Did Ivan just suddenly have a change of personality and and turn from a maniacal genius into the stupidest person on the planet ? Thought I was watching the last season of Game of Thrones for a second there
Is only me who thinks a brilliant mind would never use only cards on a access control system?
David Shore stil got it . Amazing epsode !
This show is amazing! I can't believe i've missed it all these years until trakt came along.
I love how Doctor House always talks sarcastically against his team and how he always plays pranks on the people he cares about. He is brilliant doctor in how he always finds an answer to problems other doctors cannot analyze.
Over the seasons we see more and more of the characters and get to know the people behind the white doctor clothes. Every one of them has their own story to tell that in the end makes them as real as anyone who watches this show.
Best chuckle line -
" I think there should be segregation between the sexes"
"...and within the sexes!"
The movie references throughout this episode were great. Definitely added something great to the whole episode.
7.8/10. First things first, I loved the way that CJ was caught in a tug of war between the Barlets here. On the one hand, she has a responsibility to the President and is his subordinate, which means she can’t exactly force him to go to bed or drag him out of a meeting. On the other hand, she has a responsibility to Jed Bartlet, and also his wife, to look after his health as his friend and confidante. Trying to do right by each of these things leaves her tied in knots.
I’m a sucker for stories where characters have to make difficult choices where they’re trying be fair and do the right thing, whilst serving different masters in a way that means one of them is going to be upset. If she rouses the President whenever there’s something major going on, he’s mollified but his health is at risk and she’ll get the third degree from Abigail. If she pressure him to take breaks and sleep through the night, she gets the third degree from her boss for not letting him use his long-built relationships to solve these crises.
I’ve made no secret of the fact that CJ is my favorite character on the show, and I like how, in the midst of this, she still tries to do her job and stands up for herself. She tells Mrs. (Dr.) Bartlet that she’s going to rouse the President if she thinks it’s necessary, and that it’s up to him if he wants to get up or not. And she tells the President (as does Leo) that he needs to let her do her job and not micromanage, and has to trust her to handle some of these things.
The Valentine’s Day shouting match between the Bartlets isn’t pleasant, but it reveals a truth at the core of this one – that the President and the First Lady were basically using CJ, or at least putting her in the middle, of a dispute between the two of them, where Jed wants to push himself and “leave it all on the field” and resents his wife’s efforts to make him slow down and Abigail is frustrated at her husband’s unwillingness to take his health concerns seriously and delegate when he needs to. That final scene feels like the little kid listening to her parents fight, but it still shows a canniness on the part of CJ by realizing the fight isn’t about her and she has to stand her ground with both parties.
The other highlight of the episode is Toby’s interactions with Professor Lessig (Christopher Lloyd) as he helps an Eastern Bloc nation write its new constitution. When the storyline starts out it feels like a usual West Wing primer on the merits of the American system versus parliamentary systems, with some entertaining back and forth and commentary on the difficulties of forming new democracies. But I loved where the story ended up, with Lessig using a Supreme Court case as an example of the idea that it’s more important to instill the values of democracy, because as important as a constitution is, it’s only the beginning, and the document will be interpreted and extrapolated for years, hopefully decades and centuries to come. And that maybe, by engaging in spirited speech and debate and discussion with the great and honorable figures in a country, you can achieve that better than you can by typing out the most rigorous of first principles.
The rest of the episode was kind of a wash. I’ve always found Lord John Marbury far more annoying than amusingly irksome, so his presence here, acting like a cad toward Kate did little for me. Similarly, assorted folks around the office gawking at Miss World was too sexist and, beyond that, corny for my tastes. And Iranians shooting down an American plane with British citizens sufficed for a crisis of the week to provide fodder for the bigger storylines in the episode, even if it didn’t blow me way.
But overall, CJ as the surrogate child of the Bartlets, figuring out how to do her job and not get caught between them, was a very well done story, and coupled with a B-story about what constitutions mean that’s idealistic in a way that lands with me made this a quality ep.
7.4/10. This was a breather episode of the show, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. There’s lots of excitement to be had from the drama of the campaign trail and the administration trying to finish strong, and Toby and Josh coming to blows, but once in a while, it’s nice to have a group of storylines that are as much about being slight but fun, sturdy but light, and easy but endearing.
The closest thing we get to fireworks in the episode is Cliff establishing his bona fides as the new Josh by working with Santos to mastermind an end-run around Speaker Halfley’s attempts to only bring the stem cell issue to a vote when all the Democratic congressmen are out stumping on the campaign trail. It creates for a nice set piece at the end of the episode and gives stakes to this lighter episode. What’s more, it leans into the gamesmanship and strategy element of the show that I tend to prefer. It even gives us a chance for some entertaining and meaningful awkwardness between Cliff and Josh, helping to underscore Josh’s estrangement from the administration (and, no doubt, add another layer to what I’m sure will be a Josh-Cliff-Donna love triangle.)
It also gives us Santos’s best moment in the series. What rubs me the wrong way about the Santos character is that he just comes off as too perfect to be real. He has such in-your-face nobility about every issue imaginable, and he speaks with such smug conviction every time he makes these grand statements about “this is what’s right” that I can’t take it.
And yet, when he’s sitting down after the rest of the Congressional sleepover has gone to bed and talking to the Arkansas congressman who needs to be sold on the stem cell bill, he comes off as real and as human as we’ve seen him. Gone are the bold monologues about the kind of campaign he wants to run and the good he wants to do, and in its place is an earnest and patient discussion with a colleague about why he believes what he believes on this topic. It’s not the grand gesture or stunt that shakes the foundation; it’s the simple act of commitment to the cause and heart of what Congress is supposed to be – a forum of ideas – that won’t make the papers. It’s the first time in this show that I’ve actually hoped he wins the nomination.
The next president, however, might have to win over the preteen set if Toby has any say over it. I initially rolled my eyes at the prospect of Toby having to deal with a cadre of moppets who want to give children the vote. Don’t get me wrong, there’s comedy potential in Toby being annoyed at...well, anyone, but it felt pretty insubstantial. Instead, the episode turned a nice moment of recognition for Toby, where he recognizes this kid is as tired of being brushed off and not getting to deal with matters of substance as he is, and allows this pint-sized kindred spirit to make his case.
Toby goes back and forth with him in the Roosevelt Room and in the process, the episode makes a surprisingly convincing argument about why children (or at least these children) should be allowed to vote. And Toby sneaking the kid into a Presidential press conference and helping him get a positive quote from the president was cheesy but heartwarming and the icing on the cake.
The president has less kind things to say when the man he split the Nobel Prize with, an old rival from grad school, comes to a Nobel Laureate party and acts as a thorn in Barlet’s side. As CJ points out, the idea that the President has any sort of professional resentment is kind of endearing, and the way his old colleague needles him about conservative vs. liberal economics and Barlet returns his velvet-tipped slights in kind makes for an enjoyable dynamic. But the result, that for all Bartlet resents his former competition, the guy convinces Bartlet that USA’s current deficit goes against Bartlet’s own principles, to where Bartlet pulls an Eisenhower and warns the next crop of Presidential candidates about succeeding where he failed, is a nice resolution to the story.
Oh, and Kate has a comedic subplot where she defuses escalating tensions between the US and Canada over a bunch of hunters from the two countries getting into a row. It’s fine for a few laughs here and there, but is easily the weakest of the four stories, even if it gives Kate a little something to do and a little more character to help make her more than a milquetoast addition to the show.
Overall, nothing that happens in this episode is especially earth-shattering. I bet you could skip over this one and aside from a stray remark here or there, not miss a beat in terms of being able to follow the season-long plot. But it’s still a wonderful bit of fun, giving its players something breezy and minor, that still makes us feel we know and like each of them a little more.
9.0/10. I love the look on The President’s face in the final scene of the episode, a look that says, “I don’t want to like this guy, but I like this guy.” It’s easy to chalk up Vinick being the almost ideally palatable Republican candidate to the Bartlet administration as more West Wing wish fulfillment, and yet he feels like an outsized version of John McCain, a real life moderate Republican senator from a Western state, who was known for speaking his mind even if it didn’t fall in line with Conservative orthodoxy and reaching across the aisle, who was, at least at one time, the Democrats’ favorite GOP member. (It’s yet another thing that heightens how eerily prescient this season has been in presaging the 2008 election.)
But The West Wing isn’t content to just have its McCain stand-in show up and run as a barely-seen force in the election. “In God We Trust” is basically a Vinick episode, a chance to get to know the character better, an as usual Alan Alda shines in the spotlight as a man who, like McCain struggled with whether to stick to his guns as something of an outlier, or make sacrifices in whom he runs with and where he spends his Sundays in order to appeal to the conservative base and secure the right numbers in the electoral college.
That’s why I love the reintroduction of Bruno here. The architect of Bartlet’s reelection campaign showing up to a Republican rival is a bit of a surprise, but the episode explains it remarkably well. First, there’s the professional part of it. Bruno thinks that he can help Vinick carry all fifty states in the election. Who knows if it’s just bluster to get the job, but if Bruno really thinks he can do it, that would be a personal “high score” that Bruno would have a hard time not trying to go for. But philosophically, he makes a great pitch as well. Bruno believes that Vinick can unite the country, that as a centrist who runs as a Republican and has support across the aisle, he represents where most people in the country are politically, and he can bring them together on that account, heal things a bit, which is something Bruno can believe in.
And I like Bruno and Sheila (and to a lesser extent Stephen Root) as the Devil and Angel on Vinick’s shoulders. Obviously one doesn’t represent good and the other evil, but they represent two different philosophies of how Vinick could go with his sewn up Republican nomination – he could stake out his territory in the center and double down on the principles he’s brought to Washington for decades and maybe united the country, or he could learn to the right, shore up the base, and if his advisors are to be believed, secure a win in the election right here and now. It’s The West Wing, so we already know which option he’s going to pick, but it doesn’t make that choice any less interesting.
What’s more, “In God We Trust,” does well to bring things back to a personal choice as well. Alan Vinick has not been to church in years, and mulls over whether “Washington is worth a mass” and he should show up to his rival’s church or he should tell the press that it doesn’t matter what his religiousness is. Again, this is The West Wing, we know how things are going to go when someone is presented with the pragmatic choice and the principled choice. Still, we get a glimpse into who Vinick really is. His lack of church-going has the subtext of being a result of his wife passing away, that like many people, he at least attended until someone he loved dearly was taken away from him and he had a crisis of faith.
On top of that, as explored in a great scene where he and Bartlet discuss religion over ice cream, he talks about how he read the bible and tried and tried and tried to make it work for him, to make it land for him, and eventually he just couldn’t do it. It’s pretty bold stuff for a network television show, and the interesting contrast there, the Democrat who is the devout Catholic (albeit one who once told God to go to hell in a tough moment) with the nonreligious Republican, makes for an interesting discussion. At the end of the day, just letting Martin Sheen and Alan Alda bounce off one another for a few minutes would almost certainly produce gold, but the episode goes for more than easy rapport. It goes for two people who are anything but allies, who come from anything but the same position, finding common ground and being uniquely understanding of the types of challenges each other face, even if they don’t always agree.
That’s the great thing about the Wells years, at least so far. There’s a certain myopia during the Sorkin years, a sense that we’re watching the good guys, that everyone who opposes them is either outright evil or at least cowardly, and that the only way our heroes falter is when they’re not true enough to themselves. The Wells years allow that same level of humility, the same level of good-intentions, the same level of, if you will, grace, in everyone, from the President to the campaign manager-for-hire who’s switching sides, to the man who threatens to topple Bartlet’s accomplishment if he’s elected as the force he and Leo seem to think he’ll be.
He’s a force because of moments like his speech at the end of the episode, where he says that he’s not going to lie to the voters by going to his former rival’s church that Sunday, and that if you make religious tests an unofficial condition for office, it’ll just mean more politicians lie to you. Like a lot of closing West Wing speeches, it’s a little blunt and it’s a little too didactic, but what’s striking is that it feels like the same kind of thing Bartlet himself might say, despite his different religious beliefs (and his offer to take the heat off Vinick with a statement on the issue was a nice touch). Bartlet himself watches that speech, sees a man of equal, if distinct principal, and seems to contemplate the possibility of him being elected and think, “he might not be so bad.” That’s an achievement, for Vinick, for the episode, and for the show.
7.1/10. I’m a big fan of arcs in stories, even single-episode stores. We want to see people change, even if it’s only a little bit, over the course of a narrative. But when you telegraph that arc too much, make it obvious what you’re going for, it starts to feel like you’re seeing one of Aesop’s fables as opposed to a story where the growth is just baked in.
Which is to say, we get it, West Wing. At the beginning of the episode Josh is staying up late, refusing Joey Lucas imploring him to delegate, and trying to do everything himself. At the end of the episode, after one of those trademark Bartlet Father Knows Best speeches, this time coming from Santos, he is surrounded by a team, which is directing and organizing, not micromanaging. Josh has learned that he needs other voices, he can’t do this all on his own, and that it’s the best way to manage his candidate.
That’s all well and good, but the lesson feels pretty obvious and pretty blunt. It doesn’t help that Josh tells Joey Lucas that the reason he doesn’t delegate or hire anyone to help him is that there’s no one out there with the gumption to challenge him or push back on him, and then, by some strange coincidence, he immediately goes into a meeting with someone who will question him and offer dissenting views with zero deference for his seniority and no intimidation.
So we get Lou (Janeane Garofolo, forgive my spelling, time is short) who is a foil in the vein of Amy that thinks Josh has Santos’s media strategy all wrong. She wants to attack Vinick, do more to try to define Santos on offense rather than just hang back and play defense, and she wants him to take a stand against the White House ending its own internal investigation of the leak. Josh, meanwhile, wants to focus on policy goals (specifically steering things toward domestic issue where they’re strong and away from security issues where Democrats are traditionally weak), doesn’t want to go negative, and despite his clear frustrations with CJ and Toby, doesn’t want his candidate to criticize his old boss and buddies in the west wing.
Of course, there is a magical third option, where Santos doesn’t attack Vinick, but does establish himself as his own man by siding with the president but emphasizing that he believes in being tough about these sort of leaks and isn’t just deferring, by laughing about the “trivia” box news stories about his alleged lunchtime naps and Cassanova Congressman bed destruction with his wife, and jumping to do his military reserve training now rather than waiting for it to develop into a political story. As usual, Santos is too good to be true, and has the sure-footed, brilliant answer to all these problems, but hey, that was Bartlet too, so at least the show’s being consistent.
The sum total of all of this is that Josh has a team now, and people to give him different ideas on the table that he can hone into finding the best choice. I like that message at least, and one of my favorite things about the Wells seasons is that many of the episode lean into the idea that hearing different opinions and finding a middle ground is a good thing, as opposed to the “don’t compromise, not even a little” spirit that the Sorkin years could devolve into at times. But the message isn’t delivered in a particularly successful way (Lou is a good enough foil but feels like a well-worn archetype on the show, and Santos’s magic wand solving abilities are getting tiresome), and that hurts its effectiveness, even if it’s fun to be immersed in the chaos of the campaign.
The other big story is that the reporter who leaked the military shuttle story is going to jail for not revealing his source, who is implied, but still not confirmed, to be CJ. It gives the show a chance to comment on the Valerie Plains (again, apologies for the spelling) story that was going on around this time, and does add a different dimension to it. Again, this isn’t necessarily a story I would have picked to persist on for several episode, but they’re at least wringing some interesting stuff here and there, and I appreciate the continued tension between the White House and the Santos Campaign in terms of things that benefit one but not the other.
But overall, it’s an episode with a clear, loudly declared message. The message is nice, so it gets a bit of a pass, but it’s not one of the most ambitious or thematically complex episodes the show has ever done.
7.3/10. One of the benefits of giving a little more spotlight to the Republicans is that you can have a meaningful back and forth. That’s what “Message of the Week” runs on. Santos makes a play, so Vinick hits the ball back into his court, so Santos sends it back and so on and so on. I liked that structure here, giving us ping-ponging views of how the two campaigns are responding to one another. It’s the type of thing you couldn’t do, or at least that would be far more difficult, if you hadn’t already established Vinick, Sheila, and Bruno on Team GOP to lob something over the net at Team Santos.
And it’s fun to see the strategic moves and countermoves between the campaigns. There’s something very interesting about Josh and Bruno (not to mention Sheila and Lou and, you know, the candidates themselves) trying to outmaneuver one another constantly and brainstorm ideas to try to outdo one another. I mentioned The War Room, a great documentary on the ’92 Clinton campaign in another room, and the show is quickly becoming a dramatic (and embellished version) of that. Whereas once the show seemed to focus its attentions on the strategic plays in the White House, slowly but surely it’s focused more and more on the behind the scenes tactics employed on the trail, and that is doubly interesting by getting to look behind the curtain of the campaign team on both sides of the aisle.
And yet, for once on this show, it’s clear who the bad guy is, or at least who the bad guy is supposed to be. For the most part The West Wing has depicted Arnie Vinick as distinguished competition, as a Republican even the dye-in-the-wool progressives in the White House respect, and perhaps even admire. He’s almost impossibly palatable as an opposing candidate: principled, moderate, and above all a decent guy.
But he does two things here that Bartlet, and by extension Santos, would never do, and they’re subtle (or in some cases, not so subtle) signs as to why, however much we may be charmed by Alan Alda’s Bugs Bunny-esque charms, we shouldn’t be rooting for Vinick. The first is the one that the episode underlines – namely, Vinick goes after Santos on Latino issues as a way of using his ethnicity against him. There’s no sense that it’s malicious from Vinick, and you get the sense that he doesn’t really want to do it, that he’s convinced himself that sticking to issues that affect Latino voters, without calling out Santos’s heritage directly, gives him not just political cover, but genuine moral cover in his own eyes, when it comes to those sorts of tactics. But his staffer’s resignation makes it clear – we’re meant to doubt that this is anything but a fig leaf to do something wrong, to fight dirty. Time and time again, this show gives its characters choices between fighting dirty or taking their lumps and hoping that their ideas and their principles we see them through. It rewards people who pick the latter option, and punishes people who choose the former.
Which is interesting because if nothing else, I’m always intrigued by the gamesmanship this show explores. The idea that Vinick is losing ground in the polls and is trying to come up with something to knock Santos off balance, basically to just do something surprising and unpredictable, with his team wracking their brains to come up with an option, is the sort of sausage-making fare that I enjoy on this show. But we’re presented with a situation where what works politically, as it so often does, raises questions ethically, and the show implicitly dings Vinick for making the wrong choice.
At the same time, Vinick does something Bartlet would never do – he lies, he lies because it’s easy and he’s tired it’s politically expedient. (Though as Mrs. Bloom points out, Bartlet did kind of sweep that whole MS thing under the rug, huh?) It’s a testament to the worldview of The West Wing that this is supposed to be the shocking revelation here, that a politician lied. And what I find truly interesting about it is that the show seems to want us to be on Vinick’s side in terms of how he feels about the folks pressuring him to make a pro-life pledge, but disdains him for pretending to placate those doing the pressuring. I think the show is implicitly asking WWJBD – What Would Jed Bartlet Do? Jed Bartlet would wine and dine and charm, but ultimately wouldn’t promise something he didn’t intend to deliver on, even and perhaps especially to someone or something he thinks is wrong.
But Vinick is just fed up with to make concessions, to having to play ball, with parts of his own party that he himself hates. For once we see the downside of principle, or at least the funhouse mirror version of it, where Vinick’s frustrations come from having to lean to the right, from having to depart from what he believes in for the sake of getting office. But rather than being willing to risk losing in order to be true to himself, he makes a promise he has no intention of keeping to preserve his chances to become President. And because we punish that sort of thing on this show, it nearly blows up in his face.
Thankfully, he has VP nominee and committed conservative Sullivan. He’s effective and frankly a little scary here, presenting a boogeyman that The West Wing has only really countenanced in the form of Speaker Halfley prior – someone who is a committed opponent to things that the Bartlet administration and Santos campaigns disagree with strongly, but who is also effective at wheeling and dealing and using the levers and pulleys of government as well. He’s made out to be another bad guy, not for a failure of ethics like Vinick, but for being a talented operator on the other side of the aisle.
So we get a great deal of back and forth here, and you can focus on the strategy element and have a good time watching Josh and Shiela and Bruno and Lou go ten rounds across the campaign trial. But in the background, and sometimes in the foreground, is the story of a man of equal principle, striving to do something great, but presented as faltering in his integrity in the process.
9.3/10. We’ve never had much about work-life balance on The West Wing. It comes into play a little bit early in the show with Leo’s divorce, and you hear the Barlets talk about it on occasion, but for the most part, it’s just sort of expected that everyone devotes their lives to their job and that’s that. You get great scenes where CJ remarks about how hard it is to have a social life when you’re in her position or how she feels about missing her dad, or a rotating series of love interests that all orbit around the White House one way or another, or an incredibly meaningful moment between Toby and his newborn children…whom we haven’t seen since. On the whole though, this is a show much more about the work, and much less about what’s given up in order to do that work.
That’s why it’s nice to see The West Wing, however fleetingly, engage with how difficult it would be to fulfill the responsibilities of being a husband and a father and also fulfill the responsibilities of being the leader of the free world. Ellie has the patience of a saint about everything, and Abby has her usual amusingly sharp remarks about the situation that show her perturbation with the rigmarole that comes with a White House wedding with a certain weariness to suggest that she’s been through this before. Still, the center of the story is Josiah Bartlet, and how this is as difficult for him as it is for anyone.
How do you balance the global importance of something like heading off two world powers from going to war with one another on the one hand, and the personal importance of being there on one of the most important days of your daughter’s life on the other? Neglecting one or the other, even a little bit, feels like a dereliction of a crucial duty. So you have Bartlet on the phone with the Chinese ambassador, trying stave off World War III, and losing patience because he’s missing the chance to walk his daughter down the aisle. You see him lose his cool in a diplomatic situation, something that rarely if ever happens, and it’s a sign of how torn he is between two things he absolutely must do, and it’s tying him in knots.
Josh is tying himself up in knots as well trying to figure out how to manage the Santos campaign’s resources and deploy them in a way that gives the congressman a fighting chance against Vinick. Time is running out between here and election day; the sharks are beginning to circle and suggest that maybe Josh isn’t the right person to take the campaign to the finish line, and Josh himself is beginning to second guess his own decisions.
On top of all of this, Josh isn’t sleeping. He’s overscheduling himself. He’s running himself ragged trying to change his plans, find the optimal strategic points, and is basically ready to pass the baton to the next guy and step aside from the campaign that he brought to this point through sheer force of will. We see him meeting with party elders from across the country, all of whom offer, as Leo puts it, Monday morning quarterbacking for what he should have done here or shouldn’t have done there. (As a Dallas Cowboys fan, I particularly appreciated his jab at Philadelphia on having experience with that.) The catch is that it’s getting to him. Josh can’t just make a decision and stick with it. He has to agonize and tear what’s left of his hair out constantly to try to figure how to capitalize on a bump in Illinois without sinking the rest of the campaign’s war chest.
This means he can only barely engage with his friends back in the White House. (With the divide between the operations of the Oval Office and the adventures on the campaign trail, these sorts of episodes almost feel like crossovers.) He’s barely there when he runs into CJ and she asks if he wants to trade responsibilities and take over on the Kazakhstan issue. He completely misses Will and Kate, who are semi-officially going on a date (after Ellie left Will off the guest list in what feels like a dick move). He doesn’t even respond to his star-crossed love Donna who declares herself a bored, beautiful woman who wants to be entertained.
In the midst of all of this, Santos is himself wondering if he needs to make a change. The party elders buzz in his ear that Josh’s needed replacement is right there, in the form of Leo, the man who got the last Democratic nominee to the finish line. Leo begs off, even when he’s flattered by the suggestion, even when Santos and his new coterie talk about the benefits of it, even when Josh himself practically hands over the keys to the kingdom.
Instead, he tells Josh that he can do this, that there’s going to be difficult decisions and that he’s going to make some of them wrongly, but that what counts is how he reacts and moves forward, with an offer to help however he can. And he tells Santos that the pundits are right, Josh has gotten Santos as far as he possibly can, but that the rest of it is up to Santos now, not a change in management, and it’s incumbent upon the two of them to finish the race.
Maybe it’s because after a heart attack (and a statement to Josh that “you really are trying to kill me,” he doesn’t need the pressure and sleepless nights of running a campaign. Maybe it’s because he’s blinded by loyalty and affection for Josh, who has basically been his mentee, particularly in campaign season. Maybe it’s Leo having once been there and understanding and sympathizing what Josh is going through. Maybe he’s just right. Either way, he’s there for someone who he’s quickly become like a father to just when he needs him.
And late though he may be, President Bartlet is there to be a father when he’s needed as well. As he waits with Ellie in the atrium, moments away from walking her down the aisle, he begins to fidget, to seem quietly emotional in the way that only a man who is expected to perpetually project strength and stability can. Martin Sheen does a tremendous job, reminiscing about some old Congressional fact-finding mission when Ellie was eight years old and gave him a scare. Even the leader of the free world, a man who holds such power and can stand up to world leaders and power brokers across the globe, gets wistful, gets emotional, feels the enormity of this personal moment. The world of the White House may consume so much of who these people are, but there is feeling, genuine human feeling, beneath the workaholic exteriors required of the day-in-day-out of the highest levels of government, that comes through when it really counts.
9.4/10. We’ve done Let Bartlet Be Bartlet. We’ve done Let Santos Be Santos. I suppose it was time for the old guy on the other side of the aisle to get a turn at holding steady, trusting his instincts, and doing the right thing in the face of every opportunity to compromise, give in, or make the convenient but unethical choice. I guess it was time we let Vinick be Vinick.
And, to be honest, I loved it. It’s usually the sort of the thing that bugs me on this show, the way The West Wing’s universe lets fortune smile upon those noble creature who won’t dare sully themselves in the muck of that dirty little thing you call "politics." But whether it’s the way the character’s written, the charm of Alan Alda, or my own political leanings which probably hew closer to Vinick’s policies than Santos’s, that same old spell worked on me in “Two Weeks Out,” and the moral choices the episode presents.
The lesser moral choice in the episode is how to get Vinick’s campaign out of the rut it’s been in for the last two weeks. We open with old man Arnie’s hand getting crushed from excessive handshaking (a kind of cute but nicely symbolic bit), and it’s another sign that this election is wearing on him. Vinick didn’t necessarily expect this election to be a cakewalk, but he expected to come in as the frontrunner, someone who was shooting for a 50-state electoral map rather than the guy having to scrape by to get 51%.
But that was before San Andreo, and that was before Kazakhstan. So instead, Santos is trying to figure out how to chart a new strategy between now and election day to pull out the victory. He’s come out against gay marriage, something that, behind closed doors, he’s clearly uncomfortable with. He doesn’t like having to offer sops to the “values voters” that new campaign-manager Jane wants him to court. He doesn’t like the impression that he’s chasing Santos’s tail as they hit the same swing states. He doesn’t want to have to focus his campaign on the Southern states, voters which, as Jane admits, never especially liked him anyway. He’s tired of being tarred with the nuclear accident. He’s tired of having to do things that go against who he really is.
It’s tough, because all he’s hearing from everyone is that he needs to go in directions he doesn’t like or want. Jane wants him to double down on his pitch to the GOP base. Bruno doesn’t like it, but admits he doesn’t necessarily have a better plan. And Bob pretty much bends whichever way the wind is blowing. Meanwhile, Josh is getting secret campaign advice from Toby(!) and is positioning Santos to take California right out from under Vinick in the wake of the near-meltdown in his backyard.
Vinick can’t take it. He doesn’t want to cop to Jane’s southern strategy. He doesn’t want to throw in the towel on himself as a moderate. He wants to win, but on his own terms. So he doubles-down on his straight-talking ways, the frank honesty and forthrightness the voters know him by, deciding to give a make-it-or-break-it marathon speech about nuclear power in front of the plant where the accident occurred. His advisors warn him against it, with Jane coming close to quitting, but he wants to get this story, or at least his part of it, out of the news cycle, and he believes that addressing it head-on is the best way to exercise this particular demon.
And by god, it works. He goes out there, speaks openly and truthfully, and says that despite the accident, he still believes in nuclear power. He talks about the risks we take every day for things that better our lives. He places the blame for the accident on federal regulations, and when asked if he regrets pushing for a more abbreviated process that skipped over those regulations, he dodges for a bit but then admits he does. He says if he could do it all again, he would do a lot of things differently, that politicians should change their minds with new information, be smarter in their positions and opinions than they were when they started. In the process, he comes off as earnest and human, winning back Bruno and, in a great nigh-wordless performance, earning the begrudging admiration of fierce ideologue Toby. He wears out the press, gets his mojo back by being himself, and saves his chances in California, and with them, his shot at the presidency.
But there’s a bigger moral choice to be made. When Vinick is in the depths of his frustrations at the way the campaign’s gone, Bruno offers him a golden ticket. Innocently enough, Bruno found a briefcase Santos left at a spot where both teams campaigned. Less innocently, he rifled through it, finding Santos’s journal and a mysterious checkbook made out to a young woman who worked for Santos when he was mayor, a woman with a young daughter who might be Santos’s.
He presents this information to Vinick, and with it, a choice: should Vinick use this stuff, and quite possibly guarantee himself a victory in the Presidential election, or should he give it back graciously and use nothing, and win or lose on his own merits?
What makes this episode a cut above is that it takes a seemingly obvious question (using this type of privacy invasion, however guilelessly it came about, is unquestionably shady), and actually makes a decently compelling argument on both sides. Beyond the sheer ethical issues of how Vinick’s campaign came across this material, Vinick immediately disclaims any interest in wanting to use and raises the point that even if their suspicions were true, it wouldn’t change his mind if he were a Santos voter. Bruno responds, not entirely unreasonably, that it’s not for him to decide what matters to voters, that they deserve to get all the info and make an informed judgment based on what they care about, not what Vinick thinks they should care about.
Bruno also offers a pragmatic argument, that Santos didn’t get a full vetting because he was a surprise winner in the primary, that the press will find this stuff sooner or later, and that if Santos wins, it could come out when he’s in the middle of “World War III” in Kazakhstan. It’s hard to know how much Bruno is a true believer and how much he just wants to win, but he at least lays out a plausible moral case for why Vinick should use this dirt.
Vinick, however, sticks to his principles once again. He returns the briefcase to Santos; he tells his opponent they won’t use any of what they uncovered, and rather than spilling the beans to the press, encourages Santos himself to come clean. Of course, Santos being the mythologically pure individual that he is, was simply paying child support in the stead of his deadbeat brother, and had no personal failings on that scale. But the point stands. Vinick had a chance to, at least from his perspective, win the election through underhanded means, and despite the fact that he was at the end of his rope, that he felt his last chances slipping away from him, stayed true to his beliefs and his integrity.
There’s an odd mix of enmity and mutual admiration between Vinick and Santos, a sense that in other circumstances, they would be on the same side. They share many of the same principles even if their positions differ markedly. Much of that is a product of what The West Wing is, a show about people who stay true in the face of overwhelming opposition and pressure to take the easy way out. Sometimes that’s cloying; sometimes it’s unbelievable, but sometimes, by god, it just works, even on crusty cynics like me.
7.1/10. This is, as is a bit of a West Wing tradition, a breather episode, something that is a little more focused, and a little less eventful, as things build up to the big event on the horizon. With the election (and election episodes) coming shortly, it’s a time for the show to stop and take stock a little bit.
So we get an unusually focused episode of the show, one that really only has two stories. The first is the chaos surrounding the Santos campaign as it makes a final push, and how that is beginning to wear on Santos himself as well as his family. The second is Toby being pressured by the U.S. Attorney for D.C. to tell him who gave him the information about the military spacecraft, with the carrot of a plea deal for only one year of jail time on the one hand, and a stick that if he doesn’t tell who told him, the U.S. Attorney will add a second indictment for obstruction of justice and subpoena the senior staff of the White House, causing a major optics problem for the Democratic Party five days before the election.
Each of these stories works well enough on its own, though neither of them really moves the ball forward in terms of the larger narrative of the show very much. Instead, both basically feel like setup, a chance to show us where Santos’s head at as we head into election day, and to introduce a Toby-related issue that could cause serious problems as that fateful day in November is set to arrive.
But what’s really interesting is the parallels and contrasts between Santos and Toby that “Welcome to Wherever You Are” draws.
The most impressive part of the episode is how well it depicts the utter chaos that is the staff of the Santos campaign as they dart back and forth across the country in the campaign’s final days. There’s some great video and sound editing at play, showing the semi-frantic nature of the Santos brain trust mixing and matching everything from statements about ex-cons getting their voting rights back to sketches on Jay Leno. The cacophony of noise while Santos is trying to do an interview or talk to a staffer is very well done, letting the viewer feel the organized tumult that is going on all around the candidate.
Toby, on the other hand, is in a world of quiet, a world where he has nothing to do but stew on his own future and his own past. He sits and does the crossword puzzle. He waits outside his wife’s house. He waits and wonder’s what’s going to be. Toby is a man who’s used to being a part of that tumult. While the show has only glancingly looked at the effect of the White House busy trap on the personal lives of the senior staff, you get the impression that it’s all Toby really knows, whatever toll it may have taken on him. He is born, or at least conditioned, to expect that sort of high-intensity eventfulness on a day-to-day basis. And now, in the slow, sometimes silent confines of his new life, he’s lost.
Everybody wants to be seen with Santos, everyone wants a piece of him to get their moment in the sun and get a campaign boost. Nobody wants to be seen with Toby, to be wrapped up in the stink of his criminal case, not even the mother of his children.
That leads into the other interesting parallel here – we see both Santos and Toby in relation to their families. Santos gets into a minor fight with his wife over comments she made when pressed by the media about whether ex-cons should vote, after an event done at his behest (or at the staff’s behest through him), that puts him in an awkward position. He doesn’t have time to look after his kids because he’s being rushed around (leading to his son to throw up during a photo-op from too much unsupervised candy consumption). And there’s no one else to attend to these things because everyone else on staff is wrapped up with the flurry of messages and messaging that goes on in the campaign.
(This seems as good a point as any to mention that we spend an oddly significant amount of time with Bon Jovi hanging around the campaign in this episode. I’m not sure if he had an album coming out on an NBC-affiliated label, or he was a big fan of the show and this was the best place for producers to work him in, but it was kind of a big waste that wasn’t really funny, wasn’t especially cute, and didn’t really add anything to the episode. Maybe I just didn’t spend enough time in Jersey.)
Meanwhile, Toby has all the time in the world to spend with his family, for now. But he has to deal with the sting of the fact that he can’t take them trick or treating with their mother because she has a race to win herself, and his presence would make her look bad. He fights with his wife as well, when she tells him to take the deal and blame it on his dead brother, who can’t suffer any consequences from the leak, and which would spare his family and his professional colleagues from further embarrassment or guilt by association.
Both men find themselves having to balance their family interests with their greater goals. Santos wants a good relationship with his wife and his kids, but also imagines the good he can do as President and wants to fight for that, despite the strain it puts on his family. Toby loves his kids, wants to be around for them growing up, and wants to be a part of his ex-wife’s life to boot, but he also doesn’t want to give into political extortion or give up the source whom he sees as allowing himself to do something noble.
And so both men blow up. Santos rails at his staff. Toby, with no staff to turn to, rails at his wife and then the U.S. Attorney. Both are at the end of their ropes.
The difference is that Santos gets a subtle reassurance. Josh tries to calm him down by talking about how the people he didn’t get enough time with could be made cabinet members after the election’s over. In the process, he inadvertently reveals to Santos that he thinks they’re going to win, even if he doesn’t dare say it until asked directly. (It’s a great little second-long smile from Bradley Whitford that sells the moment.) Santos sees a light at the end of the tunnel, that even nervous, semi-pragmatic Josh thinks it’ll be okay, that this will all be worth it, because the election will come out in their favor.
And Toby has a similar confidence, or maybe even hope, that an attorney appointed by President Bartlet wouldn’t threatening sabotaging his own party’s reelection to collar and corner Toby. He’s essentially making the same call, that sticking this out will be worth it because the election will work out the way he hopes. It’s true to Toby’s stubbornly sticking to his principals, to his hard-nosed beliefs, even in the face of a more pragmatic option. We’ll have to see whether his decision blows up in his, or Santos’s face.
I wouldn’t call “Welcome to Wherever You Are” a great episode of The West Wing. It does good work with both of these characters as it ferries them along through the story. But it does show two men who couldn’t be in more different positions -- one the party’s great champion and its pride, and the other the party’s great pariah and its liability – and shows how despite their differences, their lives are closer together than you would think.
8.2/10. Josh is, as a friend of mine succinctly put it, an asshole. That’s not necessarily a completely terrible thing, at least in his line of work. There’s a sense of a chicken-and-egg to his personality as explored in this episode. Surely only someone with a devotion to perfectionism and workaholism would try to do things as crazy and taxing as Josh does, but then again, the job he’s in reinforces these qualities, demanding that people devote their lives to this type of effort.
There’s a goodness within Josh, even when he can be oblivious or harsh or dismissive or self-centered. He has good intentions, however much his methods leave plenty to be desired. He cares about people. He mourns Leo. He visits Toby while he’s radioactive. He feels guilt for what happened to his family and others close to him. That’s part of what makes it so frustrating when he’s short with those people, when we see him pushing himself to the limit and lashing out at those around him.
In some ways, this version of Josh, the one who’s a little rougher around the edges and whose flaws the show is more willing to confront than during the Sorkin years (when Josh was often an author avatar), is the type of character who bridges the gap between the era of aspirational heroes on television, and the ear of difficult men like Tony Soprano, Don Draper, and Walter White. It’s too far to call Josh an antihero. The ethos of The West Wing is too steeped in optimism for almost any major character on the show not to be trying to do their best for a good cause. But he is flawed, sometimes obnoxious despite his talents, and in episodes like “Transition,” The West Wing isn’t afraid to confront the way Josh can push himself to the limit and lean into those flaws.
But the catch is that having someone call him out on this makes it much more palatable. There’s different ways to do it, and the protagonist need not always take the dressing down to heart, but having someone else in the show, someone who knows the protagonist and can see through their B.S., tell them that what they’re doing is wrong can be, in the right hands, powerful stuff.
Which is why it was so delightful to see Rob Lowe’s Sam Seaborn brought back not just as a pleasant 11th hour surprise on a show taking its victory lap, but as someone who, despite technically become Josh’s subordinate, is someone who has a relationship with him, and the chutzpah to give him an ultimatum. (And, in the process, leave me with some egg on my face after complaining a little about his absence in the prior episode.) As in “Welcome to Wherever You Are” The West Wing uses a number of great cinematographic and editing techniques to help convey the tumult of Josh in sleep-deprived, taking on too much state, culminating in him chewing out Otto for trying to follow his confusing and conflicting directives.
It’s then that Sam steps in, and gives one of those speeches that feels like classic The West Wing. He talks about how being Chief of Staff, even and perhaps especially to a guy he truly believes in like Santos, is an incredibly difficult job at one’s best, and it’s the kind of thing that’s going to crush Josh, and everyone around him if he keeps up this toxic atmosphere, if he doesn’t take some time to recharge and reevaluate. And if that’s the case, Sam won’t be around for it. It’s something Josh needs to hear, and having it come from Sam, someone who has the gravitas that comes from being on the original team and someone who hasn’t seen Josh for a while, making him able to evaluate his old friend in snapshot differences rather than gradual changes. It’s a big return that’s used for substance, not just flash.
But one of the great things about this episode is that Donna, while not exactly passive, doesn’t bother trying to effect a change in Josh. She knows him better than Sam does, but she’s also already spent enough time and energy on him at the expense of herself to make his flaws her life’s work. She knows who he is, and is willing to accept him, flaws and all, but only if he’s willing to live up to his end of the bargain.
What I love about that part of the episode is that Donna seems okay with either outcome. She clearly cares about Josh, and all else being equal, she’d like for him to be someone who’s worthy of her love, someone who will make time for her and for them in the busy life of White House Chief of Staff. But she has no illusions about who Josh is or what he’s like. She sets some basic terms, something as simple as taking time to talk about whatever it is they’re doing, and if he can meet them, great; if he can’t, well that’s too bad, but she has her own life to worry about, and isn’t going to sit around waiting for Josh to, if you’ll pardon the expression, figure his shit out.
We get a bit of that independence with Donna in the rest of the episode, as the plot of “Transition,” apart from Josh’s much-needed vacation, is filling the various jobs in the Santos administration with the likes of Sam, Lou, etc., and we get a hint at Donna’s fate. I have to admit, Chief of Staff to the First Lady is a bit of a letdown. As with the “getting the band together” episode of The West Wing that Josh references for “style points” when he goes to shanghai Sam again (a lovely little touch, and a nice handwave), it seemed like there were natural slots for the Santos campaign team in the Santos administration. Josh was going to be the new Leo. Lou would be the new Toby. And Donna, as spokesperson for the campaign, seemed poised to be the new C.J. The fact that she’s not genuinely a part of the administration is disappointing.
But there’s good reasons for it, the most important being that, as she points out, she can’t work for Josh anymore, whether or not their “thing” works out. That’s an important step (made particularly justified with the semi-galling reveal that he basically wants to give her Annabeth’s old job, presumably with Annabeth tabbed to be the new Press Secretary?). And though it didn’t exactly work out, Amy showed that being the First Lady’s Chief of Staff can be a position with legislative heft behind it. It’s not quite the culmination of Donna’s professional journey that I might have hoped for, but it’s probably more realistic than a lot of career trajectories The West Wing has gone with over the years.
That goes for the three-term Congressman who becomes President too. President-elect Santos’s and President Bartlet’s clash on what to do with Kazakhstan turning out to be a game of good cop/bad cop, without even their own chiefs of staff knowing it’s a ruse, is a cute twist, but also kind of a letdown. There’s real hay to be made with a conflict between an incoming administration that wants to be able to set the terms of the foreign policy slate it’s about to inherit, and an outgoing one that doesn’t want to be treated like a lame duck just yet. But the series is approaching its end quickly, and I suppose I can see the show not wanting to have to resolve an issue of that magnitude with so little runway left, even if the whole thing feels a little too convenient a method of commenting on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that were ongoing at the time.
Maybe it’s better that Josh didn’t know though, if only because in his current state of mind, he might have blown his top at the soon-to-be leader of the free world and found himself on a plane to the private sector rather than to some tropical island. It’s an ending that’s probably happier than Josh deserves, but one that shows he can recognize his own faults to a degree, and through the grace of his friends, make a small step toward being better, toward not letting himself get to that place. Flaws make characters interesting; meaningful growth, those same people seeing their flaws and trying to improve on them, makes them worth rooting for.
8.0/10. In some ways, a writer’s greatest ally is mystery. You can keep people hooked for a long time, even if your plotting starts to sag, even if your characters start to drift, even if your writing starts to stumble, as long as you can keep people trying to guess “what’s next?” What makes “Institutional Memory” such an interesting episode of The West Wing, then, is that there’s not a lot of mystery to it despite the fact that the central question of the episode is what’s next for these characters we’ve grown close to: C.J., Toby, and Will.
That’s because the very beginning of the season told us a lot about what happens to them when this job and this period of their lives are over. We don’t necessarily know what C.J. is up to, but we know she’s getting some sun and having kids with Danny only a little ways down the road. We don’t know for sure that Will runs for and wins that difficult Congressional seat in Oregon, but we know he’s a Congressman by the time he’s shaking hands with Bartlet at the dedication of his Presidential Library. And we don’t know for certain whether Toby gets a pardon, but we know he’s at Columbia, on speaking terms with Bartlet, and most importantly, not in jail, three years from now.
The upshot is that despite the fact that the episode plays around in the uncertainty of what’s to come for all these characters, we already know, more or less, what that is. That means The West Wing has to make that journey, these decision points, interesting in and of themselves, not just as a means to solving a mystery that can coast on the intrigue of learning how things turn out.
That tack works well enough for Will Bailey. He and Kate’s romance has been fairly superfluous. They’re kind of cute together now and then, but mostly they’re just kind of there, seemingly slapped together because neither has anything more interesting to do. That said, the idea of Will going to the DCCC makes sense, given his experience running campaigns at both a high and a low level, as Kate points out.
But the switch for him from the back end to the front end of politics is an interesting prospect. The fact that he became de facto White House spokesman gives him the stand up experience to excel at the public-facing side of the job (or at least survive it). And while I’m not super invested in the pair's relationship, there’s something nice about Kate recognizing Will's potential and pushing him to go for it.
Toby, on the other hand, seems poised to be cut off from the political world that had once been his lifeblood. He’s too proud and at the same time, too ashamed to ask for anything less than the punishment he's set to receive.
In the shadow of this, the possibility of his dear friends trying to get him a pardon is a story with legs and emotional weight. Andi showing C.J. pictures of their kids, and emphasizing that Toby's children will grow up while he's behind bars and that he was once their good friend, is a nice reminder of what’s at stake for him personally, but also in relation to these people who were in the trenches with him for so long.
And the reciprocal scene where C.J. meets Toby face to face for the first time since his confession is charged in all the right ways. Admittedly, there’s some awkward intimations that C.J. never made time to find a man because she had all these men around her, and some weird romantic tension played up between her and Toby. But Richard Schiff and Allison Janey are both such great actors in these roles, and have such a rapport, that you can feel their years of friendship, the way they’re pushing each other to do what they don’t necessarily want to but what’s best for each of them, in every exchange in what is the episode’s sequence.
The biggest decision and the most focus, however, is on C.J. as she decides between a return engagement in the Santos White House, or the prospect of a new frontier with an eccentric billionaire who wants to give her ten billion dollars to save the world. As with the Toby sequence, there’s some off-putting subtext to this storyline, where as much as this big choice is about her job, it’s also about her allowing herself a relationship. There’s meat to that, to the way that all of these people: Josh, Toby, Leo, and yes, C.J. have worked themselves to the point that they’ve basically closed themselves off from having a romantic life. The optics are just a little off in the context of the show’s most prominent and successful woman.
That said, as I’ve said before, C.J.’s my favorite character, and I am a sucker for her and Danny, so I was largely on board here. I like the tension between C.J. feeling like she has a duty to the office of the President on the one hand, despite the fact that she is beleaguered and, if she’s honest with herself, yearning for a different sort of life after eight years of the grind of the West Wing, and also kind of loving the idea of getting to slow down and really dig into one problem rather than having to constantly put out fires stemming from the fifty crises a day that pop up when you’re working for the commander-in-chief.
Of course, she’s also choosing between a life where the most she can have is a sporadic booty call where she and Danny never really have “the talk,” and one where she can have the time to be with that teddy bear of a man. I think what saves that part of the story for me is the fact that Danny doesn’t want her to pick one job or another, he just wants to be a part of the conversation. He’s accepting and happy to be “Mr. C.J. Cregg” but just wants to be a part of her life, to get to talk to her, to get to be in the future of this amazing woman. Most of all, he wants her to pick what she really wants, the thing that will make her happy.
And she does (or at least, we think she does)! And Will becomes a Congressman! And Toby stays out of jail! And despite the fact that we know all of this, that we know there’s happy endings in store, there’s still stakes to these big decisions, these life-altering paths because of the way the characters we care about struggle to make them, wrestle with the choices presented to them. The West Wing is a show that’s often gotten by on its crises of the week, but which is made compelling by the stories of the people handling those crises. That holds true even when the crises are all but over, when the future is known, and all we’re left with is these great characters, figuring out how to get there.
I think 10 episodes is overkill. I mean in this episode you would think Brady would go after Jerome or maybe even his dog. To get at Hodges. Instead he targets a white power guy, from a previous episode. When the guy calls him dickless at work, that just fuels Brady to go after him harder.
The Brendan Gleeson and Mary-Louise Parker chemistry mostly got me through this one. Otherwise it's time to intensify things between Hodges and Brady more.
Plus doesn't make sense that Brady and his mom panicked when the younger brother was choking. But just watch him die, like zombies when he fell down the stairs ?
Slow. Usual gruesome gut-punch KIng whose obsession with 'hand jobs' and other stuff is evident. Some things are just better left to the imagination.
Significantly more balanced between its stylish idiosyncrasies and emotional undercurrents than Vol. 1, injecting the Bride with a fierce matriarchal stimulus, but its wonky structure still confines it from reaching narrative transcendence.
Ok, it's dystopian as fuck, but that does not make a story. This was a good introduction, to show how fucked up this world is. The Ceremony and the particicution are really disturbing. Now waiting to see what the story will be about. Guess they will be some kind of Resistance. The story of how this society came to be might even be more interesting.
That episode was hard to watch. It’s horrible how they treat lesbians. Gender traitor, wtf? Alexis Bledel is brilliant in this role.
Interesting how they tried to rebel however they can, even if it's teenager level.
I don't get this thing with the driver. Looks so forced. Scenarists were like "Well she still has to flirt with somebody. There's litterally only one other male character. So let's go with him.".
And ok, Nolite te bastardes carborundorum, bitches was a great line.
I liked the bit where the new Offglen told June that the new order is good for her - that part was very realistic, because it's true, even if the worst of the regimes there are some who end up better than before.
I don't think that the scene with Emily-now-Offsteven was great or moving - It's just plain terrorism and the specific guard she killed wasn't to blame for anything, it just shows the nature of some extremists who think their misery is an excuse for hurting others.
And in general, it feels like people are just people, lust is lust - and June just missed good sex :) I'm not moved by the so-called feminist agenda, I don't see anything realistic about the idea, but the story itself is not that bad, the music placement is enjoyable, so it worth going on with it.
If it's a trap, June's story moves forward. If it's the truth, June's story moves forward. Either way, something has to break the monotony of her tale so far.
The 'dead' husband was the most obvious thing that could get this dead otherwise plot going. Apart of the resistance that is. This show is terribly written.
Great episode so far. I have not been disappointed with any as of yet. Would highly recommend watching this series.
i loooove the interaction between Tyler Labine and Anupam Kher. It is hillarious.
I'm really, really liking this show. Both the medical and human elements are compelling.
But the chinese girl's hair was whack. That was a wig, right?
That is a weak episode by any definition but for a season finale that is low.
I remember everyone on the cast talking about how they never thought they would reach a second season and judging by that episode the producers must have felt the same. Not wanting to end on a real cliffhanger yet provide some kind of incentive for viewers to come back should there be one.
From the comment by user "dgw" I would think that strike was a factor but in any case it is badly written throughout with several logical errors. The survivors from the cryo-pod are painfully clichèd. They are, what was thought at the end of the 80s, how people would be like in the future. Yet they appear much more back in time then the 80s. I also don't like the light hearted music they played over a scene everytime something is supposed to be funny. Switching the storylines and making the destroyed outposts and the Rumalans more prominent could have given this episode more grip.
The only real positive for me is the appearance of Marc Alaimo.
The worst episode of any Trek series I've seen in a while. Though the acting was great and the plot was decent, a higher amount of profanities than usual, not the mention the creepy aliens, messed things up for me. Let's hope the season finale ends things on a better note.
