant that Vinick pushed to get twenty-five years ago. This couldn’t have worked out any better for the Santos campaign if they had planned it. And that’s a bit disappointing to me. I know that lucky political breaks happen like this in real life, but remember, we’re supposed to be searching for Bartlet’s successor here, someone who has the skill and talent to carry forward with all the work we’ve seen people do over the past seven years, not somebody who gets lucky every now and then. And we know that Santos is smart. We know tha...

Joel:  This was the first episode of the show to air after the unexpected death of John Spencer, and the episode itself opens up with a segment where Martin Sheen deticates the upcoming set of episodes to the late actor. It’s fitting in some ways that this is the very next episode to air after Spencer’s death. In many ways, the character never quite recovered after the heart attack storyline. For years Leo has been the man in charge in every situation, and then we had that story. By the time Leo recovered and returned to the White House, it was like everyone had already moved on. Leo never really fell back into the swing of things. Then when he was added to the ticket, most of the Leo conversations revolved around whether or not he was up for the challenge, his addiction and health problems being frequently cited. But in this episode, we finally get to be reminded that Leo is really good at what he does. It’s the first time we get to see him back in full form, and he performs...

Joel:  While a large part of this episode is about Ellie’s wedding (The episode is even titled “The Wedding”), what really struck me is Josh’s story here about the campaign running out of money. I know that we had storylines where they were running thin on funds before, but that was when the Santos for President campaign was on its own. Now they have the backing of the entire Democratic Party, and it feels like their funds would be limitless. Of course I know that in real life that’s not the case. Tons of money is spent by people who run for president. A mind boggling amount almost. It took until 2013 Hillary Clinton finally pay off the debt for the first time she ran for president in 2008.  And the federal government doesn’t consider a campaign officially over until the campaign's debt has been repaid. Which means that as of this past summer, Newt Gingrich is technically still running for President in 2012. Even at the highest levels of campaigning difficult choices ha...

Joel:  This episode, along with the previous one, mark the first time in the series that Santos really starts to feel presidential. Before now he seemed smart and ambitious. He had strong views that he was willing to back up, and he clearly knew how to play the game of politics. But there is a certain je ne sais quoi about the person who is trying to declare themselves the best possible choice to be leader of the free world. Bartlet had it right from the beginning, when he walked in the room at the end of the first episode. While his was different, Walken still had the air of a president for those few episodes, in the way he held himself and the way he took command of a room. With Santos we’ve gotten to see that develop over time, from the beginning of the campaign till now. And there are several small examples throughout the debate in the previous episode that Santos has that presidential feel about him. But you get a strong example to point to at the end here, when Santos h...

Joel:  So often present day politics is broken down to republicans vs. democrats, us vs. them. Even throughout the show, the playing field is pretty much set up as the democrats that we follow having to go up against a Republican Party that seems set on beating down the democrats. If an action helps one side it automatically hurts the other side. And if something happens that hurts us, we automatically assume that it came from them. So in this episode we get a third option where a small faction throws a wrench into the whole thing and messes it up for both sides for different reasons. This year we’ve seen more division within both political parties than the past several previous elections, so today, rewatching this episode, it almost serves as a warning, a taste as what’s to come. The ad in question clearly thinks it’s speaking for the Republican party and it’s supporters. It’s attacking Matt Santos, the democratic candidate, and therefore must be good for the Republican Part...

Joel:  One of the greatest things about the election storyline is how both of the candidates seem like they would be capable of being good presidents. When we had Bartlet’s second term election story back in season three, his opponent seemed pretty much incompetent, and it was clear he never had a real shot at being president. The whole thing took second fiddle more often than not, to whatever crisis the White House was dealing with at the time. The thing is though, at the end of the day Santos needs to appear to be the slightly better of the two choices. At times they do this masterfully (wait till we get to the debate episode so that I can gush about that.) But other times it’s a bit on the heavy handed side. Take this episode for instance. We have a story that's all about evolution vs. divine creation and on what side of the debate our two candidates should come down on. And all through the episode we get the feeling that Santos isn’t going to say exactly what he’s suppose...

Joel:  There is so much hand wringing here about whether or not Santos should report for his National Guard training, with the argument against it will be that the timing of it will look like a political stunt. Now I understand that I am not a political consultant, and I get that there are people who are paid a whole lot more than me to understand the political landscape a whole lot better than me, but to me it seems like anything and everything that these two guys do from here to election day is going to seem like a political stunt on one level or another. When Vinick visits both the border patrol and the minutemen in the same trip, that comes off as politics and it should. When Santos speaks at a predominantly black church, how are we supposed to interpret that if not political at least on some level. When people pay for air time to air negative campaign ads they aren’t trying to warn us about something out of the goodness of their heart, they air because somebody is trying...

Joel:  As we go into our final season of The West Wing, it opens up the show three years in the future. It’s all a big play for the end of the cold open where the current President arrives but his identity is not revealed. The lineup of people who speak to Bartlet in the opening scene is interesting, but I don’t want to talk too much about it as it will reveal major plot points throughout the upcoming season. We’ll probably return to this scene once or twice as the season goes on to discuss it. A large portion of this episode is devoted to questioning whether or not Leo is a good pick for vice president. It was an interesting choice to be sure, and I want you to try and imagine what a pick like this would have looked like in the real world. Despite spending a large portion of his life in politics, I’m not sure if anyone had ever voted for Leo for anything before this. He was chief of staff, and we know at one point he was Secretary of Labor, but both of those are appointe...

Joel:  The two episodes that focus on the conventions here seem to take the stance that going into the convention without a clear nominee for president is a terrible thing for the party. They talk about how the democrats are going to look like an out of control circus compared to the well oiled machine that is the Republican Party here. But watching this storyline unfold just makes me want to see a contested convention in real life all the more. This current presidential election is the closest we’ve come in a long time in both parties. And watching this, you have to wonder what a real life impact might be of a convention like this. When Bartlet was running for his second term, there was a brief storyline where television stations were considering very limited coverage of both conventions because frankly, both conventions are predictable and boring. But here we have television coverage lasting well past prime time. Even with the complaints of how long the first round of votin...

Joel:  This show has a strange love/hate relationship with space exploration that I can’t help but focus on every time NASA or anything space related is a topic on the show. The West Wing seems to swing back and forth on the appeal of NASA depending on what works best for the episode at hand. We have Sam’s famous “because it’s what’s next” bit from early on in the series, but later on we have an asteroid threatening all life on earth that seems to come out of nowhere because NASA missed it. We also have satellites crashing and Josh telling NASA that they’re simply not worth much funding because they’re not interesting and make too many mistakes. And with that particular Josh storyline, we get a lot of good talk about space exploration, and Josh seems to learn the error of his attitude, but nothing ever comes of that. And then there’s this storyline. And it’s a big one as the fallout here has a major impact that lasts well into the next season. We have the International Space S...

Joel:  And just like that we’re back on the right track. Part of what makes the previous episode, Ninety Miles Away , feel so out of place is that with the very next episode, we’re right back on track. This episode is just one of the example of what an incredible job this show does of shaping the Republican campaign alongside the Democratic one for the upcoming election. We know that we’re supposed to cheer for Santos, it’s the campaign we’ve followed since the very beginning, and is being spearheaded by a character that we’ve followed since the very first episode of the show. At the same time though, even though you want Santos to win the election, you don’t really want Vinick to lose. Vinick getting in trouble in this episode doesn’t have the “Aha!” feeling that usually comes with seeing the antagonist of a story have to deal with something. Instead Vinick is portrayed as the reasonable character that is being irrationally attacked. It’s very similar to the way that we’ve se...