4.8/10. When my wife and I were watching Season 3 originally, she wanted to skip this episode. She’d seen the series before, and wasn’t a fan of this one. But now, since I’m about to finish the series, and I’m a completionist, I felt compelled to go back and add this one to the “watched” column.
In hindsight, it may not have been the best decision. There’s all sorts of factors that make it hard to judge this episode. The biggest one is that “Isaac and Ishmael” is very much a product of its time. A great deal of what may seem quaint, even myopic when discussing terrorism and Islam and all that goes with that today, looked very different when the episode aired, less than a month after 9/11. It’s hard to put oneself in that mindset again, with the uncertainty, the fear, of what would come next, what would happen to our country after a near-unprecedented attack, and so in some ways, it’s really hard to evaluate this episode outside of that context.
But that problem of context is also an issue when I dive back into an episode of the show written by Aaron Sorkin after watching three seasons’ worth of episodes produced under John Wells. The show, to some people’s consternation, has a noticeably different tone under one showrunner versus the other. To my mind, under Wells, The West Wing is more down to earth – a little less grandiose and a little less self-satisfied.
That makes it very difficult to tell whether problems of presentation I have in “Isaac and Ishmael” are issues limited to this episode, which given that it was hastily produced in response to the terrible tragedy, deserves some leeway, or whether they’re the same issues I had through four season’s worth of Sorkin’s episodes, and they stand out all the more when I’ve been steeped in the different character the show takes on under his successor.
To the point, if there’s a device that Sorkin loved and went back to time and time again, it’s smart people condescendingly explaining things to people who aren’t as smart as they are. I’m sure having the main cast of the show just talk to an impromptu classroom full of children makes sense when you’re scrambling to create an episode commenting on the most serious act of terror the United States has ever faced in three weeks, but it’s also a frustrating example of Sorkin just hammering that trope home over and over again.
The episode, then, basically turns into an op-ed for Sorkin, who is the sole credited writer for the episode. There’s the patina of debate and discussion, with C.J. and others presenting an opposing viewpoint here and there. But for the most part it’s just a gigantic exercise in “This is what Aaron Sorkin thinks.” It’s one of his most plainly preachy, straightforward soapbox episodes ever, and for The West Wing, that’s saying something.
And yet, my impulse is to cut him some slack. Maybe he should have ignored the impulse to try to comment on such a monumental, history-changing moment for America so soon, but if you decide to do it within the confines of a network drama, this is the best you’re likely to do in terms of style and perhaps even substance. It’s just annoying, to say the least, to have Sorkin’s editorial essay be buried in the conceit of a roomful of kids asking his mouthpiece characters dumb, leading questions.
That, however, is only half the problem. The answers offered by Josh, Toby, and others are pretty hackneyed and shallow platitudes about terrorism and cultural differences and Islamic extremism. There’s a trite “we’re not so different” theme throughout their response. To some degree, that makes sense. It’s accurate, and there’s hay to made from the idea that there are larger socio-political and economic factors that lead to things like terror attacks, some of which affect this country as much as they affect others, even if they manifest themselves differently. The catch is that through Sorkin’s pen, the explanations of these things comes off so rote and even smug.
Toss in the fact that there’s the blindspots and cringe points that show up in Sorkin’s work repeatedly, and a lot of these segments were tough for me. The fact that Donna’s only line in the intro to the episode is “And I get a boyfriend” is a testament to the character’s general uselessness in the show’s early going and the way female characters fare under his watch. On top of that, the way Josh dismisses Donna’s comments as “right but college girl-ish” or (jokingly) tells C.J. to put on fishnets rubs me the wrong way. Like the 9/11 commentary, the episode is of its time, but 2001 wasn’t that long ago and the casual sexism just makes it difficult for me to connect with episodes like these.
Throw in the fact that Charlie’s only purpose in the episode is to talk about what gangs are like, in a way that reads more like what a middle-aged white guy thinks gangs are like than someone who grew up around them, and you have those types of problems all around.
The other part of the story fares a little better with Leo interrogating Rakim Ali, a White House employee who is suspected of being a terrorist after his name shows up in an FBI search. That part of the episode is fairly trite too, with a predictable “it turns out he’s not a terrorist! Let's not lose our empathy in the heat of the moment, everybody!” resolution. But there’s at least a charged atmosphere during the interrogation, something that feels more raw and human on both sides of the table in those scenes, then in the ones where the senior staff is pontificating to high school students.
It also features Leo screwing up, and offering a too little too late apology at the end. Sure, the whole thing’s a pretty obvious parable about not profiling and not taking away someone’s dignity just because they’re olive-skinned and attend mosques, but it at least has the dignity to make one of our heroes the bad guy in the narrative, to show Leo as flawed if well-meaning here, rather than the all-knowing geniuses explaining the mysteries of the universe to we unwashed masses.
That’s the problem for me with “Isaac and Ishmael” and was often my larger problem with a lot of the Sorkin-run episodes of the show. This is The West Wing at its most didactic, the point where it’s artlessly just telling the audience what the show’s creator thinks. Some of that can be attributed to the exigent circumstances of episode’s unusual production history, but some of it is just Aaron Sorkin being Aaron Sorkin, offering his enlightened solutions to all the world’s problems and dumbing it down for us rubes in the process.
Despite that and the fact that a lot of that artlessness left me cold, I’m not willing to write off “Isaac and Ishmael.” It may not work as an episode of television, but it works as an odd time capsule of what people were thinking and wondering at one of the most fraught and frightening times in this country’s history.
I wish more of that uncertainty were baked into the episode, that we got less kumbaya and more of a complicated, messy take on the scary unknowns and wistful hopes we as a country had at the time. But maybe people needed a little kumbaya then. Maybe in the midst of all that fearfulness and uncertainty, people needed a voice like Sorkin’s telling them to hang in there, that things were fraught but that they’d be okay. It seems patronizing now, a decade and a half after the attack that changed this country, but maybe then, when the wounds were still fresh, something reassuring, however hamfisted, was what people wanted, and maybe even needed.
