The second part resolves this with a much more tense and exciting episode, which - unlike many previous Trek double episodes - lives up to the promise of the first one. Avery Brooks in particular is on fire here, giving a great performance and letting a lot of anger through which feels appropriate for the situation.
The episode also highlights how much Dr. Bashir has grown. Pairing him up with Sisko is something that we haven't seen very much, and it would be easy for Julian to get lost in the commander's large shadow, but he really holds his own and acts maturely throughout the whole adventure. He's caring and compassionate while never backing down, and it's probably this episode that made me really like him at long last.
Frank Military is also really memorable as the slightly unhinged BC, who is given a much more rounded personality here and comes off as one of the strongest parts, despite how antagonistic he is. I particularly love his really unexpected line, "Errol Flynn was born in Tasmania!"
The small amount of comedy with Kira and O'Brien is appreciated, as otherwise this would be a really heavy episode. Dax's adventure is probably the least interesting part, although we get an amusing if odd appearance by Clint Howard (although, those are pretty much his defining characteristics). This two-parter was a real high point of early DS9, and I'm blown away at its powerful and relevant messages.
Mostly memorably for the pretty great twist at the end, but it's Nog's story which remains the best part of the episode. His desire to enter Starfleet seems to come out of nowhere, but through a combination of some good writing and Aron Eisenberg's great performance, it all manages to feel right. The scene in which Sisko wrings his reasons out of him is mesmerising to watch due to impressive work from both actors. I also love the moment in which Rom defies Quark and lets Nog know he would be proud of him.
The Kira/Odo A-plot is a bit more problematic. Not because of it's content, which is great, but because of how off so much of it feels in execution. Nana Visitor's performance is just not very good, and while I sincerely hope that this because she was trying to convey that she's NOT really Kira, it's something that I can't say with certainty. Her strained voice becomes grating very quickly, and the dialogue is unnatural. Again, possibly clues that she's not who she appears to be, but hard to watch without cringing.
Rene Auberjoinois, meanwhile, is fantastic. The story of how he got his name is charming, and it's heartbreaking that the reason he realises he's not talking to Kira is because she tells him that she loves him too.
O'Brien must suffer! A fairly unique time-travel episode with a cool idea behind it. It stumbles a little bit because as it goes on, more and more it bugs me that things don't quite make sense. Especially once O'Brien travels ahead for the final time, why hasn't the Miles he meets already done the same thing? "I hate temporal mechanics" indeed!
It's most memorable for doing a very non-Star Trek thing, and that's killing the main character! It somehow feels quite daring that they decided to kill of "our" O'Brien and use the future O'Brien for the rest of the series (this echoes back to the original plan with Thomas and Will Riker, which the producers eventually thought went too far). Even though there's no real difference between them, the script does reflect the viewer's own thoughts in that somehow it's like he doesn't belong here. I wonder if he ever told Keiko and Molly about it?
The Miles/Julian friendship is pretty firmly established now, through their dartboard being set up in the bar and the amusing argument they have about letting Miles die. The show made this friendship grow very naturally across the past seasons, and I love it.
The Romulan stuff is surprisingly boring. Kira's outrage feels a bit stale, and why they even bother to interview Quark I don't know. Odo's stuff is much better and he's quite funny all the way through - I especially like his fake indignation in regards to what Kira tells him. It does seem more than a little obvious that the singularity orbiting the station is a cloaked Romulan ship, though, why did none of the crew think of that?
This is an episode made up on some extremely powerful moments, yet somehow when it's all put together I just don't find myself all that enticed and I'm hard pressed to say exactly why.
The Odo/Garak stuff is still the bulk of the story, continuing on from the previous episode. Here they are much more at odds with each other and while they were never particularly friendly towards each other, this really shows that what they go through here puts a strain on whatever relationship they did have. This is supposed to be Garak back in his element, but all we see is a man who wishes he were anywhere else rather than having to torture Odo.
And the torture scene is pretty heavy stuff, at least in the terms of this franchise. Excellent make-up on Odo makes him look like he's drying up and flaking into pieces which is quite a horrifying effect. Still, the impact on character is the real punch to the gut here as Garak begs him to just make up something so that he can end the interrogation, and we get Odo's admission that he just wants to be with his own people.
I can't think of another franchise that would have two characters bonding over one torturing the other, as the episode ends with a wonderful scene that seems to solidify a friendship between the two of them. It's also shot beautifully with Odo's reflection being revealed in the dirty mirror - in fact, the entire episode is full of quite fantastic cinematography including dutch angles and extreme close ups.
This also gives us DS9's first real major space battle, and it's pretty impressive. The Defiant finally gets to show its teeth as it mows its way through Jem'Hadar ships. It feels like we've been waiting a long time to see that.
And yet, I don't find myself being able to love the episode. Perhaps its because the Romulan/Cardassian stuff is so laboured, or maybe it's because I realised that this is the episode which really made me dismiss Enabran Tain as a watchable character. The guy is so driven by his ego and acts so magnanimously, but when it all falls apart at the end he's revealed to be a gibbering wreck. It could have been a great role but Paul Dooley just doesn't cut it for me because it feels cartoonish.
Maybe it's because this episode has MAJOR events for the Trek universe happening - both the Obsidian Order and Tal Shiar are wiped out, and the Dominion show their truly aggressive side - and yet, it doesn't really register as a massive thing.
All that, and the rest of the DS9 crew barely get a look in. Sisko defies orders and (of course) gets away with no repercussions. Dax gets to show of her piloting skills, O'Brien gets to fix things and Eddington reappears for the first time since his initial appearance and pretty much reveals himself to be a dick. I did quite enjoy Bashir trying to substitute O'Brien as a replacement for a lunch partner, and the whole thing failing.
This will always remain among my favourite episodes. It's full of joy and the spirit of exploration as well as being all about the father/son relationship portrayed so well by Brooks and Lofton. It feels like it's been a while since we've spent time with Benjamin and Jake, so this makes up for it very nicely.
It's not a flashy episode, it's a quiet character piece that lets itself have fun. We've had a hint of Jake's desire to write before, but this is the real beginning of his journey and it was always one of my favourite parts of DS9 (I always wanted to write when I was a teenager, so Jake was such a great character for me to watch). The relationship between the two of them feels so natural. I love the way Jake is nervous about showing his dad his story, and the way he makes a joke about joining the Maquis. There also seems to be a lot of delight in Avery Brooks' performance here.
The Bajoran sailing ship is a gorgeous creation. Sure, it stretches believablility that Benjamin managed to build it in a couple of weeks - especially with that level of detail - but we can let it slide. Don't forget, before being assigned to DS9 he was in charge of ship building at Utopia Planitia and designed the Defiant. The story of them getting all the way to Cardassia is just lovely and peaceful, and I love the welcome that Gul Dukat gives them when they arrive (which, for once, sounds pretty sincere). Ben also gets a great scene with Dax, reminiscing about their past.
The background story isn't quite as wonderful, but there's fun to be had. Julian handing Dax a padd saying "GO AWAY" never fails to make me laugh. We get to meet Leeta for the first time, who will become quite important.
Drunk Bashir and O'Brien is one of my favourite scenes in all of DS9, and they both play it really well. I love that their friendship has now reached this point, and I love that O'Brien declares "I really do... not hate you anymore!".
Also, important to note: the beard has appeared. It's funny, because it coincides with a change in the series which is going to propel it's quality up and and up. To me, this episode does represent the beginning of the real DS9, there's a change in the mood of the show and everything just feels like it's working perfectly.
Slightly more hit than miss, this Ferengi episode manages to be pretty good because it isn't full of crazy antics. Instead, we get a grounded and simple story about family and that's what makes it work. The different dynamics between how Quark, Rom and their mother each treat each other make them highly watchable, possibly relatable and sometimes cringeworthy! It's almost shocking to see how vicious Quark and his mother can be to each other but the comedy keeps things from descending into uncomfortable territory (well, apart from the brother's desire to see their mother unclothed).
It tackles Ferengi sexism head on, and is pretty successful at it. Ishka is maybe a bit much to take with a very big performance, but all of the points she raises are entirely valid. It was also telling that Quark was disgusted with the idea of a female earning profit until he thought she was willing to share it with him. Greed is indeed eternal.
One of the real joys here comes from the introduction of Brunt (FCA), played by the excellent Jeffrey Combs. He's one of the best characters on the show, always good for a laugh and always easy to hate. I also like our first look at Ferenginar and the culture that exists there, notably with the way they have to pay each other for the most basic tasks like entering someone's home, using an elevator or sitting in a chair.
I actually found myself enjoying the background story a bit more. Commander Sisko has his first date with Kassidy and they hit it off in quite a delightful fashion by bonding over baseball. I love Jake's happy reaction as he watches from a distance, and the gossip he's spread around the station is pretty funny.
I don't dislike (most) Ferengi episodes, I just find them difficult to get excited about.
I do enjoy episodes about Bajoran culture and politics, but this one just misses the mark. Shakaar and his band of resistance fighters just aren't interesting enough to carry an episode.
Sisko mentions to Kai Winn at one point that this whole thing seems like an overreaction, and I feel like that applies to the whole episode. The fact that Kira and co. immediately go back to their old resistance fighting ways is more than slightly ridiculous. It also means that we have to endure the stock locations of caves and quarries while members of the group bicker with each other over tactics.
It gets some redemption by a pretty great ending, though. Kira (and Shakaar's) realisation that they can't bring themselves to fire on their own people really hits home that they are not in the same situation they were with the Cardassians. The conversation with Colonel Lenaris is mature and sensible, and I love the way they beat Winn at her own game. "Mature and sensible" certainly isn't a phrase that can ever be applied to her, and Louise Fletcher continues to absolutely shine in the role of someone you just want to scream at. It's no surprise that Kira finally has enough of her in this one.
I'm glad that the show has finally acknowledged Kira's mourning of Bareil, and her decision to now move on. It felt like he had been forgotten and his death hadn't really affected her.
As for the b-story with O'Brien playing darts, I'm not sure what that's all about at all. A fun diversion but there's nothing to it, and it feels like it's underusing the actors.
A cosy episode that is a fantastic exploration of Jadzia and allows the cast to have fun by taking on different roles. We learn about all of the Dax hosts, and this works out quite nicely for me as I recently read the 'Lives of Dax' short story collection, so there was a lot of familiar stuff here.
But I do find this to be a bit of a missed opportunity. I really want to spend more time with each of the host personalities and am disappointed that we only get tiny glimpse of Lela, Tobin, etc. Cramming them all together in what is little more than a montage is a bit of a disservice and also spoils the pacing a bit. It's also weird the way the Leeta is shoehorned in as one of Dax's closest friends simply because they needed an extra person.
But Curzon/Odo is quite interesting to see and Rene Auberjoinois certainly puts in a great performance. He's almost upstaged by Joran/Sisko who goes super creepy. It's maybe a bit pantomime but Avery Brooks' quirky acting is nicely off kilter.
The background story also deserved more time. I really wanted to see the tests that Nog had to take (and his Starfleet desires haven't really been mentioned for a long while). I particularly loved how assertive Rom became when he figured out what his brother was doing.
There does seem to be a massive plot hole here for me, which has always bugged me: why doesn't Jadzia already know why Curzon denied her application, or that he was in love with her? She has ALL of his memories! That seems to be a big oversight in the writing department and ultimately ruins the entire central concept of the episode.
Side note: I have memories of this episode being advertised. When we first got Sky TV in the family home, DS9 season 3 was nearing the end of it's UK premiere run and this episodes had adverts all over Sky One, along with 'The Adversary' the next week.
As season enders go, this is an excellent example. It gives us the setup for the show going forward from this point and makes the Changeling threat suddenly feel very real. The whole episode has a wonderful sense of isolation, claustrophobia and paranoia. While it's hard not to view it as a fairly obvious rip-off of The Thing (down to the blood test scene), this puts a nice Trek slant on that. Maybe it just appeals to me because it's sort of like a monster/creature feature.
Sisko finally gets a promotion to fully fledged Captain. Part of me wonders why the hell he wasn't already a captain when the show began, part of me thinks that his rank doesn't really matter. But there's something very inherent to the way Star Trek works, and having a captain being in charge is a part of that. At any rate, it suits Sisko very well and does lend him more of an air of authority. Looking back, I have to wonder why all those admirals and ambassadors were ever listening to a lowly commander for the past three seasons.
The episode throws in some tried and tested moments that are always used when sci-fi does a "doppelganger/impersonator" episode, but it makes them exciting. It succeeds in that it keeps you guessing and surprises you when the revelations come. The two Odo's saying "no, he's the Changeling!" is great, no matter how many times I've seen it.
If I had to criticise the episode, I would say that the central premise of the Defiant going into Tzenkethi space doesn't make sense - why didn't Sisko just check with his superiors about what's going on? Since when does an ambassador order him on missions? We also never get an explanation for the weird living cables that have infested the ship's systems, what the hell were they? This is a big episode for Odo's character as he becomes the first Changeling to ever harm another and he also speaks about not really understanding his own people; this doesn't really track with his behaviour earlier when he seems to act like he knows exactly what the Changeling will be up to.
Minor quibbles in an otherwise excellent episode that has a great ending. "It's too late. We are everywhere." If that doesn't bring you back for more, I don't know what will. Get ready, DS9 is about to go through a change, and it's going to be awesome.
Reviewing this as a complete 90-minute movie rather than two separate episodes.
"Worf... WOOOOOOOORRRRRFFF!!!!!!" - Gowron
It's hard to talk about 'The Way of the Warrior' without acknowledging what a kick in the arse it was for DS9. It can be seen almost as a second pilot for the show given how it changes things up so much. It sets in motion a massive story arc and gives us a new main character by bringing Worf over from TNG. It gives us a modified title sequence and reworked version of the theme tune, both of which are more active and less forlorn. There are people who claim that this is where the show really begins, and in some ways it's hard to argue with them. Myself, I think the previous three seasons have been instrumental in building up to this, though.
Klingons. That's what we get here, a lot of them, and we're going to be seeing them for quite some time. It's a big move to make them the Federation's enemy again and also very exciting. From the off, it's clear that action is going play a bigger part in the show than it has previously, but we're also shown that it's not going to do that at the expense of character. Each person here is engaging in the action scenes specific to their own character's strengths and it's allowing their individualities to show. That ranges from Jadzia allowing her knowledge of Klingon combat to come through to Garak teaming up with his greatest enemy and making snarky comments while fighting side by side.
If the show does anything a bit wrong, it's that it might focus a bit too much of making it all about Worf. He's bringing a lot of baggage with him, and his past dealings with the Klingon leaders are crucial to why he's there. For all that, I do feel that Worf fits perfectly on the station and integrates very well with the rest of the crew. Garak also seems to fit in better than previously, and we see that he's dining with Odo as was once hinted at. It's also great the way the crew inform him that his homeworld is about to be invaded.
Sisko also seems to have kicked things up a notch. His shaved head makes him feel like even more of a force to be reckoned with, but he goes toe-to-toe with the Klingons and doesn't back down an inch. His talks with Worf about staying in Starfleet show how at ease he now feels with his role in command of the station. I like our introduction to Martok (whom, if you've seen the show before, you might know that he is actually a Changeling, which makes things even more interesting in retrospect).
The battle with the Klingon fleet still remains impressive, if quite small scale by today's standards. I remember watching this in the '90s and being blown away by how good it all looked and how exciting it was. I hadn't really seen stuff like it on television before. I love that the station is now decked out with an arsenal of weapons and it says that this place is now prepared for full on war. An action packed and beautifully involved piece of television, this is essential viewing. Maybe way too much exposition in the dialogue, especially at the start, but that's just how Trek does things.
How do I begin to sum up 'The Visitor'? It's not only one of the finest episodes in all of Star Trek, it's one of the best pieces of television ever made. Every time I see it, I end up in tears. But it's not an overly sentimental tearjerker, it's subtle and honest in its storytelling. It's delightfully simple and self-contained, making it something that you can watch even if you've never seen any of DS9 before.
I think what clicks for me always is the performances. Everything that makes Avery Brooks my favourite Star Trek captain is displayed here, not only because of his performance but because of what he allowed Captain Sisko to be. He's a family man and a father before he is a Starfleet officer, and he's never afraid to show his vulnerable and caring side. Duty is important to him, but it's with the simple things in life that his heart really lies.
To complement that, Cirroc Lofton as Jake is probably the best he's ever been so far. The moment where his father first comes back and asks how he's doing, and instead of being able to reply he just starts to cry sums up so much of their close father/son relationship. Jake really needs his dad, even relies on him and there's a really deep love between them, undoubtedly solidified more since he lost his mother. We can see that without his dad, Jake turns completely away from the life he could have and shuts the doors to so many other people and paths. My favourite moment is actually the last time Sisko appears and he just watches old Jake sleeping with such a lovely expression on his face.
Then there's Tony Todd playing the older Jake who also is magnificent. While the old-age makeup effects still look kind of terrible (always a problem, they looked terrible back in the 1990s too), the performances are fortunately able to come through. He also has a great chemistry with the young lady playing Melanie.
Maybe there's a bit too much technobabble at moments, butI love this episode and it will make you want to go and see your dad.
How delightful it is to come across an episode of your favourite TV show that you had almost forgotten. As it went on, more of it came back to me, but at the start I really couldn't recall where it was all going.
Gul Dukat has been a presence on the show since the beginning, but he's slowly received more and more development over time. Despite previous episodes spent with him ('The Maquis', 'Defiant') which gave us titbits, this is probably one of the first truly deep dives into what makes him tick. A large reason for it feeling so much more satisfying here is because he's paired up with Kira, and the two of them together really bring out a more truthful side to both of them. For Dukat, family does really seem to be the most important thing (and family will heavily influence his actions later in the series), but you can't help but wonder how much he's really in it for himself.
The show has also gotten me invested in the relationship of these two due to how much we've learned about their backgrounds. By all rights, Kira and Dukat should more or less despise each other but they've both learned that things are never quite as clear cut as that. Kira certainly has more right to feel hatred but she knows that all Cardassians are not the same. The scene in which Dukat sits on a thorn (?) and they both end up laughing is genuinely great and beautifully natural. It occurred to me here that I really want these two characters to get along.
Things get much more serious towards the end as we learn that Dukat has a half-Bajoran daughter, Ziyal. This is one of my favourite plot points of the series, but it also had the added issue (as it went on) of making Dukat very sympathetic. Whether that's a good or bad thing is different for every viewer, but for me I think it's always amazing if you end up feeling something for the "bad" guy and is only a sign of good writing. For all that, it still feels like a mistake to trust him and you always get the feeling that he has something else going on, and that something is probably not good. His charm can make you forget that he's a mass murderer, and it's easy to be disarmed because he believes that what he did was right. Just one of the best characters in the entire franchise.
Apart from that, meeting the Breen for the first time is a bit underwhelming. The Sisko/Kassidy relationship is a pleasant background story, with the best scene being the informal chat with Jadzia and Julian. Sisko's admission to Kassidy about his fears is excellent, and it seems like their relationship is about to proceed to a deeper level.
[9.7/10] Doing satisfying fan service that doesn’t just feel like empty calories is hard. Doing time travel stories is hard. Doing stories where you mix a familiar story with a new one is hard. Mixing old a new footage in a satisfying way is hard. Blending a current series with a classic one is hard. And yet, “Trial and Tribble-ations” succeeds at all of it.
That’s why I’ve ranked this one so highly. Is it the best ever episode in the Star Trek franchise? Certainly not. Is it even the episode of Deep Space 9? Probably not. But the task at hand was so hard, the pitfalls so many, and the folks behind the scenes at DS9 managed to craft a funny, clever, nostalgic, winking, and above all satisfying hour of television.
It’s particularly interesting revisiting “Trials” after watching the original “Trouble with Tribbles” episode of The Original Series. That only heightens the potential difficulties in appreciating the modern follow-on, because it should more clearly expose the seams in the way that “Trials” attempts to integrate itself with the classic. Instead, it just makes it all the more impressive what attention to detail the people who made the DS9 episode (who are clearly very admiring of their 60s predecessor) showed in sending Sisko and company back to TOS.
What’s really impressive is the way that the episode manages to have its cake and eat it too when it comes to nodding at the sillier or fan-noted elements of the original Star Trek. There’s plenty of opportunities for DS9 to poke fun at its predecessor. Everything from the short skirts of the female officers on the Enterprise to the jerry-rigged control stations get a wink. Kirk in particular gets a few nods of his own, from the Temporal Agents noting how many violations he had to Sisko noting that he was known as quite the ladies man. There’s even some fun riffing on fan fascinations like Bashir, Odo, and O’Brien asking Worf about the ridgeless Klingons or Dax having a crush on Spock.
Still, for all “Trials” has fun focusing on the eccentricities and rib-elbowing elements of revisiting The Original Series, it’s also clearly so reverent and loving of the old Star Trek that those gags never mean spirit. When Dax admires the black finish and silver accents of the old tricorders or, in the episode’s crowning moment, Captain Sisko tells Captain Kirk what an honor it is to serve under him, however fleetingly, it’s obvious how much writers René Echevarria and Ronald D. Moore (of later Battlestar Galactica fame) admire the old series, with their observations coming from a place of affection not derision.
Echevarria and Moore also do well to find an interesting hook for our modern day heroes to have something to do back in the 23rd century. While the orb of time is fairly convenient as a device that sends them back in time, “Trials” manages to have its own plot that compliments, rather than clashes or feels glommed onto the original story in “Troubles.” The episode benefits from using a light touch, keeping Sisko and co. near the action, but only getting directly involved when necessary and plausible, preventing things from getting too cute in the matching.
I’m also a sucker for long-term continuity, so I love the fact that they got Charlie Brill back to play secret Klingon Arne Darvin as an old man, who’s returning to the past to fix what went wrong for him the first time. The episode does a nice job at giving us just enough of a post-mortem on “Troubles” -- the Klingons struggled to eradicate the tribbles after Scotty beamed them aboard Koloth’s ship, and Darvin was excommunicated by both the Federation and Klingons -- to give context to the choices people are making here. It helps make the main plot of the episode, that Darvin has planted a bomb to kill Kirk and make him a hero rather than a scapegoat in Klingon history and Sisko and his crew have to find, work on its own terms, not just as an add-on to the story we know from “Trouble.”
If that weren’t enough, there’s all sorts of amusing riffs on the sort of confusion and tropes that come with any kind of time travel story. It’s great how jaded and world-weary (time weary?) the temporal agents are in their back-and-forth with Sisko, lamenting stable time loops and other stock answers in time-hopping tales like they’ve heard them a million times. Beyond that, O’Brien and Bashir have a nice moment where they debate the old “I’m my own grandpa” paradox in an amusing fashion years before the cast of Futurama would do the same. Again, the writers are laughing about the conventions of time travel, a well Star Trek returns to often, but do so lovingly.
It also must be said how well the effects team integrates the cast of Deep Space 9 into the various scenes from The Original Series. I remembered the effects as having been impressive at the time, but it’s amazing how well they hold up twenty years later. Again, it’s clear that the show took great care in not overdoing it, but throwing in just enough interactions and connections to thrill without going overboard. The restraint is admirable.
So is the devotion to visual continuity. While it’d be nigh-impossible to bridge the gap between sixties shooting techniques and nineties network television, “Trials” does one hell of a job. Much of it comes from simply editing new footage with old footage in a coherent fashion, to where bits like Bashir, Worf, Odo, and O’Brien getting involved in the bar fight on K9 or Dax shrugging at Captain Kirk work more from stitching the episode together than any special effects. (And it must be said that the lighting and costumes are spot on and help create that continuity.)
But the effects shine as well. While there’s seams here and there (the difference in audio quality is particularly notable), the folks behind the scenes did a tremendous job of depositing the Deep Space 9 cast into the old clips. Much of it works by simply placing the Defiant’s crew in the background, making them notable but not distracting, but it works just as well when the show gets more ambitious as well, whether it’s standing O’Brien next to Chekov when the crew’s being interrogated about the fight or putting Sisko face-to-face with Kirk.
That’s what makes “Trials and Tribble-ations” such a gem. It is absolutely an achievement of craft -- with well done effects work, production design, and editing to meld the two shows made thirty years apart. But it’s also an achievement in writing, finding ways to nod at the rhythms and style of the old series but also to honor it, while telling a story of its own. It would be so easy for the episode to settle at “pretty good” and coast on the thrill of blending new and old. Instead, Deep Space 9 nails it, finding the perfect mix of humor, adventure, nostalgia, and fun. It may not be the best episode of Star Trek, but it’s one of the hardest episodes to get right, and “Trials” absolutely does.
Jimmy has hustle. Mike feels obligated to help his daughter-in-law. And Jimmy loves his brother.
It's so easy to boil these episodes down to a few simple themes, and yet it's the way the show depicts and explores them that makes it superlative.
Take Mike's storyline for instance. It's literally three scenes, each of them fairly short, and yet all of them communicate a great deal about who Mike is and what his motivation and moral calculus is in that brief time. When Mike is on the phone with his daughter-in-law in the tollbooth, we see him not only stand at attention, but wave someone through the gate without bothering to check their stickers. If there's one thing we've seen from Mike in Better Call Saul, it's a devotion to the rules of the parking lot, where he hassles Jimmy and even if it seems dumb, he falls back on the fact that it's just "the rules." And yet he tells his son's wife that he'll drop whatever he's doing, whenever he needs her. We see that dramatized as suddenly those same rules have no purchase with the previously doctrinaire Mr. Ehrmentraut, and it emphasizes the truth of his promise to help her however he can, with the subtext of his guilt for, in his mind, taking her husband away from her.
Then we see the not-so-subtle manipulation from Stacey, who initially asks Mike if it's okay to spend the money that effectively got her husband killed, and after receiving Mike's blessing, seamlessly segues into talking about how hard it is to make ends meet without him. She let's the silence after this statement hang in the air before sneaking a furtive glance at Mike. Mike's a smart guy; he has to know that Stacey is effectively using Mike's guilt to convince him to help them out financially. It's not necessarily craven; as a single mother of a young child, she likely needs a great deal of support. and yet at the same time, it does feel uncomfortable to see her taking advantage of Mike's guilt rather than simply asking him for help. But the look on Mike's face says it all, and speaks to the depth of those feelings of remorse and regret. So when we see him back at the vet's office, looking for "work," we get one step closer to the Mike we know and love Breaking Bad.
Throughout all of this, Mike never once says how important Stacey and her daughter's well-being are to him; we never hear him say how much his guilt over his son's death still drives him; and we never hear him say that's he's dipping into the underworld in order to help support Stacey and clear his conscience for what happened with Matty. And yet all of those things are 100% clear from his actions, from what we know about the character from prior episodes, and from the relationships the show has built so far. It's not even that big a part of the episode! And it still moves Mike's arc forward quite a bit in a very limited amount of screentime because of how much it says without saying anything.
That's the beauty of Better Call Saul (or, at least the beauty apart from wonderfully composed and framed shots like the one at the end of this episode). Vince Gilligan and his lieutenants know how to tell you what a character is thinking, what they're feeling, what's pushing them in one direction or another, with the characters rarely having to announce or vocalize these things. In fact, the show's pretty good about having a character declare something about themselves or their intentions while conveying the opposite. It's the epitome of "show, don't tell" storytelling, and it's one of the things that makes the series so engaging despite the fact, or perhaps because, you can boil a given episode's big ideas down to a few short sentences.
In the same vein, no one in "RICO" ever tells us that Jimmy has the utmost admiration and affection for his brother, or that what he lacks in Chuck's brilliance he makes up for in sweat, or that the scales are tipped against him. But it all comes through loud and clear.
The hustle is the easiest to process. The idea that Jimmy worked in the mailroom of his brother's firm, that he used distance learning to make up his remaining credits, that he found a law school that would accept him and managed, after a couple of failed attempts, to pass the bar, shows remarkable commitment and perseverance. And when we see him combing through a dumpster in order to find the shredded documents he needs to make his RICO case against the nursing home, when we see him tirelessly trying to piece together the shredded documents, we see him working harder than his well-heeled colleague on the other side of the case would ever have to. It comes through, and we learn a little more about who he is, what makes him admirable despite a certain shadiness, and what differentiates him from the other folks in his orbit.
But we also see some really cleverness from him. He's obviously not the precedent-spouting legal whiz that Chuck is, but he picks up on the irregularities in the story his wills client is telling him; he figures out a MacGyver-esque plan to write a demand letter and try to stop the spoliation of evidence then and there, and he even has the wherewithal to stake out the nursing home's garbage to collect the evidence (with proper legal support for why it's acceptable!) even if he's not quite clever enough to check the recycle bins first.
And it's also clear that Jimmy both loves and admires his brother. Again, the show never outright says that Jimmy became a lawyer because 1. he wanted to make his brother proud of him and 2. he respects Chuck so much that he thought the best way to make himself respectable would be to emulate his brother, but that subtext (and Chuck's bemused, slightly incredulous, but warm surprise at the news in the flashback), is palpable throughout. There's something aspirational about Jimmy here, and that makes the audience all the more apt to side with him when Hamlin crushes his dreams of working alongside chuck (in a wonderfully effective, dialogue-free scene), or when the nursing home's lawyers try to intimidate and condescend to him.
Jimmy wants to become his brother's equal, to measure up to the man who always stood out as the best a McGill could be in contrast to his good-for-nothing little brother. He loves Chuck, and while Chuck can be a bit patronizing to Jimmy as well, the affection is clearly mutual, as is the pride when Chuck realizes what Jimmy's managed to uncover. And Chuck is revitalized by that. He's quiet and nervous in the negotiation until he speaks up and demands the $20 million like the legal ace we see in the opening flashback.
The series has yet to tell us how Chuck went from being the star partner we see in that flashback to the beleaguered shut-in we meet at the beginning of Better Call Saul, but what we've seen thus far suggests that he's suffered a loss, a setback, that made him not himself, that made him feel less than capable, and that he became convinced of his electromagnetic sensitivity as a way to shield or excuse himself from that. And we see Jimmy putting little breadcrumbs to help bring his brother back to who he was. That's what makes the scene at the end of the episode so flabbergasting, where Chuck is once again in his element, to the point that he doesn't even realize he's stepped outside without any ill-effects. There's still problems on the horizon (Chuck's partnership agreement and the use of his billing code seems like a Chekov's gun for one thing), but the enormity of that moment, and the build to get there, are all expressed with hardly a word, and without ever making those concepts too literal or blunt. It's a thing of beauty, and part of what makes "RICO" such a superlative episode of television, and Better Call Saul a great series right out of the gate.
I've seen some gripes that people like Better Call Saul, but that sometimes it feels like it's two different shows hot-glued together. It's true that there's a particular storyline focused on Jimmy's trials and travails with Kim and his brother, and another with Mike getting mixed up with Salamancas. While the leads of each story bump into one another from time to time, there's not a strong plot-based connection between the two of them.
Despite that, in episodes like "Nailed," there's a strong thematic connection between the two of them. In the episode, both Jimmy and MIke have pulled a con of some kind, in the hopes of protecting someone else but in a way that benefits them. Jimmy's adventures at the copy center in "Fifi" led to Kim winning Mesa Verde back, and Mike's road obstacle is intended to draw the cops' attention to Hector and keep him too otherwise occupied to threaten his family, but also leads to Mike pocketing a nice quarter-mil. And each has the added bonus of this windfall coming at the expense of someone they have beef with. For Jimmy, it's a chance to get back at his brother, and for Mike, it's a chance for him to stick it to Hector after causing him such a headache.
And both Mike and Jimmy are pros, so they know how to cover their tracks. Jimmy is meticulous about transposing the address (as Chuck points out, he was never lazy), and removes the evidence of his forgery while Chuck is out of the house. Mike, meanwhile, wears a ski mark, blindfolds the Salamana associate he's ripping off, and makes sure he's neither seen nor heard.
But despite the fact that each of them is absolutely careful not to leave behind any corroborating or identifying evidence, each gets figured out because of who they are, because people who know them know what their M.O. is, and even if there's nothing that ties them to these crimes that would necessarily hold up in court, each incident has the trademark of the man who incited it. Chuck knows that this is what his brother does, that this is who he is, and that lets him piece together what happened. For that matter, Kim knows Jimmy too well to buy Jimmy's pleas of ignorance either. He is a huckster, and the story Chuck tells is perfectly in line with Jimmy's usual methods and motives. By the same token, even though Mike doesn't leave a trace on the road to Mexico, Nacho is able to figure out that it was him who hit the ice cream truck, because only a guy like Mike would have the stones to pull off a heist like that, but would expend such effort to avoid taking life.
And then each of them suffers an incredible setback due to the law of unintended consequences. One of the most striking parts of "Nailed" is how, for once in his life, it seems like Mike is happy. The reliable grump uses his newfound wealth to buy a round for the entire bar, and more notably, he actually smiles in the process! He flirts with the waitress at the diner, and he actually laughs! It's not a sour sarcastic laugh; it's a laugh of incredulity, of relief, that maybe things are going to work out, that maybe he can finally put all of the stress and strain he'd had to deal with since the events we witnessed in "Five-O" behind him.
Then he gets that phone call from Nacho, and as always seems to be the case in Better Call Saul and its predecessor, there's some contingency, some way that the cookie crumbled, that didn't work out just right. A good Samaritan helped the driver that Mike hogtied, and not only did it throw a monkey-wrench in his plans to take Hector off the chessboard, but that good Samaritan was shot and killed for their trouble.
Mike's moral code exposed him to Nacho, and their exchange reveals that for all the effort he went to not to have to kill anyone, not to cause anyone any harm that he could avoid, his choices still led directly to someone being killed, and because he tried to avoid killing a crazy drug lord, or that crazy drug lord's much more calculating uncle, he let a completely innocent life perish. The look on his face when he hears that news shows that it wiped away whatever joy he possessed in the rest of the episode. It's replaced with an expression of utter loss, of failure, of the best laid plans leading to the one thing he was trying to avoid.
And Jimmy has the same experience, albeit in a much different way. Jimmy seems legitimately happy when he and Kim are just palling around, painting their new office and enjoying that joking rapport that makes them feel right for one another. While his feigned surprise is not particularly convincing, there's also genuine glee when he hears that Kim got Mesa Verde back. But there's two things he doesn't count on, and each of them comes back to bite him in a particular way.
The first is that Kim figures out what happened, or at least buys that even if Chuck doesn't have the whole story, or doesn't have things 100% correct, that he's right that Jimmy tampered with Chuck's work in such a way so as to benefit her. After how clear Kim made it that she wasn't comfortable with Jimmy's methods, that she wanted to do things her own way, sink or swim, she understandably feels betrayed, even if she's not yet ready to break things off with Jimmy, let alone give up her client or expose him to the risk of being disbarred or going to jail. Despite that, the scene of the two of them in bed together, and the palpable coldness between them, feels like a mirror image of Chuck and his wife sitting in bed, similarly disconnected, in the cold open to "Rebecca." Chuck's wife isn't in the picture anymore, and we do not yet know why, but that visual rhyme, and Kim's demeanor, suggests that she may not be in Jimmy's life for much longer either.
But there's a more severe unintended consequence for Jimmy as well. Jimmy loves his brother. He hates him a little bit, but he loves him. He doesn't want to hurt Chuck; he just wants to take him down a peg, to stop him from keeping Kim from what she's owed the same way that Chuck did to him. But Jimmy's actions go further than that. They torture Chuck. He begins to suffer under the electric hum of the banking commission's offices once the alleged "discrepancy" is exposed. The blistering buzz of the florescent lights at the copy shop start to take their toll on him. Chuck's clearly at the end of his rope. He's right, but feels like the world is gas-lighting him. And he's right. All at once, it's too much for Chuck, and he cracks his head on the table and crumples to the ground. Once again, Jimmy has plied his trade as best he knows how, never meaning any real harm, but someone he cares about ends up getting seriously hurt in the process. Let's hope that Chuck fares better than Marco did.
In truth, there's a great deal of coincidence and convenience at play in "Nailed." How is it that Kim gets the call to come pick up the Mesa Verde boxes from Chuck's so soon after she wins Mesa Verde back? Chalk it up to narrative convenience. Why would she bring Jimmy along to what is already likely to be a delicate situation? Maybe she knows he's there to gloat and doesn't want to deny him, but figures he'll be on his best behavior. How is it that Chuck not only realizes that Jimmy sabotaged him, but is able to almost preternaturally piece together exactly how he did it? Welll, Chuck's a smart guy, and the show tries to handwave it by having him bring up Jimmy's fake I.D. scam in high school.
So how does Kim obliquely bring up that Jimmy needs to cover his tracks just in time for Chuck to show up to the copy shop when Ernesto just happens to be there? How is it that he just so happens to have the copy shop empty except for him and the clerk with enough time for him to lay out his bribe and his story? How is it that he has the nigh-perfect vantage point to see and understand all that's going on in the shop once Chuck rolls in? Beats me.
The episode, the acting, the direction, the dialogue, the plotting, the themes, and the show are all just too damn good to care. From the wry-edged sweetness between Jimmy and Kim as they're setting up their new apartment, to the perfectly-constructed and tension-filled hit by Mike in the desert, to the hilarious scene where Jimmy talks his way into filming on a school playground, to the frenetically shot and edited final scene where Chuck loses it, to the blistering, incredible moment where Jimmy, Kim, and Chuck are laying it out on the table for one another, there is simply too much greatness in too many modes from this show to be especially bothered by any bit of narrative convenience.
That last scene in particular is an all-timer. In "Pimento," the penultimate episode of Season 1, Jimmy confronted his brother in that same room, with a similar inflammatory atmosphere and tone to their hashing things out. Here, once again only a single episode away from the finale, the show doubles down on that concept. The tables are turned -- this time it's Chuck exposing the double cross, and for that matter, "Nailed" throws Kim into the mix, both to have the other major presence in Jimmy's life represented and exposed to this, but also to stand out as the person who sees each of these misguided men for what they are.
The anger, the betrayal, the pride, the sense of pleading in Chuck's voice as he lays this all out is remarkable. He has been betrayed by the brother whom she had just thanked for looking after him despite their issues with one another. And he has Kim there not just for the boxes, but because he wants to tell her not to make the same mistake he did, of trusting Jimmy. He knows that Jimmy did it for her, but that Jimmy will eventually do the same thing to her--betray her trust, if not twist the knife in quite the same fashion--because he can't help himself. He wants to Kim to see Jimmy clearly, without the lens of affection that's blinded him and which he thinks is blinding her.
But unbeknownst to Chuck, and for that matter the audience, Kim already knows. It's hard to tell at what moment in that scene that Kim believes what Chuck is telling her. Maybe it's Jimmy's less-than-convincing denial. Maybe it's Chuck's declaration that his brother did it for love. Maybe it's just her piecing it together in the space between the accusations and the pleas of innocence. Rhea Seehorn and Kim Wexler play it close to the vest, not letting the viewer be sure what she thinks or what she understands until the moment when her frustration erupts and she punches Jimmy's arm in the car.
Before that though, she offers the frankest, truest, and saddest assessment of the McGill boys that the show has allowed us to witness. The show commits to the feint when it has Kim pushing back at Chuck and telling him that one typo by lantern light is far more likely than Chuck's accurate but paranoid-sounding account of what happens. But then she speaks the absolute truth. Chuck made Jimmy, or at least pushed him this direction. As I've said before, Jimmy idolizes his brother, and if Chuck had returned that affection, returned that trust, just a little bit, who knows where Jimmy's talents might have been put to use.
Thus far, Better Call Saul has seemed to posit that there is something essential about Jimmy that cannot avoid taking the occasional shortcut, that cannot completely suppress his conman ways. But he toiled in the mailroom long enough to make something of himself. He dredged up the Sandpiper case not through pure dishonest trickery, but by using his resourcefulness for good. Maybe Chuck will always see his brother with a law license as a chimp with a machine gun, but with a little guidance, a little help, maybe he could at least be aiming it in the right direction.
That doesn't absolve Jimmy, and neither does Kim. She's right to be sorry for both of them, that each has made awful choices to hurt the other and, meaning to or not, her. For Jimmy, those choices led him to potentially losing the woman he loves, and have left his brother in need of an ambulance. For Mike, those choices have left him with blood on his hands once more. Jimmy and Mike never cross paths, not even for a moment in "Nailed," but by the end of the episode, they're in the exact same place.
[8.0/10] Two devices, each meant to record, to track, to create leverage over another person, are at the forefront. Each, in their own roundabout way, needs its batteries replaced, and in both instances, that necessity leads to the monitoring party being exposed. It continues to amaze me how two stories that seemingly have nothing to do with one another can maintain such close but unshowy thematic ties.
By which I mean, Better Call Saul is back! That simple parallelism is a reminder as to how great this show is at setting up the little things that have much bigger echoes. The two plots in this episode – one about the fallout from Jimmy revealing his malfeasance to Chuck, and the other hinging on Mike trying to figure out how a mysterious stranger realized he was headed out to the desert to do some business – take things slow, letting us see the incremental progress of each story thread. But it’s immediately clear in each of them how these developments are building to a bigger reckoning.
The former story centers on the lifeblood of the series – the relationship between Jimmy and Chuck. After Jimmy has seemingly resolved the issue with Chuck retiring from HHM, and helps his brother start taking down the aluminum foil, a chance discovery of an old book rescends into a mutual bit of reminiscing. Chuck talks about how he used to read to Jimmy; Jimmy compliments his brother’s memory for recalling details like the shade of his nightlight, and for a split second, the two are brothers again.
But then, Jimmy mentions a young neighbor, and Chuck’s expression changes, and without underscoring it, there’s the perfect hint that some Slippin’ Jimmy incident from the past is back at the forefront of Chuck’s mind. He stops the trip down memory lane, and tells Jimmy that he has not forgiven him and, moreover, that Jimmy will pay for what he’s done. When describing the events to Kim later, Jimmy is lost in frustration, telling her that for ten minutes Chuck didn’t hate him, and Jimmy had forgotten what that was like.
It’s heartbreaking in its way. The events of “Klick” demonstrated that as much as Jimmy resents Chuck sometimes, he still loves his brother, and is willing to subordinate his own interests when his brother truly needs him. While Chuck is undeniably petty, we’ve also seen that to some degree, he’s earned his brother’s mistrust, but there’s still something sad about the way the two siblings are seemingly fated to tear one another down, as Chuck promises to do right to his brother’s face.
I’ve been lousy about predictions on this show, but I’ll venture a guess as to how he means to do it. When Hamlin hears Chuck’s surreptitiously recorded tape, he asks what possible use the tape could have, given the questionable legality or utility of the tape in any court of law or professional setting. It’s potentially not a coincidence that in the preceding scene, we see a glimpse of discord between Jimmy and Kim, one spurred on by her continued distaste for the very act of stepping outside the bounds of ethical behavior that committed by Jimmy to benefit her.
We only get short scenes of Kim in “Mabel,” but they’re meaningful, conveying the discomfort she feels from capitalizing on Jimmy’s misdeeds. She blanches when her contract from Mesa Verde trashes Chuck for his incompetence. She stays up late into the night agonizing over every punctuation mark in her filing, desperate not only to earn this (somewhat) ill-gotten windfall, but to prove that she will not make the same sort of mistake, that she deserves this despite how it came to her. It’s not hard to imagine Chuck being able to drive a wedge in the already fraught relationship between Jimmy and Kim, to make his brother pay by trying to take away one of the few people in his life that Jimmy truly cares about. The irony, of course, is that Chuck is one of those few people.
People care about Mike Ehrmantraut too, though perhaps not in the way he might prefer. As I discussed in the context of BCS’s network sibling, The Walking Dead, there’s something impressive about a show being able to tell a complete story nigh-wordlessly. Mike is, characteristically, a man of few words, and his Season 3 debut doesn’t depart from that, but communicates the confusion, desperation, insight, and turnabout of Mike’s adventures with a tracking device expertly despite that limitation.
It is still such a thrill to see Mike work. One of Better Call Saul’s best qualities is the way it takes time out to show its characters thinking, working out problems, without ever belaboring the point. In fact, Mike’s tinkering with the duplicate tracker he manages to get his hands on (via the shady veterinarian we met previously) is, mid-process, a bit too opaque, to where it’s clear he’s onto something, but it’s not clear what. And yet, the moment an unnamed goon shows up to Mike’s house to replace the battery and Mike’s little radar lights up, it’s clear where his ingenuity has led him.
But more than that bit of excitement at everything coming to fruition, it’s just as enjoyable watching Mike chew on this problem and slowly but surely piece everything together. Like its predecessor, Better Call Saul sets up these miniature mysteries, requiring its characters to use their wits and their determination to solve them. The promotion for the new season strongly suggests where Mike’s clever use of the tracker will lead him, but the way he reaches that point is just as compelling.
It is not, however, the only instance in the episode where such a device meant to give the user an edge over their would-be prey backfires. Of all the great moments in “Mabel,” the best may be the one where Ernesto goes to replace the batteries in Chuck’s tape recorder, inadvertently hears the recording of Jimmy, and is immediately dressed down and quietly threatened by Chuck.
I’m sure there’ll be plenty of time to wax rhapsodic about how interesting a foil Chuck is in this show, but what’s telling is how quickly Chuck segues from pure anger to a quick cover up and CYA maneuver centered on misdirected notions of legal confidentiality, to not so subtle threats directed at poor, innocent Ernesto should he volunteer the information he overheard. Better Call Saul repeatedly plays up the cruel irony of how Chuck looks down upon Jimmy for his unethical ways, but is not above bending the rules, or at least mischaracterizing, when it suits his needs, most frequently in order to stifle his brother.
Jimmy clearly feels the brunt of that from his brother. When confronted by the young captain who calls him out for lying to get his eight-second clip of the B-29 bomber for his commercial, Jimmy clearly projects his frustrations with Chuck onto the young man who, like his brother, seems concerned with Jimmy’s less than upstanding tactics. Jimmy, as is his talent, manages to misdirect and in a strikingly similar fashion, threaten the man to keep his lie under wraps, but the pain of the brothers’ relationship lingers with each of them.
Better Call Saul is cagey about whether the McGill brothers will ever be able to overcome that. We know that Jimmy becomes Saul. We know that Chuck isn’t around, or at least remains unseen by the time of Breaking Bad. There’s little hint that they will be able to forgive one another and reconcile, or if the show believes that sort of thing is even possible.
If anything, BCS seems skeptical that a tiger can ever really change its stripes. In the episode’s opening, we see Jimmy as Cinnabon Gene, making every effort to keep a low profile and continue living his life as a schnook. But despite strenuous efforts, he cannot resist yelling to a young shoplifter that he should say nothing and get a lawyer. That part of Jimmy will seemingly always be with him. Chuck recognizes that, but fails to see that the same manipulative bent lies within him as well, and the devices meant to expose his brother, unwittingly exposes him as cut from the same cloth.
[9.1/10] If you graphed Walter White’s transition from mild-mannered science teacher to Heisenberg, there would be a few peaks and valleys, but it would pretty much be a straight, diagonal line. There were always these inciting events, these decision points, that pushed him further and further into becoming the man he eventually became. But the line between Jimmy McGill and Saul Goodman isn’t that neat. It’s more like a series of deepening parabolic arcs, where time and again, he reaches the brink of giving in, of becoming the shyster running cheesy ads on daytime television and linking up with criminals, and then he pulls back.
Because Jimmy has been fortunate enough to have wake up calls, to have people who pull him toward the light. Whether it’s Marco’s death or Chuck’s episode or Kim’s crash, there are moments that tell Jimmy he’s gone too far, that he needs to feed his better nature rather than settle into his Machiavellian talents. Those have been enough to keep him in the realm of the (at least mildly) righteous. Each time, some setback emerges that prompts him to gradually drift back to his flim-flamming ways, but time and again, he has the presence of mind to recognize that he’s in a bad place and hold back.
That’s one of the nice things about “Lantern,” the finale of Better Call Saul’s third season. It doesn’t overplay its hand on these sorts of moments. Kim doesn’t have some big monologue about how she’s been pushing herself too hard and it’s all Jimmy’s doing. Instead, she responds to Jimmy’s apology by declaring that she’s an adult and chose to get into the car. She comes close to jumping back into the breakneck schedule that brought her to that point and chooses to rent ten movies and actually relax and convalesce instead.
By the same token, Jimmy doesn’t have any long, drawn out confession or apologia. The look on his face, the held hand between him and Kim, the way he dotes on his friend and partner, says it all. “Lantern” plays the remorse, the realization, in Jimmy’s actions, not in the words he uses so often to bend and blister the truth. After fighting so hard to keep the office going, Jimmy immediately has a change of heart and says it doesn’t matter, setting that dream aside after seeing what it did to the woman he loved.
There’s a good deal of repentance to Jimmy here. He tries to make amends with Irene, to set things right with her and her friends, and continually comes up short. Until he reaches a strange epiphany. He admits to Kim that he’s only good at tearing things down, not at building them up, but then realizes that he can fix things by turning that quality against himself. So he uses that Jimmy McGill cleverness, this time setting up a ruse (that takes us back to chair yoga) and hot mic so he can stage a confession with Erin, the young Davis & Main associate we met back in Season 2. Jimmy applies that same manipulative quality to his own detriment, and it proves to be a clever solution to his attempts to correct his mistakes.
It’s not like Jimmy to be self-sacrificing, to make a move that will not only make him look bad, but effectively screw up the elder law niche he’d carved for himself in Albuquerque. That has the benefit of foreshadowing how Jimmy will need to find a new racket whenever his license is reinstated, but more importantly, it shows the lengths Jimmy is willing to go to, the surprisingly selfless moves he’s willing to make, for Kim and for Irene, in an effort to straighten out and fly right.
(Amid all of this fascinating, unexpected, but largely internal drama, it’s notable that Nacho’s portion of the episode is downright straightforward. The episode pays off the dummy pills it set up in “Slip”, and Hector’s debilitating infuriation at having to put his lot in with “The Chicken Man” established in “Fall”. There’s some minor tension in the scene where Nacho’s father seems poised to stand up to Hector but relents (with a great performance from Juan Carlos Cantu), a bit more when Nacho shows himself willing to train a gun on his boss rather than risk Hector hurting his father before his pill plan works, and the knowing look Gus offers after Hector succumbs. But for the most part, this is where the show simply dutifully knocks down what it previously set up.)
It ties into the symbolism that the episode is steeped in. “Lantern” opens on a young Chuck McGill reading to his brother by lantern light. He’s still supercilious (and it’s a great vocal mimic from the young actor), but the whistle of that gas lantern symbolizes the connection between the two siblings, the fact that despite Chuck’s issues, there is a light still burning for him.
That’s the difference between Chuck and Jimmy. Chuck manages to systematically alienate anyone and everyone who cares about him, from pride, from overconfidence, and from self-centeredness. We don’t know exactly what happened with Chuck and Rebecca, but we know that Chuck pissed away a promising chance for reconciliation rather than admit his condition. We see him push away Jimmy, the one person who really loved Chuck, giving him the devastating pronouncement, “you never mattered all that much to me.”
And when he goes to shake Howard’s hand, with the expectation that he will be welcomed back with open arms, Howard not only rebuffs him, not only sends him off from the firm he helped start, but he reaches into his own pocket to do it. He is so ready to be rid of Chuck, so tired of his crap, so devoted to the good of his firm, that he is willing to pay personally to be done with his erstwhile partner.
That is a wake up call of a different sort of Chuck, one that severs his last connection to the world, that sends him on a downward spiral away from the progress he’d made on coping with his condition. In “Lantern”, Jimmy admits that he’s not good at building things, only tearing things down, a pathology that seems to affect both McGills. For Chuck, that becomes more literal, as he methodically tears his own house apart trying to find the source of the electricity that is driving him deeper and deeper into his insanity.
“Lantern” revels in this, taking the time to show the escalation in Chuck’s madness when he realizes he is truly and utterly alone. It starts with simply shutting off the breakers, then checking the switches, then tearing at the walls, and finally ripping the whole place apart. We’re back to “Fly” from Breaking Bad, an unscratchable itch, an unattainable goal, that stands in for deeper issues the character can’t bear to confront directly. Better Call Saul holds the tension of these moments -- the threat that Chuck will fall off the ladder in his light-bulb snatching ardor, that he’ll electrocute himself grasping at wires buried in drywall, that he’ll cut himself on the shattered glass or sparks of his smashed electricity meter. Instead, it’s Chuck’s own deliberate hand that seemingly does him in.
The last we see of Chuck is him sitting delirious on in his torn apart living room. He is in a stupor. The whistle of the gas lantern returns. And throughout the scene, there is the knock, knock, knock of Chuck kicking at the table where it rests. Chuck’s descent is a straight line, a gradual peeling off of all the people who would give a damn about him. The lantern symbolizes his connections to other people, the quiet hum of the other lights in his life, that he continually had to snuff out to make sure his shined the brightest. That is, in a symbolic and more literal sense, his undoing. The distant crawl of flames that ends the episode sees to that.
And yet, once again, he is right about his brother. That’s the inherent tragedy of Better Call Saul. There’s room for decency in the parts of Saul Goodman’s life we never see in Breaking Bad, but whatever strides he makes here, whatever changes he commits to, we know that eventually, he backslides into becoming the huckster who helps murderers and criminals take care of their problems by any means necessary.
Before he descends into his mania, Chuck offers one last, unwittingly self-effacing assessment of his brother. He asks Jimmy why express the regret, why go through the exercise of pleading remorse and trying to change. Chuck tells his brother that he believes his feelings of regret are genuine, that he feels those feelings, but that it’ll never be enough to make him change, that he will inevitably hurt the people around him. There’s the irony that Chuck himself is scelerotic, that he is just as un-self-aware, incapable of overcoming the lesser parts of himself, but he isn’t wrong. The audience knows that and knows where kind-hearted Jimmy McGill ends up.
That’s the idea this season opened up with, and maybe the theme of the whole show -- you cannot escape your nature. Cinnabon Gene has every reason to keep his mouth shut when a young shoplifter is taken in by local cops, but he cannot help but yell out that he should ask for a lawyer. There are parts of Jimmy that he will never tamp down. Maybe, if his brother had truly loved him, had helped him to channel those parts of himself in a good direction, he could have used his charming, conning ways in service of helping old ladies with wills or other injustices. But there is a part of Jimmy always ready to slip, always ready to go to color outside the lines, to go to extremes, to get his way.
When he does that, people get hurt, people like Chuck. Jimmy is not to blame, at least not solely to blame, for his brother’s (probable) death. Chuck has brought more than enough of that on himself. To paraphrase Kim -- he’s an adult; he made his choices. But Jimmy had a hand in the catalysts for what happened to Chuck, in the things that drove him apart from Howard, that threw a monkey wrench into Chuck’s recovery, that made it impossible for him to return to practice and the life he once knew, the prospect of which seemed to energize and inspire him.
That is going to haunt him. The one thing Jimmy wanted almost as much as his brother’s love was his brother’s respect. Chuck’s likely last words to him will be essentially that he never really loved Jimmy and that he’d only really respect him if he embraced the harmful person he is deep down, and owned it, rather than fighting it. Jimmy won’t learn what happened to his brother and wake up the next morning as a fully-formed Saul Goodman, but that final thought, that warning and proclamation, will linger with him, eat him, even as he makes these grand gestures in the name of being a better man. It’s Chuck’s last awful gift to his little brother.
The changes that happen to people as they grow and evolve are rarely as neat or clean as Walter White’s elegant descent into villainy. They are an accumulation of little moments, stops and starts, peaks and valleys, until another person emerges from the slow tumult. Few people turn into monsters overnight or have one grand moment where they change completely. Instead, for most, it’s just that little by little, moment by moment, person by person, the light goes out.
8.4/10. Here's a hot take for you -- there's not enough data to say for certain, but provisionally, I think I'm enjoying the Wells seasons better than I enjoyed the Sorkin seasons. There's more of showing how the staff beats the bushes and maneuvers their way around these problems in a semi-realistic fashion to come up with solutions than there is solving the problem through sheer force of will and optimism.
And hey, you're never going to go wrong in my book by centering an episode around CJ Cregg. CJ has always been my favorite character on the show, and seeing her get a win here, while struggling in the process but getting through it, warmed the cockles of my heart. The opening scene where The President announces her taking over the Chief of Staff position and the whole press corps. applauds was great and nice little victory lap for CJ with all her good work at the podium.
But I loved her misadventures of her opening couple of days as Chief of Staff as well. It's a little bit fast, but the episode told a great story, about how CJ walked into the job with a decent amount of confidence, found herself stumbling through much of the initial going, had a big moment of self doubt and wondered if she was in over her head, but then asserted herself and found her own path. The Georgians offering enriched Uranium with the American government scrambling to figure out how to dispose of it made for a nice crisis of the week to test CJ's mettle out of the gate, and her fumbles but eventual success through not deferring and throwing the weight of her office and experience around a bit made that quiet moment at the end of the day where she symbollicaly claims Leo's desk as her own via her goldfish feel, once again, heartwarming, but also earned.
The B-plot, to the extent this show engages in such things, featured Toby and Donna trying to find a replacement Press Secretary after Toby completely messes up filling in for her. (Toby saying that CJ would go down and swat at rockets with her purse was both gasp-worthy and hilarious for how tone deaf it was.) That, combined with the runaround the DoD tried to do was a nice way of leaning into CJ's lack of direct foreign policy experience as one of the real life things that would keep her out of this job. It's a fig leaf, but it's nice for the show to at least address it.
It did address the search for her replacement though, and the various applicants were another source of great comedy, from the quiet talking guy to the boring guy. I like Kristin Chenowith, but her strolling in as the unorthodox problem solver was a little too old school West Wing cheesy for my tastes, though Toby's reaction to the proposal, especially after being complimented, was amusing.
Otherwise, there were other fun tidbits here and there. The fact that Jimmy Smits is now in the opening credits suggests we haven't seen the last of Santos, and his introduction with Josh worked well enough, though Smits doesn't seem to have the fast-talking rhythms of the series down pat just yet. (Though maybe that's intentional?) The prank where everyone pretends to resign was the right kind of fraternal joshing you'd want to see among these good friends. And the bookends with the President and Ms. Fiderer talking about whether CJ was nervous hit the right notes. Plus, we got a little bit of insight into the help Leo's secretary provides and it gave a boost to her character too.
Overall, another very good episode of the show that's been on quite a little streak here in S6.
6.8/10. How many times on this show are we going to get the committed idealist who doesn't want to play politics and just wants to do right on the issues? I mean I get it. That's basically the ethos of the show and Season 6 is a little late in the day to complain. It's something in the series's DNA and you pretty much get on board or get out at this stage. Still, the whole conflict feels too trite to me. Santos feels too good to be true, the arguments feel too rote, and the resolution feels too easy.
An abstract level, I like what the episode is going for. There's meat in the idea that Santos is naive, has his own lofty ideas about what he wants to accomplish and what type of candidate he wants to be despite the fact that it doesn't really line up with running a successful campaign (with an admission that he realizes he's an issue candidate not a contender), and Josh wanting to play to win and try to do some of the on-the-ground, admittedly pandering retail politics and mudslinging that helps to get Presidential candidates actually elected.
And there's some give-and-take there. Santos sticks to his guns on the education plan and gets the other candidates to move toward him a bit. Josh seems to convince Santos that injecting a little of his life story into his pitches can help explain why he's fighting for the issues that are so important to him. What's more, there's some great parallels with Leo & Co. struggling to make the high-minded Bartlet sexy enough for a primary race audience.
But man, Santos is too much. Again, West Wing is a fantasy, and you just kind of have to accept that. But the whole true believer, don't want to play even a little dirty, won't play ball when it comes to politicking just makes him seem impossibly pure. I'm sure there'll be some dramatic revelation or scandal or something to muck him up a bit down the road, but it makes the idealism vs. pragmatism conflict at the core of this one really hard to swallow.
Still, there's fun to be had in the gamesmanship and strategy going on, which is always one of the more interesting parts of the show. The clashes between Josh and the Russell campaign, particularly with Will trying to get Josh off-balance by bringing Donna into the room, are kind of tense and thrilling in the tet-a-tet. Donna and Josh's awkardness is palpable, and Donna kind of pointedly noting what her new job is was a nice beat for the two of them.
It was also a nice opportunity to tie things back to Bartlet and prior adventures in New Hampshire. Bringing in Liz Bartlet and having her congressional candidate husband throw Santos under the bus after Josh tried to bring him into the fold as a bit of strategy was a nice obstacle. And having Liz give a big donation to Santos campaign, which not only gives their underfunded HQ a boost but lifts Santos by giving some public Barlet (or at least Barlet-adjacent) approval, is a solid way to give Josh's guy a win while keeping them firmly as underdogs. (Plus, while it was corny, the President feeding Josh something for Santos to attack the administration on with Josh burning the info because he can't turn on the President like that was a nice touch too.)
I like a good underdog story, and like Coach Taylor in East Dillon, I like a story about a guy who's used to being in the prime spot with all the resources imaginable at his disposal having to scrape and scrap his way from the bottom without the advantages he's grown accustomed to. I just get tired when The West Wing, as it is wont to do, stops being a semi-realistic if fanciful and optimistic look at the inner workings of government and starts feeling more like a fairytale with a dashing, unimpeachable prince come to save us all. We'll have to see if the show offers us any more frogs Josh will have to kiss along the way instead.
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.
9.5/10. It's a crime that Richard Schiff didn't win an Emmy for this episode. It's a powerhouse performance as Toby, and it's kind of amazing that he's still finding new notes to play for this character six seasons into the show.
But it’s not just Schiff’s performance that wows in this episode; it’s the way the character is written. Toby has not only lost his brother, but he’s lost his brother to suicide, a fact he doesn’t share with anyone in the episode by CJ. It’s shameful in Toby’s eyes, that someone would give up like that, they would leave the fight before it was over, before the loss was truly set in stone. It’s cowardly, and that devastates him, mixed with the grief of losing someone close to him. It fits with what we know about Toby, that he hates compromise, that he hates doing anything but fighting the good fight til the bitter end. Suicide, giving up, is something that he just doesn’t understand, and so it means he doesn’t understand his brother, and is hurt and bewildered and angry all at the same time.
So he takes it out on Josh, because Josh his brother too. They never say it, and I’m glad they don’t, but the row between Toby and Josh isn’t just a professional one, it’s personal, it’s a betrayal. Toby and Josh, for all their various disagreements over the years, are close, in a way that makes their argument feel like a schism within the family. Toby is angry because two brothers have given up the fight, two brothers didn’t ask him for help; two brothers left him all to his lonesome to keep going and pick up all the pieces, be they children or government projects, that were dropped. But Toby can only express his frustrations to one of them. So he retaliates against Josh in the most Toby way possible, but passing his ideological tidbits onto one of Josh’s candidates opponents.
The reveal that that opponent, Senator Rafferty, is the woman Toby is talking to the bar from the beginning of the episode in a conversation we get interspersed throughout, is a brilliant move. I love the device, keeping the intrigue up by having the audience guess who this woman is, what her connection to Toby is, and what their conversation means. (Mrs. Bloom and I guessed: Brother’s mistress, prostitute, Rafferty staffer, but never guessed it would be Rafferty herself.) The reveal that what sounds like a romantic conversation is actually a professional one, and the little breadcrumbs dropped throughout the episode work really well to keep things flowing.
But that fight. There’s so much mutual disappointment. Josh already feels like he’s been quickly forgotten by his own people, when he can’t get in the door, can’t see the President, and his best friend is feeding lines to the other side in a way that makes the press think Bartlet is “channeling” support. Both of them are sublimating, and it’s a charged scene that leaves bruises and hurt feelings all around.
And then it’s followed up with a quiet scene, where Toby admits his lack of understanding of what his brother did, he confides in CJ, the sibling who’s stayed with him, and he breaks down, trying not to abandon the fight himself despite being at wits end. (And his scene with Leo—where the old hand explains that he’s Goliath, not David now—is superb too.) In the end, he wants to stay in the fight, and he asks Rafferty to back down, trying to make peace with all of this. It’s a great performance and a great character story.
As usual, there’s a lot more going on in the episode. In addition to dealing with Toby, CJ deals with Donna annoying former beau Cliff Calley, realizing that as pestersome as he is, Josh was equally irksome and they share an effectiveness despite (or perhaps because) of their ability to rankle. Kate puts herself back on the market after Charlie confuses what he thinks is a set up for an ex-husband checking up on Kate, but then she and Will check each other out and the show seems to be trying to setting up on that front. And Anna Beth feels like she should be on a different show, giving a broadly comedic performance after Will praises her.
But really, the heart of the episode is Toby dealing with multiple kinds of losses, and rolling them up into one big ball of misery that threatens to steamroll him. The show uses its cinematography to sell it, contrasting the slow, luxurious pace and almost sensual lighting of his scenes with Rafferty with the spinning cameras of the DNC gala covered with brightly twinkling lights. There’s a world out there, and Toby feels apart from it, but as frustrated as he is, he hangs onto his brother’s glasses, and tries to hold Rafferty off. Try as he might, he can’t let go of his brothers, either one of them.
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.
7.2/10. I enjoyed this one because they managed to sucker me in. When they showed Santos reading from cue-cards to talk to supporters, mastering the art of the pivot to the message of the day, and having no pushback about Josh’s urge not to take a stand on a California bill that would deny drivers’ licenses to illegal immigrants, I thought we were heading to a bargain basement “you’ve changed, man” story. They even had one of Santos’s old colleagues and supporters give him the “we don’t even recognize you” speech. It struck me as implausible, that this guy who was such a champion of idealism would, however much you can handwave it via the unseen passage of time, would turn into such a spineless, go with the flow, Bob Russel equivalent so quickly.
But it was a feint on the part of the writers. Santos didn’t choose to hang back on the California bill because he’s making a cold calculation to help him win this race or because he’s forgotten where he came from or because he’s not the same ideological purist he was when he started, having been poisoned by Josh injecting “politics” into everything. Instead, he doesn’t want to make a statement because he doesn’t just want to be the Latino candidate, and however much he abhors that bill, he has a larger goal in mind that doesn’t have to involve winning the nomination.
It’s a goal of representation. Santos wants to stay in the race until Texas, even mortgaging his house to do it, so that he can stand up in front of all the kids from his neighborhood and be a real candidate, so that they see that they can be real candidates too, that their possibilities are endless. He doesn’t want to speak out on the bill because it will mean less coming from him than it will from the governor. He’s willing to stay silent about it not in the hopes that he can win a race that’s heavily tilted against him, but so he can get back to his home state and stand for something greater than himself, something that his old friend, and everyone else will recognize.
Of course, this being The West Wing, it all works out for him anyway. But the show earns that turn in two ways.
The big one is it has Josh agonize over whether he’s doing the right thing. I appreciate that this episode flipped Josh and Santos’s usual roles here. Santos was the full steam ahead/we have to keep fighting guy and Josh was the one telling everyone to slow down and think about the real issue. Having him feel the guilt of the Santos family staking their financial future on what he quickly realizes may be a lost cause is a nice beat for him. It helps show Josh’s empathetic side, and putting him in the position of someone who is trying not to ruin someone’s life, not to blow up Santos’s family by making them mortgage their house or have Matt return to the capital to pay for it, who’s calling Leo every ten minutes to ask if he’s doing the right thing, is a good look.
The other way it earns that is by having the good fortune that benefits Santos come from Donna’s hard work and good instincts. One of the most gratifying things about this season has been watching Donna live up to her potential. Seeing her be the one who realizes something is amiss with Hoynes’s campaign, doggedly pursue the issue and manage to sic the press on it, and then successfully knock her candidate’s most significant opponent out of the race is a big win for her, and “La Palabra” shows the character’s ingenuity and talent in getting it.
It’s a little convenient, but in the age of Anthony Weiner (and I guess before that, Bill Clinton) the prospect of successive sex scandals is not particularly implausible. At the same time, Santos being able to get the governor of California’s endorsement without actually getting it, and being able to speak against the bill of the day without actually speaking against it, is also a bit strained in terms of plausibility. And yet, for the most part, the episode gets the audience where it wants them to go, and the thrill of Santos winning California and having renewed life headed into his home state is a happy thing.
The episode succeeds despite these conveniences (and some facepalm-worthy dialogue) and gives us the best character-focused Santos episode yet. In the end, Santos is a good man, struggling between being true to his roots without being seen as nothing but a product of his roots, and finding, however conveniently, a way to be both.
(My one small beef is that initially it seems like Santos basically agrees to mortgage his house and return to Congress without so much as consulting his wife, which is really reprehensible. That said, the show addresses it (in a somewhat rushed fashion, but it’s enough) and gives Mrs. Santos some good moments that show her frustration with not wanting to squelch her husband’s ambitions but also not wanting to have to compromise again and again for him, that show she knows what they’re getting into with open eyes.)
5.0/10. Look, it’s unfair to compare this episode to a show that came out years later, but this one felt like a bad episode of Homeland. All the cloak and dagger backroom dealing, the conversations about the old times, the young spy woman having secret meetings with old allies. It just doesn’t feel very West Wing. Don’t get me wrong, I get tired of the high-minded idealism and “just believe harder” stuff, and yearn for a little more of the times when politics drags you in the muck, but going the whole espionage angle doesn’t really do it for me.
What’s more, involving Fidel Castro in the proceedings a bit of a bridge too far. Something about involving real world leaders, even if they’re bathed in shadow, just feels off in the alternate reality of West Wing. Rather than making the world that the Bartlet administration is set in feel more real by association, it makes the whole thing cheaper by invoking elements from the real world that only serve to expose how the rest of the show is something imaginary.
There’s really not much more to say. Getting to see John Spencer and Brian Dennehy go toe-to-toe as actors for a scene is a treat, and they rise above the material to some degree. Having Bartlet and the rest of the staff struggle between trying to maximize their accomplishments in their last year of office and trying not to doom the Democrats’ chances to hold the White House in the next election by dooming the party in Florida is interesting. And Charlie dealing with both exterminators and forensic entomologists is…there? It has a few laughs.
But for the most part this an episode where the show is trying to be something is not, aiming for spycraft and mystery, and ending up as a lukewarm effort at something outside the series’ wheelhouse.
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.
8.5/10. As I’ve said before (as recently as the last episode) if there’s one thing you can count on when it comes to The West Wing, it’s that when someone on the show is presented two options -- one that is practical, pragmatic, and politically expedient, and another that is bold, uncompromising, and favors principle over consequence – our hero(es) will inevitably flirt with the former better committing firmly to the latter choice. It’s engrained in this show’s DNA – doing the “right” thing invariably trumps doing the less right thing that’s more likely to actually work. (Though that’s the beauty of television, you can have your characters rewarded for actions that might fail miserably in the real world.)
So when Santos is presented with the option to end the infighting in the Democratic party by agreeing to become Bob Russell's VP, when his campaign is being leaned on by the White House to accept, when even Josh is advising him to settle for less with an aim toward running as a presumptive front runner in four or eight years, you just know that it’s not going to work that way. You just know that Santos is going to go right to the brink, look Bingo Bob in the eye, and be unwilling to play second fiddle to a man he doesn’t really respect, whom he doesn’t think is a true champion of the party and its values, whom he doesn’t see as a true successor to the legacy of Jed Bartlet.
But at least “Things Fall Apart” makes that choice meaningful but emphasizing the tumultuous, potentially disastrous, consequences of Santos’ choice. We see the campaign managers for Santos, Russell, and Hoynes unable to even agree on seating arrangements for the convention floor, portending a messy, unpresidential DNC in contrast to the well-oiled machine and vision of unity the GOP presents at its convention. At the same time, we see clips of that convention (which so perfectly capture the tone and tenor of political conventions) where the Republicans are attacking Bartlet and his administration with coordinated fury, looking every bit the opposite of the Dems who still seem to have their targets set on each other.
Then, Vinick comes out to accept the nomination, and in contrast to all the partisan attacks on the White House, he gives Bartlet a resounding bit of gratitude, emphasizing that despite their political differences, he appreciates the man whom he hopes will be his predecessor, and whether through earnest appreciation or calculated political move, appears to be following Bruno’s suggestion and positioning himself as someone who can unite the whole country, and as Toby puts, be seen as the natural inheritor of Bartlet’s legacy.
The point is clear. Vinick is formidable. The party is in disarray. By taking the fight to the convention because he can’t get along with Russell, Santos is staying true to who he is and why he and Josh got into this race, but potentially dooming the Democratic party’s chances in the general election. Again, this is The West Wing, where people are rewarded for these sorts of choices rather than punished for them, no matter how disastrous they seem on paper, but it at least serves to increase the significance of the decision, and making what seems like an inevitability still feel meaningful.
(As an aside, I loved the scene between Josh and Toby, where they say very little, but manage to say so much about where their relationship is and finding subtle ways to try to pat one another on the back and apologize without doing it outright. It’s a nicely written moment that had me waiting for the (hopefully) inevitable reconciliation. And I also loved the similarly understated scene between Josh and Donna, where Josh recognizes (far too late, I might add) how capable Donna is, how astute she is, and how much she’s accomplished since leaving the nest. It’s a pair of well-written moments that advance the ball on two of the show’s big relationships with great economy in an episode with a lot going on.)
But Santos isn’t the only person in the episode who makes a hard choice that goes against a consequentialist philosophy. Three astronauts (two Americans and one Russian) are suffocating in the space station, and the only shuttle that can save them is a military vessel, the use of which would reveal to the rest of the world that the USA is militarizing space and potentially launch an inner-orbit arms race. It presents an interesting moral quandary – whether to definitively let three innocent people die to forestall the stars becoming a battleground, or to save them at the risk of the much more uncertain consequences and potential loss of life that could come if this is the first step toward Russia and China, and the U.S. for that matter, starting to build interstellar battleships rather than exploratory vessels.
C.J. cannot abide a choice to let these people die for that, so the implication is that she leaks the existence of the military shuttle to force the US government’s hand. I imagine we’ll be dealing with the fallout in the next episode, but it’s worth noting that we once again have a major character on the show operate from a deontological base—i.e. “this is just wrong on principle”—even if there’s far-reaching, uncertain, potentially awful consequences from doing what’s right on principle. It makes for an interesting parallel with the Santos story, and once again reveals the show’s ethos.
In the midst of all this high drama, there is a much more domestic story about Bartlet catching Charlie heading out of Zoe’s room at the White House, making things awkward for both of them. There’s something kind of adorable, albeit retrograde, about Jed’s grumpiness about it, and it’s great to see Abigail shutting him down over it. Their relationship is one of the show’s hidden gems, and always features a lively and entertaining back and forth between equals.
Charlie and the President’s relationship is a little less equal, but still one of the most vital and endearing on the show, and the prospect of having the President as a father-in-law is an interesting story. To be honest, I always felt like Charlie could do better than Zoe, and that she never treated him especially well, so I’m not necessarily enthused at the thought of him proposing, but I like the story possibilities it opens up between him and the President.
The decision to date your boss’s daughter, when your boss just happens to be the President, is also a bold choice, but again, that’s what The West Wing is – people doing what they believe is best even if it’s not easy and the consequences are, at best, unclear. Sometimes that makes it hard to be on their side – as much as we like these characters, we, or at least I, feel leery about them jeopardizing a lot on a hunch, or sacrificing big things on the ground for abstract principles – but it adds weight to the decisions they make, and with any luck, can help the inevitable victories feel earned.
7.3/10. It just wouldn’t be West Wing if the day wasn’t won with a big, soaring speech, would it? It’s convention time in West Wing land, and the action is centered around the brokered convention, with candidates of all stripes squaring off on the convention floor. And we get a fairly typical West Wing story despite the unusual setting, one where there’s plenty of wheeling and dealing and strategy going on, but where the victory comes from someone sticking to their principles and standing up for what they believe in.
In truth, it’s getting a little tiresome. I get it. Santos is a great guy, and he’s morally upstanding, and unlike a mealy-mouthed puffball like Bingo Bob, or more accurately Will Bailey, he’s unwilling to expose the mental illness of an opponent’s wife in order to get ahead in the race. Unlike Josh, he’s unwilling to trade jobs, jobs where the recipients may or may not be qualified, in order to gin up more votes in the contentious nomination election process. And unlike Leo, he’s unwilling to take the decision of who the Democratic nominee should be out of the hands of the people, and just step aside.
As I’ve said before, the problem with Santos is that he’s too perfect; he’s too pure; and he’s too unassailable. It’s hard to really connect with a character whose greatest flaw is just caring too much. But his speech works, partly because of the writing, which falls into the same “I’m not just another politician” dialogue Santos has been spouting from the beginning, but also because of how it’s shot. We constantly see Santos as the delegates and the voters see him, framed as he appears on television, seen from side while outlined by the teleprompter, shot from low angles that make it look as though we’re someone right below the podium. These are all subtle visual cues that convey the idea that Santos is a man of the people, that he is with them in the way the other candidates are not, and they go a lot further than the usual grandiose rhetoric does.
That said, I like the way the episode resolves the contentious nominating contest, particularly the fact that it involves a little more power brokering. Santos’s speech obviously goes over well with the crowd, but it’s not what wins him the nomination. Instead, it’s also what convinces the President that he’s found his guy, that as much as he’s tried to stay neutral in all of this and let the process work itself out, this is a man he believes in enough that he’s willing to go to bat for him behind the scenes and break the deadlock that’s thrown the party into disarray. It’s not as simple as Santos simply winning over the crowd with a great speech, or the President breaking his neutrality by publicly picking Santos. Instead, the President wields his soft power behind the scenes to get the teachers to support Santos, and we see a little more of the sausage being made. It’s still pretty convenient, and the fake out that Santos was going to concede was laid on a little thick, but it’s a novel way to close out the issue.
That sausage-making, however, is the best part of the episode. One of the best things that longtime director Alex Graves, and writer/showrunner John Wells brought to the episode is the way managed to capture the chaos of the proceedings. Having an actual brokered convention is a bit of a reach (though we nearly had one in 2016, so maybe it’s not so crazy) and having one where a dark horse candidate rejoins the race late in the process is an even bigger one, but it works well enough within the outsized reality of the show, and certainly heightens the drama.
But more exciting than the horserace itself is seeing Josh and Will and Donna and the rest of the staffers trying to whip votes, frantically writing and erasing numbers on white boards, and frantically making phone calls to anyone who’ll listen, while Leo, as the party’s wrangler-in-chief, tries to keep everything in some type of order. There’s a franticness to all of this that, in addition to the obvious stakes that come from deciding who the Democratic candidate will be, created a notably electric atmosphere as delegates yell, placards are raised, and balloons drop.
In the end though, we have a candidate. Sure enough, it turns out to be the guy whose name was added to the opening credits. Who’d have guessed? Still, though the outcome itself was a foregone conclusion, the way it happened was not, and that counts for something. Mrs. Bloom pointed out that if we didn’t know Santos was so pure, that move, to signal that you’re going to drop out and then give a rousing speech that gets the President on your side, could be a cynical calculation you’d expect from Frank Underwood on House of Cards, the soapily cynical yin to The West Wing’s impossibly idealistic yang. But it’s interesting, you have to give it that.
The actual nomination, however, isn’t the only bit of excitement or meaning in the episode. Donna has her “who am I working for” moment when she asks Will not to break the mental illness story, and he does anyway, which adds to her moments of doubt throughout. (Though the beer shared by her, Josh, and Will suggests there are minimal hard feelings after a hard-fought campaign.) In a storyline that was mostly minimized, Kate and Toby’s investigation seems to have revealed or at least suggested that CJ was the leak, in a move that will surely have reverberations in the next season. And in a move as implausible as it is heartwarming, Josh informs Leo that Santos has picked him as his VP. It’s a bit of headscratcher, but I imagine we’ll have plenty of time to dig into why and have the show address it next season. And if the final, ominous shot and score for the scene where Vinick tells his staffers “let’s go beat this guy,” there’ll be plenty to unpack.
Overall, this was a solid but somewhat underwhelming finish to what has, in my estimation, been the most consistently good season in the show’s run. Santos himself is not my favorite character, but the way this season explored both the primary races and the goal to extend the Bartlet legacy on the one hand, with the intrigue of the people still trying to hold down the fort at the White House and preserve that legacy on the other, made for one of the most diverse, thoughtful, and exciting seasons in the show’s history.
7.2/10. The West Wing is a show that you kind of just have to go with a lot of the time. It's a show that banks on the idea that you'll like its characters so much, or have a loose enough view of the political sphere, that you're still on board when less than realistic things happen. So when Leo McGarry, a character who (unless I'm remembering incorrectly) has never held elected office before is picked to The Democratic Party's nominee for Vice President, is strains credulity, but you have to just sort of take it in stride, because damnit, we love Leo, and it works in emotional terms, even if it doesn't work in terms of, you know, logic and realism or anything that makes actual sense.
But at least in "The Ticket", the show has the good sense to address how little sense this makes rather than pretend that everything is all hunky dory. The press is hounding him about his past addictions (something he previously identified as something that would deny him a shot at elected office); he's being pressed about his health issues, and most notably, he seems out of step with the rest of the Santos campaign in terms of strategy and trust. The latter is what really stands out as the crux of the episode, how much Santos seems to override Leo, compartmentalize him, and overall just not trust this man whom he doesn't really know and doesn't really trust.
It gets to the point that Leo basically offers to quit, realizing that he's not a natural campaigner and that his advice on strategy is being ignored. It's then than Santos offers the fig leaf to explain why he picked Leo. It's not because Leo makes any sense in terms of the street appeal of the ticket; he has the aforementioned baggage, he offers gaffes right out of the gate, and he creates the impression that Santos is an empty front for the news cameras to photograph while the remains of the Bartlet administration pull the strings. It’s not because, as Santos puts it, he wants Leo to do Josh’s job: giving campaign advice or managing election strategy, where Leo seems at odds with the rest of the staff anyway.
No, what Santos wants Leo for is to govern effectively. Santos didn’t pick Leo to help him get elected; he picked Leo to help him enact his agenda in as quick, committed, and as effective a manner as possible. Santos has, often to my similar frustrations due to lack of realism, been much more concerned to his ideas, almost to a fault, than he is about getting elected, and to that end, the Leo pick makes some sense as Santos bringing someone on board who is a veteran of taking White House plans and putting them into practice. That justification shows consistency in Santos’s approach and makes sense insofar as it zeroes in on something Leo is good at that he would bring to the Santos administration.
Now the problem is that Santos could almost just as easily get that from Leo without having to make him one the public faces of the campaign and opening him up to all this expected scrutiny and occasional headbutting. Presumably Josh has dibs on Chief of Staff, but lord knows there would be some behind the scenes role, or cabinet position with Leo’s name on it if he wanted it. But again, we like Leo, so we like seeing him get this win, and it makes the unreality of it all a little easier to swallow.
What’s less easy to swallow is that we’re not only continuing this military shuttle storyline, but that’s poised to continue on indefinitely. It’s always nice to see Oliver Platt’s Babish back, and his amusing tone combined with pointed questions is a welcome addition to any episode. But I wish they would go ahead and resolve this storyline. I’m a big fan of CJ, but I’d rather see her doing the work of Chief of Staff than enmeshed in some palace intrigue storyline where we don’t know who knows she’s the leak, who suspects it, and whether she truly is the leak, that gets dragged on through midseason until there’s some predictable dramatic outburst over it or a resignation-worthy scandal. I suspect I’m going to have to just deal, though.
As will Donna, who in a mildly heartbreaking scene, comes to Josh asking for a job on the Santos campaign and is rebuffed after he reads her own words about Santos as Russell’s spokesperson back to her and tells her he can’t do it. It sucks, because he has a point that there’d be awkwardness from hiring someone who said damaging things about the candidate, but Donna’s right that she’s proved herself out there and deserves the opportunity to continue to rise up the ladder and do real work. There’s still romantic tension there (which I’m pretty well over), but the real meaning in the scene comes from Donna getting dinged, however understandably, for having been good at her old job.
That’s not the only way in which the old senior staff is on the outs. There’s a great scene between Leo and Josh on the one hand, and CJ and Toby on the other, where we get the divide between the Bartlet administration and the Santos campaign, how despite the fact that they’re on the same team, tackling issues that may benefit one may hurt the other, and each expects a certain degree of deference and capitulations that will no doubt continue to cause problems in the future. I love seeing these good friends find themselves with conflicting interests, and having to resolve their differences despite being used to being on the same side.
And last, but certainly not least, we get a flash forward! They leave most of the major details out, but hey, Bartlet is alive and walking! Will is a congressman! Toby’s at Columbia! Kate wrote a book! Charlie’s doing…something! And most importantly, CJ is with Danny! Okay, there’s something uneasy about being most excited about a female’s character’s personal life, especially one as accomplished as CJ Cregg, but man, I shipped her and Danny so hard, so seeing that the two of them are together in the future and even have a baby together was such an unexpected treat.
As I said, the thing about West Wing is that it always aimed for emotional resonance over realism, and because we’re invested in these characters, in watching them succeed in their lives and find happiness and joys, we’re willing to forgive a lot of the little (or big) details that may not add up along the way.
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.
