Peter J. Mello

VIP

8

7.2/10. I’m beginning to sound like a broken record, but once again, we get Santos as someone a little too perfect. Of course, he believes whole-heartedly in evolution, but also firmly believes in God, and even the possibility of intelligent design, but thinks that one belongs in the classroom and the other in the chapel. Is it that improbable? No, but it’s just such a crowd-pleasing answer, right down to his too perfect exchange with a teacher over the issue toward the end of the episode.

I will say this – it’s interesting to have the Democratic candidate talking about his belief in God while the Republican candidate is having trouble with his non-religiousness on the campaign trail. That is another way in which this election is not just business as usual, and while not necessarily super-realistic, creates another intriguing dimension to this race.

But what is realistic is the idea that in the wake of Bartlet’s Middle East Peace Plan, there would be resistance from hardliners in the region. The assassination of the Palestinian leader who compromised for peace is very sad in-universe, but it’s meaningful out of universe because it shows that there is blowback from the semi-miraculous, mostly aspirational peace deal Bartlet was able to strike at the beginning of Season 6. Sure, there was some domestic fallout from the decision with Congressional Republicans wanting concessions and press concerns about US soldiers being injured or killed protecting lives overseas, but this is the first time we’ve really heard about consequences in the region itself, and a rocky road forward makes the deal and its import feel more real.

It also gives us a chance to see a side of Bartlet we don’t often see – a guilty side. The President feels responsible for his Palestinian counterpart’s death. It was opposition to his plan that spurred these terrorists to kill Farad, and Bartlet feels like he essentially goaded Farad into accepting the plan, and thus believes he has Farad’s blood on his hands. It’s the subtext to the President’s firm commitment to attending the funeral, despite the advice of his senior staff, and going a step further to convince other foreign leaders to attend as a show of strength and solidarity and in his case, as a small way of making amends and helping the death to mean something by showing that this attack won’t stop the world’s resolve or its commitment to defending the peace Farad died for. Putting himself in harm’s way by attending the funeral is part of the way he’s gaining absolution for putting Farad in harm’s way with this deal.

For most of the episode, it looks like CJ is in harm’s way too. There’s a sense in which CJ is dancing on the edge of a razor blade here, seeing all the subpoenas flying, realizing she hasn’t gotten one, and having it slowly but surely dawn on her that it means she’s going to be the focus of the investigation. She seems almost gallows-level joyous about it, half- trying to ignore the possibility and seeming inevitability, and half trying to blithely enjoy what may be her last days in office before the Congressional investigations uses circumstantial evidence (her many calls to Brock) to pin this on her.

The show seems to point us in that direction too. It features Margaret staying resolute but stumbling a bit when being peppered with questions by the Senator. Prior episodes have shown edits and juxtaposed scenes that point to CJ leaking the story on principle. But then, in the final moments, we get the reveal. CJ was a red herring; it was Toby. And it makes sense. Toby is the ideologue and the one least willing to compromise for some utilitarian good. He’s also someone who lost a brother who was an astronaut, so rescuing astronauts has a certain symbolic resonance for him. It’s not what I would have expected, and it’s not what the show seemed to be pointing toward, but it makes a lot of sense if you step back and think about it, so I’m curious to see where the show goes with it.

There’s other events happening in the episode as well. The titular Mr. Frost is going full blown Carrie Matheson, tracking down various members of the White House staff to propound his seemingly crazy theories of terrorists plots. There’s some odd, mildly Hepburn-Tracy back-and-forth between Leo and Anna Beth of all people, and I’m not sure where it’s going for that. And in the midst of CJ burning the midnight oil to seemingly make the most of her time as Chief of Staff before the investigation boots her, there’s some amusing exchanges with Charlie about her being able to catch forty winks between emergencies.

Overall, it’s a frenetic episode, with some of the usual West Wing didactic qualities when it comes to an issue like evolution vs. intelligent design. But its strength is in exploring two of its major characters, The President and CJ, and examining how they respond to these extreme circumstances.

8.7/10. “Here Today” is the first really great episode of this young season, and it takes some pretty big fireworks to get us there, but it draws an unexpected parallel between President Bartlett and Candidate Santos that warrants a comparison to, of all things, Game of Thrones.

In the first episode of the series, Ned Stark, the patriarch of one of the great family of GoT’s quasi-medieval setting, is called to confront a deserter. He brings his young son along as he carries out the sentence for deserters, death, himself. He emphasizes to his child that this is part of the burden of leadership, that if you expect people to follow the laws of the land, you cannot shield yourself from the uglier parts of those laws, but instead must take responsibility for doing even the most grisly deeds in service of them.

President Bartlet seems to adhere to the same belief system. Though Toby and the President have always had their differences, it must be difficult for him to fire someone who’s been dutifully working for him for seven and a half years. (Bartlet hearing the news and asking if it’s possible to be totally astonished and yet not at all surprised at the same time was the perfect reaction.) And yet, even though Babash advises strongly against it (lest there be another name directly tainted by Toby’s confession), The President insists on firing Toby himself and in person.

It’s a tense, and sad scene. The President is understandably angry, weary, and disappointed. (There’s great gallows humor in Toby offering his letter of resignation and Bartlet asking whether this is his third or fourth.) Toby is neither strident nor repentant. He simply walks in and accepts his fate. The President takes no joy in his part either, though does twist the knife by emphasizing that he doesn’t believe Toby did something noble in particularly cutting fashion. This is unpleasant for all involved, and it’s an unpleasantness that Bartlet could have avoided, but chooses to face head on.

As Mrs. Bloom noticed, there’s a direct parallel to Santos here. Josh reports to the candidate that, given that the campaign is trailing in the race by nine points, they need to shake up the staff and that includes letting go of Ned, one of Congressman Santos’s longtime aides from when he began running for Congress. Like Bartlet, Santos trusts his advisors and accedes to the idea that this is what needs to be done, but he chooses not to face it; he chooses to leave it for Josh to be his hatchet man, and Josh basically denies Ned (and by extension Santos) the opportunity for the candidate to deliver this news face-to-face and deal with the resentment and the consequences.

What is the upshot of this parallel? Frankly, I’m not sure. Perhaps it’s a hint that Santos doesn’t have the strength or the stomach to be President. We’ve had hints of a few “you’ve changed” plots with Santos before, but the show has mostly swerved on that front. Maybe we’re finally getting a flaw in this nigh-impossibly perfect candidate, something he’ll have to legitimately overcome in order to be worthy of earning the voters’ respect and the audience’s blessing to be Bartlet’s heir.

But while Ned is basically a redshirt, someone who’s been in the background to give Josh and Santos some people to banter with when the script called for it, Toby has been one of the fixtures and foundations of The West Wing since its beginning, and now he finds himself being shooed out of the White House, put into a car, and sent away, possibly never to return.

There’s a strong theme of alienation here, of the pain of being treated like a leper by your closest friends, by having strangers handle you like a criminal and a trespasser in a place you practically called home. One of the things that I really responded to in this episode is the silence that permeated it. The West Wing, true to its Sorkin-y origins, is a show of constant chatter, set in a place where things are constantly buzzing, constantly moving, constantly making noise.

Instead, in the wake of Toby’s confession, everything slows down and grows quiet. The score, which can occasionally be a little too overbearing or soaring in the series for my tastes, is only minimally deployed in the episode. In the opening scene after Toby tells CJ what he did, the pregnant pause between his confession and the arrival of White House counsel is allowed to linger, with the expressions on the two friends’ faces allowed to tell the story of what this means.

Afterward, Toby is questioned in exquisite detail by Babash in a room in which he’s sequestered. He responds in terse, succinct answers, trying to take the full blame for the leak and ensure that no one is brought down with him. Bartlet is right – this is par for the course for Toby, and Toby’s right too, that with his fierce stubbornness and commitment to principle regardless of consequences, he was destined to crash and burn in this fashion sooner or later. One of the benefits of a show reaching its final season is that it can stop handwaving certain things that feel like inevitabilities, or at least likely consequences for certain recurring actions, because indulging them would break the premise of the show. Toby’s single-minded devotion to his ideals was bound to get him in real trouble sooner or later, and The West Wing deserves kudos for embracing that.

Because this is the kind of thing Toby would do. He’s exactly the kind of person who would, filled with regrets of his inability to prevent his own astronaut brother’s death, take a stand to protect people like his brother, and against the militariziation of space, even if it’s a crime to do so. But he’s also the kind of person who, when his actions threaten to bring down one of his best friends (CJ), will fall on his sword, let himself be a martyr for his cause, emphasize that he acted alone, and take his medicine no matter how painful that punishment may be.

Two people, two of the core characters in the show, have faced something terrible with open eyes and embraced their responsibilities regardless of how unpalatable they seem, because it’s what they’ve reaped from what they’ve sewn, it’s what they must do because of who they are and what they do. But one character, the man poised to carry the mantle of The President in the election, shies away from it. The atmosphere around the west wing after this revelation is that of a death in the family. There is a solemnity, a shock to all of this. Toby, The President, and even a clearly wounded CJ accept this horribleness and face it as dutifully as they can under the circumstances. Santos delegates, keeps himself above it. It’s a glimpse of how the old guard doesn’t falter, even in the face of something they wish with all their hearts didn’t have to happen, but the new blood defers, and in the process, seems lesser than what came before.

[8.4/10] The Americans is a prestige drama, and it wants you to know that. It’s not just that the first episode opens with a spate of sex and violence, dimly lit and full of people making profound declarations about this or that. It’s the way that this pilot mixes and matches elements from the rest of prestige T.V.

If you like The Sopranos you have a story about “the bad guys” who want to keep their kids away from the dark parts of their lives, while the feds are circling up and trying to catch them. If you like Mad Men, then you have the slick protagonists in a particular point of American history doing their dirty business and then, shock of shocks, coming home to a seemingly normal suburban family where deeper troubles simmer beneath the surface. If you like Breaking Bad, you have the protagonists debating what to do with the baddie locked away in the house, while dad bides his time and beats up the jerk at the department store who dares disrespect his child.

(And if you like The Wire, well, you’re pretty much out of luck beyond the cat and mouse game between the cops and criminals, but three out of four ain't bad.)

That’s not a knock, necessarily. There’s tropes of that era of prestige drama that have become nigh omnipresent: the villainous (or at least morally complicated) protagonist, the double life, the struggle to balance one’s immoral business responsibilities with one’s more moral domestic ones. But they’re tropes for a reason, because these are the kinds of approaches that have allowed tons of shows and showrunners to craft meaningful characters and conflicts and stories with nuance and layers of complexity.

The Americans feels very familiar, very of a piece with those other shows, in its opening hour, but it also holds its own. There’s worse company to keep.

“Pilot”, true to its name, does the things a T.V. pilot’s supposed to do while functioning as a complete vignette of this particular inflection point in the Jennings’ life. It introduces the main characters and establishes their basic traits and wants and personalities. It sets up the premise of the show -- with a pair of Russian spies gone deep undercover in the United States, hiding behind the mask of the nice, normal family to conduct their deadly and dangerous espionage without suspicion. It adds the wrinkle of an FBI agent who lives across the street to keep the intrigue and danger up even when things seem calm.

And it has plenty of portentous statements about how Things Are About To Go Down and This Is A Very Important And Precarious Time and you should definitely keep watching because people are almost straight up telling you that scary and exciting things are about to go down, each and every week.

But the best thing that The Americans does in its opening hour is give you a short but revealing look at who Philip and Elizabeth are, what the conflict between them is, and how each of them changes, or at least moves closer to the other, in the course of that hour.
Elizabeth is a fiercely devoted, to her country and to her mission, and willing to sacrifice pretty much anything in service of them. The quiet, suburban wife routine is entirely an act, one that she grits and bears for the sake of serving the motherland, but not one that she’s ever adopted or wants to. She plays the part, but keeps it at arms’ length, and can barely restrain her disgust at her children being raised in a culture she views as a capitalist hellscape. She’s willing to let her comrades die in the name of completing their objectives, and she’s ready to kill when the situation calls for it. She is all-in on this mission, the perfect soldier and the perfect spy, but anything else is a costume she puts on.

Philip is a talented spook in his own right, one good enough in combat to scrap with whomever he’s up against, and sharp enough at his job to have cultivated an unwitting informant on the inside of the FBI. He’s willing to risk mission failure to save the life of a compatriot. He too has been trained since he was a young man twenty years ago to inhabit this life in a way that no one could detect.

The difference, though, is that he’s okay with that mask. He’s okay with America, with the idea that little things like cold air and the whole place being brighter are something he could get use to for the rest of his life. He could defect, for the right place, and for the chance to make this pretend family a real one. He loves his kids and wants this life with them to be real and permanent.

And he loves Elizabeth. That may be the biggest wedge between the Jennings. “Pilot” gives the sense that in the twenty years they’ve been together, this marriage has become more than an obligatory partnership for Phillip; it’s become something he genuinely feels, to where he wants to play “ice cream olympics” with his bride and recoils at her recorded conversations with top federal agents in the midst of sexual encounters. Elizabeth doesn't seem to feel the same way, retreating from Philip’s touch and balking at the idea of them running away from their Russian lives in order to cement their American ones.

That question is further complicated by the presence of their new neighbor, Stan, who just so happens to be an FBI agent, leading the Jennings to wonder whether the feds are onto them, or if it’s just a coincidence that nevertheless makes their lives more difficult. In truth, that narrative choice seems like something out of a cheesy sitcom -- the foreign spy with a counterintelligence agent right next door, exchanging brownies and asking to borrow spark plugs.

But The Americans goes deeper than that. For one thing, it makes Stan a distorted, mirror image of Philip and Elizabeth, as someone who himself went deep undercover in a white supremacist group. He is uniquely positioned to understand them, to relate to them, but also to catch them. And yet he has his own complication of needing to detox from that life, of questioning his own judgment of his presumably nice, normal neighbors and turn off his paranoid instincts when he’s in an environment where, at least as far as he knows, she no longer needs them.

The episode constructs and deploys a nice little puzzle box and set of moral dilemma to tease all of this out. Elizabeth’s human intelligence-gathering leads them to the whereabouts of a prominent Russian defector. The Jennings and an ally abduct the guy and intend to hand him off to their Soviet confederates, but as always happens on T.V. shows, something goes wrong.

So until they can make contact with their handlers, Philip and Elizabeth debate what to do with the turncoat Ruskie captain tied up in the trunk of their car, while Philip plies his contact at the FBI for info on their investigation, and Stan sniffs around his new neighbors’ house, sensing that something’s up.

It’s a nice framework for the episode, that provides a nice excuse for the Jennings to engage in some spycraft, to force the two of them to have to thread the needle between being Soviet spies and an American family, and for the show to demonstrate how it can deliver the pulse-pounding intrigue of spooks in action and the nuanced character work of the main figures of the show figuring out their place within it.

And it also provides an excuse for each to inch a little closer to the other, to use what they believe to break a bit of their rules and move nearer to common ground. Elizabeth’s frustration with Philip is that he is not all-in, and not willing to embrace the dirty (read: bloody) work that their job requires in service of the mission. He wants to let the tied-up defector live until they can hand him off, while she’s desperate to kill the guy.

That is, until Philip finds out that the defector raped Elizabeth when she was a cadet, and suddenly the reluctant spook is ready, willing, and able to take him out. He may not be anxious to kill for his country, but he is, as his interlude with the creep who hits on his daughter at the mall indicates, ready to use the violence he was taught to protect the family that he loves.

And Philip’s great frustration with Elizabeth is that he wants them to be a real couple, not just dutifully putting on the mask of the suburban family, but truly being man and wife. I’ll admit, there’s something a little uncomfortable about not only the fact that Elizabeth is quickly introduced as a rape victim in episode one, but also that it’s Philip killing her rapist that leads to the physical intimacy with her that he’d been denied multiple times earlier in the episode, coded as a level beyond duty that Elizabeth isn’t interested in.

But more compelling is Elizabeth’s act of purer intimacy with Philip -- that she tells him about her old life, her pre-American life -- something forbidden and until now unshared between the two. And when she has the chance to turn Philip in to their superiors for his own attempted defection, she defends him, keeps him in her life a little longer.

That’s the thing that immediately separates The Americans from its prestige television forebears. Emerging from an era of T.V.’s difficult men, this is Elizabeth’s show as much as it is Philip’s in the early going. Here are a pair of individuals, with complimentary but opposite inclinations in that double life, conflicting pulls and impulses between their dirty jobs and their cleaner families, and plenty of messy, thorny ground to cover between them, enough to sustain the series as long as it needs to go.

The Americans is prestige T.V. to the core, with all the sturm und drang and literally dark doings that come with that, but for once, it’s also a double act.

7.8/10. Sooner or later, The West Wing was bound to address abortion head on. It’s controversial, but it’s too much a major part of the political discourse for the show not to offer a take on it, and especially in the context of a presidential election, it makes sense that it’s an issue which both candidates would feel pressure on.

What’s interesting about this episode, then, is it basically paints Santos and Vinick into another “we’re not so different, you and I” scenario. Both of the candidates are basically in the middle here, with each at least publicly being pro-choice with certain limitations in place. But the intrigue of the episode is that both candidates are getting heat from their base to stop staking out the middle and secure the core of their party, and both candidates want to resist it (in addition to wanting to resist the campaign becoming a negative-ad filled slugfest).
Vinick, for his part of the proceedings, sees the ad from a SuperPAC (or maybe it was just a regular PAC in the simpler times of 2005) hammering Santos on his pro-choice record an immediately wants to denounce it. He has support from Bruno, who still believes Vinick could be a unifying figure for voters across the spectrum, but he has pushback from Sheila and from the chairman of the Republican Party (Breaking Bad’s Dean Norris!) who think this is the perfect scenario for him – something that will energize the religious right and “values voters” where he’ll have cover since he didn’t authorize or sponsor the ad.

On the other side of the fight, Santos is struggling with whether to respond to Vinick and go negative, as Lou is advocating for, or follow the advice of others in his campaign who say that he should lean into the ad, emphasize that he is, in fact, a member of the part of pro-choice and thus the ad is not a smear. There’s only one catch – as Leo discovers to his chagrin (I love the line “kick in the pulpit”) Santos is actually pro-life, or at least believes that life should begin at conception.

The fulcrum of all of this is the endorsement of the Women’s Alliance, the leader of whom is threatening to give to Vinick. There’s a pragmatism there, a bow to the fact that Vinick is ahead by a significant margin, and that by endorsing him as a pro-choice candidate, it could send a strong message that this doesn’t have to be a left/right issue, but rather something that Republicans could take her side on and still succeed.

But two other people in the episode are trying to do something unexpected and succeed. The first, and yet most glancing is our own Donna Moss. Lou taps Donna (under Josh’s nose) to be the campaign’s spokesperson to respond to the SuperPAC’s ad. Josh is initially miffed, but Lou basically forces him to interview her for the position of campaign spokesman, and it results in one of Donna’s best scenes. When Josh challenges her for nonsense like experience and references, she offers witty comebacks that show she gives as good as she gets from him. But the most satisfying moment is when Josh criticizes her for not following him to the Santos campaign, implying that it was disrespectful to him as her “mentor,” and she rightfully pushes back and notes that as a “mentor” he never really helped her develop or gave her the opportunities to advance and do more in the White House. What’s more, when the Santos campaign is deciding how to respond to the endorsement issue, she makes a trenchant observation about how voters will respond, and basically out-Joshes Josh, in a well-played scene by Bradley Whitford where it appears that Mr. Lyman has slowly begun to realize what potential he hadn’t been fostering.

Meanwhile, CJ is, in her own way, trying to foster Will Bailey in his new role as White House communications director and, as an immediate fill-in for Toby, the staffer who conducts the press briefings. It’s mostly a tidy little plot to establish Will in his new role, but the idea that he is out there to be a punching bag until the press gets tired of asking fruitless questions about Toby’s leak, his frustration at having to do the same routine again and again, and then his joy at actually making it through and getting a question about his actual statement works well toward that end. In addition, his lack of an attaboy from CJ, followed by him finding Toby’s old thinkin’ handball tied up in a ribbon for him, was a nice end to the story, and him feeling proud and on top of things, only to fall out of his chair while trying to be smooth on the phone, was a comedic highlight.

Vinick and Santos have their own little moment of triumph together. As they each stand next to one another, waiting to speak at the Al Smith Dinner, there’s animosity on both sides. Santos blames Vinick for the ad and threatens to go negative. Vinick thinks the Women’s Alliance endorsement offer is a plot by Santos to convince the “values voters” to stay home. And yet they’re both disgusted at where the campaign is going, that this is what they’ve devolved to.

They realize, however, that each of them really wants a substantive campaign and a debate on the real issues. In the midst of all the partisan politics and ideological spectrum positioning, what they both want most (short of, perhaps, winning) is to get to have a real debate on the issues, where each believes they can not only shine, but make their real case to the American people about who they are without the need for negative ads and an ugly campaign.

This is more of the typical West Wing fantasy world, but there’s something about these two candidates who have different beliefs on many topics, both wanting to root out the nastier side of politics and do things the right way that is as heartening as it is unrealistic. It strains credulity that either man would give up the potential for an electoral advantage at the behest of the other, especially when both of them are getting wedged by an issue as divisive and hot button as abortion, but sometimes that’s the beauty of stories – we get to see things as we might wish they would be, not as they are.

8.1/10. You have to admire the chutzpah it took to put on this episode. Going live isn’t that brave – live episodes have been ratings stunts for years, and The West Wing’s corporate cousin Saturday Night Live has put on a live show on weekly basis since 1975. But doing a live show in the context of a debate, a discussion of policy and talking points, is pretty bold. Sure, the show may attract more politically-minded viewers who could be more interested in seeing that type of presentation, but showing politics, even an act of political theater, without the razzle dazzle of Hollywood editing and lighting and cinematography and score and all the other elements, great and small, that the folks behind the scenes use to communicate their themes and help the medicine go down takes moxie, and doing it without a net on live television takes even more.

The results weren’t flawless, but they were interesting. Some of the live elements were a little shaky. For instance, the camera knew to cut to Vinick for footage of him interrupting before he’d actually begun speaking, and both Jimmy Smits and Forrest Sawyer had some trouble making the scripted moments feel spontaneous. That said, in many ways, the shagginess of the production helped to make the exercise feel a little more daring, even if we could see the strings.

And kudos to the West Wing’s brain trust for giving us forty-five minutes of substance. Some of that substance was still gussied up and prepackaged for easy consumption, but this could pass for a somewhat outsized and exaggerated version of a real debate, and the show deserves real credit for that. Stunts like Vinick asking to scrap the rules at the beginning of the debate or Santos going all Price Is Right with the audience when asking how much Medicare spends in administrative costs felt unrealistic or tailored for the narrative the show is going for, but for the most part, the candidates engaged with one another on real issues, whether it be healthcare or energy independence or pharmaceutical companies or jobs. The writers did a nice job of balancing parts of the candidates we’ve seen them discuss, like tax cuts or education plans, with ones we haven’t really seen them tackle, but which voters would be interested in like drilling in Anwar or the death penalty.

What I’m most curious about is how the next episode of the show treats the debate. Presumably, the next few episodes of the show had been completed long before this live episode had aired, given the usual TV production schedule, which means that John Wells & Co. presumably already had and have a narrative in mind about how the debate went and how the public responded to it. It’ll be very interesting to see how much that matches up to the live performance out there.

Because if I’m scoring at home, this was a good performance for Vinick and a solid but kind of shaky one for Santos. But maybe that plays into the narrative that had been previously established. Despite his early awkward pause (which may have been intentional given the context), Alan Alda seemed pretty relaxed and natural out there, even during some of the more obviously scripted parts. Jimmy Smits, by contrast, felt a little stiff, mannered, and overly rehearsed, even when he got some of his big lines in. That could work though, if we believe Josh and Lou’s prior sell that Vinick is a known debater and Santos is much more of a neophyte at doing this under a spotlight this bright.

What’s exciting, and another great credit to the people who produced this episode, is that I’m not really sure where the show’s going to go with “The Debate.” There’s a lot of potential narratives out there. Does Vinick somewhat dominating the time show him as a seasoned orator who could engage with the issues, or is he meant to come off like a bully who wouldn’t let Santos get fair time? (Particularly with Sawyer basically shushing him.) Does Santos’s request that Vinick join him a pledge not to go to war for foreign oil come off as the Democratic candidate taking a stand with his rival lacking the integrity to do the same, or does it play as a political stunt that gets Santos backlash? Does Vinick’s closing speech about trusting liberty over government unify the country as Bruno suggested or alienate voters on the left side of the political spectrum? Does Santos’s final statement about his heritage inspire voters to see what he’s achieved despite discrimination and implicit biases or does it come off as him playing the race card? Are we supposed to walk away from this episode buying Santos’ pitch for taking action and not just saying no, or for Vinick’s pitch for the need for maturity and experience?

I don’t know, and that’s a testament to the nigh-cinema vérité approach that The West Wing took in this episode. In truth, the only moments that really felt like they were biased, slanted, and awkward, were the ones where The West Wing was clearly commenting on the contemporary Bush administration and the political climate of the real world in ways that didn’t really match up with the one that was about to finish up eight years of a Bartlet presidency. The comments about not going to war for oil, or Santos’s big speech about reclaiming the term “liberal” felt more like the candidate arguing against the real life President and his party rather than his opponent, and it made certain chunks of the episode feel a bit strained.

That said, “The Debate” is a major accomplishment for the series, not only for doing this whole thing live, not only for packing in forty-five minutes of some real (if slightly sugared up) substance, not only for making back and forth policy debates compelling without the benefits of dramatic cuts or soaring music, but for creating an episode where the fallout is so uncertain. In real world debates, it’s often easy to walk away with both sides declaring victory and it being difficult to discern how the public writ large will respond. Being able to achieve the same thing in a fictional context, especially on a show that so often tips its hand, is a mean feat. “The Debate” is more than just a stunt; it’s an achievement.

8.3/10. I’ve complained in my previous write ups that Santos is too perfect for my tastes, too pure and too good and too idealized for me to really connect with him as a character or a candidate. But in “Undecideds” I liked him more than I’ve ever like him on this show.

It’s not because of his closing speech, which was good, but which fits into the vast collection of grand bits of oratory that have piled up on this show for years. The West Wing has a unique ability, regardless of who’s at the helm, to reduce big ideas to soaring verbiage that smooths over the rough edges.

No, it’s the anger and frustration and doubt from him that are on display. When a Latino police officer shoots a young black boy with a plastic, but realistic gun, he is, understandably, at a loss. He wants to blame both sides. He doesn’t know what the answer to the problem is. And he feels the difficult at not just facing the pressure of being the Democratic nominee for president, but of having to carry the mantle as the pride and joy of the Latino community, as though he speaks for every person in the country who happens to share his heritage.
It's the most human that we’ve ever seen the preternaturally decent and principled Santos seem. It’s the first time we haven’t seen him have the “right” answer to whatever intractable problem arose. It presages the excellent film Selma, which explored the way in which even the duly venerated Martin Luther King Jr., whom Santos references in his speech, wavered and experienced self-doubt and felt the weight of having to represent his community at a time of crisis and upheaval and difficulty.

Because what makes Santos’s speech good is that he doesn’t offer easy answers, because his discussion of the issue with his wife earlier reveals he has none, because there are none. All he can do is admit his human frailty – his desire to cast blame, his questioning whether progress will truly come between two fractured and hurt communities, whether social justice will ever fully be here – and admit that all he can do is try, try to have compassion, try to offer forgiveness and understanding, in the hopes that one day, it may lead everyone forward.

There’s not a lot of forgiveness and understanding between Josh and Toby, unfortunately. When Josh stops to pay Toby a visit, the typically bristly Mr. Ziegler is even more ornery than usual when faced with his former friend. Toby is a political pariah and feeling the isolation of the fact that even if he’s fielding requests for interviews and book deals along with the prospect of jail, his job has been his life and now he’s disconnected from anyone and anything that was a part of it.

So he lashes out at Josh, who is understandably hurt by Toby running down the candidate whose campaign he’s running. I don’t know if there’s truth to Toby’s pronouncement, that the President has to have unqualified, unwavering belief in himself and his truth and his projects in order to be a leader. More than a few Presidents in history, even beatified ones like Abraham Lincoln, have been shown by history to have mulled and wavered in their biggest decisions. But it sounds like the type of thing Toby would believe, with his persistent belief in principle and unwavering truth in all things. Josh seems to admit that Santos doesn’t have that, as we see him struggle here. Maybe it’s the show simply setting the tone here, giving us the reasons that Santos is maybe not quite Bartlet’s successor, how he maybe doesn’t have “the stuff” to win this election. That’s certainly what Toby believes.

But more than that, there’s a personal enmity there, a professional jealousy and an anger that Josh still gets to do this while Toby is under political house arrest. It’s a hell of a show for Richard Schiff and Bradley Whitford, with more coming through in tone, in what’s not said, than in the words said by both of these former friends. There is a pain at the heart of the character of Toby; there always has been, and it’s difficult to see him push away the people who try to offer him a salve, when he sees it as disingenuous, as pity. We can only hope that he, and the people who give his life meaning, will make up soon.

Oh yeah, and then there’s a wacky comic relief story about Will helping Ellie Bartlet plan her wedding! There’s nothing wrong with it really. It’s a bit of a generic sitcom plotline shoehorned into the confines of the senior staff’s orbit (see: bumbling man knows nothing about matrimony! Humor!) But Josh Malina does a good job with the material, and it’s a nice enough comic break from some of the heavier material in the episode.
In addition, CJ and Kate are dealing with the episode’s crisis of the week, this time involving a conflict between Russia and China over oil in Kazakhstan. Aside from, perhaps, making Santos’s pledge about not getting into a war involving oil seem a little prescient, there’s not much to this part of the episode aside from what feels like a little table setting and an excuse for CJ to be otherwise occupied after agreeing to help Ellie with her wedding planning (which is, in and of itself, already a little nuts for the Chief of Staff to be doing, even as a favor on her off day.)

The core of this episode, however, is Santos showing a chink in his armor. Of course, this being The West Wing, the show turns into a strength, into something that allows him to connect with the black community by being honest and open about his feelings with regard to one tragedy and a larger, very complicated issue. But it’s also a strength for the character in connecting with the audience. It shows us that Santos is not just a god on high, with the usual brilliant and principled ideas that win the day. He is a human being, who doubts and falters and gets frustrated and doesn’t always have the right solution to the big problems. That’s what makes him a character and not just an archetype, and that’s what makes him relatable instead of just admirable.

9.3/10. We’ve never had much about work-life balance on The West Wing. It comes into play a little bit early in the show with Leo’s divorce, and you hear the Barlets talk about it on occasion, but for the most part, it’s just sort of expected that everyone devotes their lives to their job and that’s that. You get great scenes where CJ remarks about how hard it is to have a social life when you’re in her position or how she feels about missing her dad, or a rotating series of love interests that all orbit around the White House one way or another, or an incredibly meaningful moment between Toby and his newborn children…whom we haven’t seen since. On the whole though, this is a show much more about the work, and much less about what’s given up in order to do that work.

That’s why it’s nice to see The West Wing, however fleetingly, engage with how difficult it would be to fulfill the responsibilities of being a husband and a father and also fulfill the responsibilities of being the leader of the free world. Ellie has the patience of a saint about everything, and Abby has her usual amusingly sharp remarks about the situation that show her perturbation with the rigmarole that comes with a White House wedding with a certain weariness to suggest that she’s been through this before. Still, the center of the story is Josiah Bartlet, and how this is as difficult for him as it is for anyone.

How do you balance the global importance of something like heading off two world powers from going to war with one another on the one hand, and the personal importance of being there on one of the most important days of your daughter’s life on the other? Neglecting one or the other, even a little bit, feels like a dereliction of a crucial duty. So you have Bartlet on the phone with the Chinese ambassador, trying stave off World War III, and losing patience because he’s missing the chance to walk his daughter down the aisle. You see him lose his cool in a diplomatic situation, something that rarely if ever happens, and it’s a sign of how torn he is between two things he absolutely must do, and it’s tying him in knots.

Josh is tying himself up in knots as well trying to figure out how to manage the Santos campaign’s resources and deploy them in a way that gives the congressman a fighting chance against Vinick. Time is running out between here and election day; the sharks are beginning to circle and suggest that maybe Josh isn’t the right person to take the campaign to the finish line, and Josh himself is beginning to second guess his own decisions.

On top of all of this, Josh isn’t sleeping. He’s overscheduling himself. He’s running himself ragged trying to change his plans, find the optimal strategic points, and is basically ready to pass the baton to the next guy and step aside from the campaign that he brought to this point through sheer force of will. We see him meeting with party elders from across the country, all of whom offer, as Leo puts it, Monday morning quarterbacking for what he should have done here or shouldn’t have done there. (As a Dallas Cowboys fan, I particularly appreciated his jab at Philadelphia on having experience with that.) The catch is that it’s getting to him. Josh can’t just make a decision and stick with it. He has to agonize and tear what’s left of his hair out constantly to try to figure how to capitalize on a bump in Illinois without sinking the rest of the campaign’s war chest.

This means he can only barely engage with his friends back in the White House. (With the divide between the operations of the Oval Office and the adventures on the campaign trail, these sorts of episodes almost feel like crossovers.) He’s barely there when he runs into CJ and she asks if he wants to trade responsibilities and take over on the Kazakhstan issue. He completely misses Will and Kate, who are semi-officially going on a date (after Ellie left Will off the guest list in what feels like a dick move). He doesn’t even respond to his star-crossed love Donna who declares herself a bored, beautiful woman who wants to be entertained.

In the midst of all of this, Santos is himself wondering if he needs to make a change. The party elders buzz in his ear that Josh’s needed replacement is right there, in the form of Leo, the man who got the last Democratic nominee to the finish line. Leo begs off, even when he’s flattered by the suggestion, even when Santos and his new coterie talk about the benefits of it, even when Josh himself practically hands over the keys to the kingdom.

Instead, he tells Josh that he can do this, that there’s going to be difficult decisions and that he’s going to make some of them wrongly, but that what counts is how he reacts and moves forward, with an offer to help however he can. And he tells Santos that the pundits are right, Josh has gotten Santos as far as he possibly can, but that the rest of it is up to Santos now, not a change in management, and it’s incumbent upon the two of them to finish the race.

Maybe it’s because after a heart attack (and a statement to Josh that “you really are trying to kill me,” he doesn’t need the pressure and sleepless nights of running a campaign. Maybe it’s because he’s blinded by loyalty and affection for Josh, who has basically been his mentee, particularly in campaign season. Maybe it’s Leo having once been there and understanding and sympathizing what Josh is going through. Maybe he’s just right. Either way, he’s there for someone who he’s quickly become like a father to just when he needs him.

And late though he may be, President Bartlet is there to be a father when he’s needed as well. As he waits with Ellie in the atrium, moments away from walking her down the aisle, he begins to fidget, to seem quietly emotional in the way that only a man who is expected to perpetually project strength and stability can. Martin Sheen does a tremendous job, reminiscing about some old Congressional fact-finding mission when Ellie was eight years old and gave him a scare. Even the leader of the free world, a man who holds such power and can stand up to world leaders and power brokers across the globe, gets wistful, gets emotional, feels the enormity of this personal moment. The world of the White House may consume so much of who these people are, but there is feeling, genuine human feeling, beneath the workaholic exteriors required of the day-in-day-out of the highest levels of government, that comes through when it really counts.

6.6/10. You need what I might charitably call a “low impact” episode now and then in a twenty-two episode season. You can only have so many bits of high-anxiety, world-impacting drama, even on a show about the goings on of the White House, before it starts to become almost overwhelming and undifferentiated. You need chances to slow down and have a laugh or tell a story where the stakes aren’t so high to give the audience a chance to breathe before the next earth-shattering reveal.

But the upshot is that sometimes, as a viewer, you see a pack of perfectly good plots and sort of go “ho-hum.” Don’t get me wrong. I love Leo, and giving him a little focus in the context of the (traditionally not quite earth-shattering) Vice Presidential debate is generally welcome. In my last write up, I was just talking about how it’s refreshing to see the show deal a little bit with the issues of work/life balance, and carrying that theme onto the Santos campaign is a solid choice. And I’d be lying if I said I was terribly moved by the Will Bailey-Kate Harper pairing, but they’re cute enough. It’s just that none of these stories is especially compelling on their own, and it makes for a gentle, solid but unspectacular episode when they’re bundled together.

Leo’s story is probably the strongest. Having Martin Sheen address the audience directly regarding John Spencer’s death at the top of the episode adds some weight to the nigh cringe-worthy opening scene where Leo is preparing for the debate and doesn’t seem all there. From the beginning, the show has acknowledged that Leo is not a natural campaigner, that he’s used to being a behind the scenes power player and that’s the world he knows, but being in front of the cameras is less his forte. Seeing him struggle, and seeing his staff struggle with trying to get him ready for the big event creates what little stakes there are in this one.

It also creates a good amount of the comedy. Watching Josh, Lou, and the rest of the gang bend over backwards not to tell Leo that he’s awful out there (with the amusing reveal that Leo was leaking bad prep stories to lower expectations) leads to some good laughs. It also leads to the episode’s best scene, where Josh expresses his worries about the VP debate to Toby.

It’s scenes like these that make me wonder if we take the chemistry of the original cast for granted. Even when they’re clearly on different sets and probably not actually talking to one another live, there’s such a rapport between Richard Schiff and Bradley Whitford that the back and forth between their characters over the phone is still so endearing. Josh is, as he is wont to do, terribly worried about the potential for having led Leo into failure at Josh’s behest, and Toby has his usual grumpily smart remarks to reassure Josh and knock him down a little bit at the same time. It’s nice to see these two friends, even if there’s still some bad blood, reaching out to one another.

Those are frankly the best scenes in this episode – the ones that don’t necessarily move the plot too far forward, but which give you little scenes of people reacting to these situations and just being people. There was something almost sweet about Santos and Leo chatting on the phone, with Santos giving Leo advice on loosening up for the debate (which—gasp—turns out to be the key!) and Leo giving Santos advice on making up with his wife. There’s a chummy dynamic there, a budding version of what we saw with Leo and President Bartlet, that connects these two parts of the episode but almost warms you to both characters. The same is true when we’re watching the Vinick campaign joke back and forth about their own VP prep, or Santos is curling up with his wife and kids, or Josh is calling up an old friend. Showing us these individuals just being themselves, apart from all the campaign histrionics, is a welcome part of the episode.

Of course, the Santos family, or at least Mr. and Mrs. Santos, feel like they can’t be themselves with all the campaign hoopla going on. This is, frankly, the weakest part of the episode. It’s an interesting idea in principle – showing the toll that a grueling Presidential campaign takes on the family, and it’s nice to see an episode where Mrs. Santos is given a little more agency and perspective in all of this. But the results are just okay, feeling a little like this corner of The West Wing has slipped into Full House territory. (Or, for you BoJack Horseman fans, the season of Horsin’ Around where BoJack ran for president.)

After all, Congressman Santos bristling at not being able to go get his own mail works for a beat or two, but isn’t the type of thing to hang a plotline on. Similarly, Mrs. Santos presumably knew what the campaign would entail in terms of Matt’s free time, so it feels a little disingenuous, albeit very human, when she complains about him not being there to spend time with the kids. And the tabloids flipping out over a picture of Mrs. Santos’s underwear is an interesting dramatization of the privacy a family gives up when a family member embarks on something like this, and the gross, invasive indignities that possible first ladies have to deal with, but folding it all into what amounts to a “you spend too much time at work” plot, replete with Santos’s adorable little cough at the end, ties it all up in too neat and too hoary a bow.

But hey, not every episode can change the face of television. Some of them just feature a couple of characters with mild chemistry having a first date with take out while watching a Vice Presidential debate. (You know, like you do.) It’s a lighter entry in The West Wing’s canon, but now and then we need something lighter, a different energy or tone, to make the show feel varied and diverse.

9.7/10. As I mentioned in my write-up of “The Debate,” I am a sucker for what Simpsons fans refer to as “format benders,” or episodes that depart from the usual formula for a show and try something a little new and different. On the surface, “Internal Displacement” doesn’t seem like a format bender. The bulk of the episode takes place in the White House; almost all of the major players are there; there’s still a crisis of the week, and if you just flipped on a rerun for five minutes or so, you’d have little reason to this was anything out of the ordinary. And yet, all of these events, all of the excitement in the episode, is entirely filtered through my favorite character on the show: C.J. Cregg.

And this episode goes a long way to demonstrating why C.J.’s my favorite character on The West Wing. We get to see her be accomplished. We get to see her be self-aware. We get to see her be clever. We get to see her be funny. We get to see her be strong. We get to see her face incredible difficulties. We get to see her be frantic. We get to see her be firm. We get to see her be vulnerable. We get to see her be charming. We get to see her be pointed. We get to see her be determined. And we even get to see her be a little romantic.

In short, in a show full of characters who are almost all superb, but don’t always feel especially realistic, C.J. always felt the most vivid and multifaceted to me. She was incredibly talented and capable of taking whatever was given to her, but also took meaningful lumps and did it with humor and grace and even a certain droll weariness about all of this that made you understand this was a person who was fully equipped and committed to her job, but had no illusions that it was a cakewalk or her personal arena of the deluded that Danny talks about. So much of this is owed to the incredible Allison Janney, who always brings a layered performance to the character that shows off the character’s complexity while never making her feel inconsistent.

But the rest of it goes to writers like Bradley Whitford, the actor who plays Josh Lyman, who turned in one of the best-written scripts (or at least, wrote something that turned into one of the best-written episodes) the show’s ever done. Leave it to someone who’s been spitting out West Wing dialogue for seven years to be able to do it, but the way the dialogue just spills out of the characters is so natural and so in-tune with the show’s patter-y ethos that it’s like they took Sorkin out of the mothballs but held back the sexism and impossible idealism for an episode.

That writing is strongest in the two scenes that bookend the episode, each of which feature CJ and Danny on a date at the same restaurant. I’ve mentioned previously that I’m also, somewhat embarrassingly, a committed Danny-C.J. shipper, and these scenes exemplify why. There’s just such a rapport between the two actors and the characters, that you can both see why they are inextricably attracted to one another, but also so often finding themselves with missed connections. But more than that, they influence each other, they listen to each other, they impact each other.

When CJ is making her pitch to the President on Sudan, she echoes Danny’s line about not being hypnotized by the complexity and being willing to take action. It’s clear that even if the show (wisely) never makes it explicit, Danny’s words stuck with her, and are a big part of what prompted her to push on a backroom deal response to Sudan in order to, as the President surmises, make the most of their last days in office and do something, as both the Refugee Rights representative and the Chinese Ambassador gesture toward, something purely for the ethics of it.

It’s a two-way street though. When C.J. complains in response to Danny’s jibes about politicians by noting that reporters often ignore the real story in favor of salacious or sensational headlines, the subtext is that it’s part of not only what prompted Danny not to run with the story that the President’s son-in-law is cheating on his wife, but part of what has prompted Danny to want to get out of the reporting business, to try something new. And his speech, his adorable “forced into a heroic posture” statement that he’s about to jump off a cliff, C.J. is about to be pushed off of one, and they may as well hold hands on the way down, however fatalistic that may seem, is pretty much the sweetest thing ever said on this show.

But as enjoyable as that moment is (and as sorry as it is to see it interrupted by the inevitable crisis leading to the next episode, and perhaps giving Santos a way forward in the electoral horse race), this episode isn’t about Danny. It’s about C.J. It’s about how she is not merely inspired by talk from plenty of corners that the White House should not rest on its laurels in the Bartlet Administration’s last 100 days in office but should instead reach for more (something that goes back to Leo’s episode to the same effect last season), but that she has the knowhow to do it.

It’s about how she “can be very persuasive” and knows how to lean on the French Ambassador, the German Ambassador, the Chinese Ambassador, interests groups, and the President himself to get done what she wants to get done. It’s about how the can take something as delicate and uncomfortable as the President’s son-in-law, who’s running for Congress being on the verge of a sex scandal and navigate her way around to intimating a “back off” to the son-in-law, doing her job to protect the President despite the pressure from his daughter, and having to break the news of the event to Bartlet herself. It’s about how she can deal with a pain in the ass like Josh, and the competing needs of a Presidential campaign and a Senatorial campaign, each of which wants help from the West Wing.

Because that’s who CJ is, someone who can believably juggle all of these things, show the strain but determination in the effort, know when discretion is the better part of valor, and reveal the real human beneath this incredibly accomplished Chief of Staff. She’s the kind of character whom you’re excited to see in action, in conquering whatever challenges are thrown her way, but whom you’re also excited and hopeful for when she finally gets to stop, to get out of this marathon, catch her breath, and maybe even hold some incredibly lucky guy’s hand afterward.

8.3/10. Every now and again, The West Wing turns into a disaster movie. There’s nothing wrong with it exactly, but the show stumbles into some uber-crisis with tense music and a sense that, if only for one episode, the show is becoming more of a blockbuster than it is a heady, policy-wonky show for nerds like yours truly.

But one of the ways that the show backs away from this a little is by focusing less on the crisis itself, and more on how the people in charge are struggling to handle it. I’ve made no secret of the fact that Bartlet’s Father Knows Best routine can wear on me, but I like the idea, however implausible, that the President refuses to push off responsibility of a malfunctioning nuclear plant to a Czar or the Head of the Nuclear Regulatory Council, instead seeing it as a burden so important that he must take it on himself.

That means making the hard calls. Bartlet has to decide whether to vent gas when evacuation is not complete, with the possibility of explosion on the one hand and the risk of the elderly and disabled “bearing the brunt” of the release on the other. (If only he’d had Homer Simpson’s drinking bird to help him.) He has to decide whether to announce that the amount of nuclear material in the air is a little bit above the EPA-specified safe amount, risking a panic on the one hand and the moral difficulty of hiding a danger from the public on the other. He has to decide whether to send civilian mechanical engineers into the plant, risking their lives in the process. He has to decide whether to keep them in there longer, exposing them to more possibly dangerous radiation, but also possibly ending the crisis once and for all and keeping the whole of Southern California safe. And when that doesn’t work, and one of them slips into a coma, he has to decide whether to send in another team.

He makes the tough calls, and eventually manages to stop the problem, but at the cost of one of those engineer’s lives, a death he puts at the feet of Senator Vinick, who lobbied for that plant to be in his home state and who has been, and still is, a staunch pro-nuclear energy advocate.

And this is where, as has happened many times as I’ve watched The West Wing, my personal politics put me on the outs with the series a bit. Though the show attempts to give Vinick’s position a fair hearing, it’s clear that the folks behind the scenes are against nuclear energy, if only for giving the last word to ol’ wise papa Bartlet declaring that they’ll never be safe, and having his argument with Vinick interrupted by the news of a young man’s death to drive the point home.

I don’t want to litigate the arguments on both sides here, but it’s a reminder of the risks of any show about politics. When you make it about a political issue, and portray one side as heroic, or even just right, it can make parts of your narrative, even big parts, feel tin-eared to swaths of your audience. (See also: Dallas Buyers Club where the protagonist rails against a now well-known life-saving medication.) If nothing else, the Jed Bartlet we’ve seen for seven years would almost certainly take that kind of position on nuclear power, and I’m sure he’s not especially endeared to arguments about its safety having had to make all of those tough calls.

He is, however, not the only person having to make tough calls here. Apart from the actual mechanics of the crisis, both the Santos campaign and the Vinick campaign are embroiled in a game of chicken over how to deal with the political consequences of this event. The importance of this political calculation is magnified by two notable developments: the information that Vinick lobbied to get that power plant, and President Bartlet following procedure by inviting Vinick to come on Air Force One and visit his home state with the President.

These two things create a crisis for the Santos campaign. Josh’s initial instinct is to go dark. He knows that as soon as Santos makes any kind of statement about Vinick’s support for nuclear power, he’ll be open to accusations that they’re playing politics, and that if they leak the info about Vinick’s lobbying, it’ll be seen as an almost craven use of the tragedy for political purposes. On the other hand, the President inviting Vinick, however standard it may be, complicates matters, because it allows Vinick to be seen as a healer, as presidential, as bipartisan, and most of all would let him wriggle out of the situation that gives Santos the best chance to tar him with this disaster.
On the other side of the fence, Bruno is being just as calculating. Campaign advisor Bob is worried about the pro-nuclear clips from Vinick’s debate performance being repeated endlessly on the news networks and wants Vinick to put out a statement. Bruno, like Josh, advises calm and reserve, a chance to wait and see. He wants to bait Josh. He knows his old ally, and he knows that as soon as Josh smells blood in the water, he won’t be able to help himself from taking advantage of the situation. Then, Vinick’s camp can deflect, can turn around and accuse Santos of making this humanitarian issue a political one, and win the news cycle.

Vinick, however, can’t help himself. It’s oddly noble from him. Even if he’s on what the show would consider the wrong side of the issue, Vinick is still one of The West Wing’s champions, and that means when offered a choice between doing what’s politically expedient and what he truly believes in, he’s going to pick the latter. Vinick believes that nuclear power is safe. He believes that inadequate federal regulations are to blame. And however helpful to his campaign it would be for him to just hang back and bask in the halo effect of standing with the President and letting his mea culpa cover your own, he just can’t do it. He has to stand by his beliefs, even if they’re beliefs the show will have its mouthpiece of truth and righteousness excoriate him for later.

What’s so incredible about that moment, when Vinick goes off script and speaks his mind, is that Bruno was right! Josh had given in and told Donna to leak the story, but because Josh had been able to forebear just long enough for the press to get a hold of it on their own, the story gets out and Santos’s campaign doesn’t get tainted by seeming to be mercenary about something like this. This was a stand off, a game of strategy. Vinick flinched, because he, like so many West Wing characters, couldn’t let the moment get ahead of his principles, and Josh (and by extension Santos) held out just long enough for the map to suddenly be looking much more in their favor.

The decisions made at a Presidential level, whether they come from hopefuls or the man occupying the Oval Office, are hard ones. You have to deal with the tough calls of weighing the lives of the many versus those of the few, and have blood on your hands even when you’ve arguably done the right thing. You have to decide whether politicizing something is what’s best in a utilitarian calculation or whether to stand firm on your beliefs regardless of how that may hurt you. You have to balance all of this while Russia and China are about to go to war over oil and elections in Eastern Europe. You have to have your lonely, beleaguered Communications Director wrangle the press and his own subordinates in order to avoid panicking the population.

There’s no right answer to most of these questions. Does Vinick look at that map and wish he’d kept quiet? Does Bartlet hear the news about the dead engineer and wish he’d pulled the first team earlier? Does Josh thank his lucky stars that one enterprising reporter got to the story before he had a chance to have Donna leak it? Probably. There’s so much uncertainty, so much at stake in these decisions, that as much as an episode like this feels like a disaster movie with dramatic events taking place every five minutes, what makes them meaningful are the people navigating these decisions, trying to figure out which way the wind is blowing, and hoping for the best, sometimes even to their ruin.

7.6/10. So this is the love episode, which is odd because it’s also the legacy episode, which is odd because it’s also yet another “who will stick to their principles” Santos vs. Vinick episode. That means that what we get as a whole in “The Cold,” feels a little muddled. The pieces fit together decently well, but the fit is a little awkward in places as the show tries to juggle its romantic storylines, its campaign storylines, its Presidential storylines, and its international relations storylines all at once.

But let’s focus on the light stuff to start out with! As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve never been especially invested in the Josh-Donna relationship. They’ve often been sketched as too condescending a pairing for me to really get behind them as a couple, and the show hasn’t gone far enough to show Josh earning Donna’s affections by respect her or treating her as a peer rather than a pontification toy for me to change my mind.

The way their flirtations here were dramatized didn’t do much for me either. I understand that “Will They, Won’t They” has been the most dependable story engine on television for decades now, but I grow weary of these teases, and wish the show would do it or get off the pot already. Bradley Whitford and Janel Moloney do a good job at elevating generic romcom-level waffling, and the missed connection slip of the hotel key is a solid touch, but I’m perturbed, rather than anticipatory, at The West Wing drawing this out rather than pulling the trigger.

I did, however, enjoy the use of C.J. as someone who can detect both that something’s up with Donna and that there’s something going on with Will and Kate. The latter couple doesn’t really have the chemistry to make them compelling, but there’s some cute enough (again) rom-com-y material between them that works as a garnish to the rest of the story and a parallel to Josh and Donna unpacking their fateful kiss.

The opening, which featured that kiss, was done about as well as you can imagine. It was a great set piece to have the Santos team frantically checking polls, waiting for the newest update, and then have a jaunty tune slowly pipe in as they gather round the same screen to see the good news revealed. The ensuing scenes of the team slamming on doors to wake up the crew and tell them that Santos is officially tied was fully of fun and energy, and lent the right air to that fateful kiss.

But while the episode opened with jubilant music and two people coming together, it ended with a much more melancholy music selection, and two people breaking apart (albeit not romantically). Starting the episode with Santos’s altogether and celebrating, and closing it with Vinick all alone, practically in mourning, tells the story of the trajectory of these two campaigns.

Sheila basically making the call of firing herself as campaign manager to signal a shakeup to the public and get Vinick’s campaign back on track was quite sad. Sheila (Jill Taylor, to we T.G.I.F. fans), has been the rock of Vinick’s campaign, someone whom he trusted and who served as a voice of reason who could channel the Senator’s impulses into something crowd-pleasing and digestable. You also got the impression that she was one of Vinick’s few friends on the campaign trail, someone who was looking out for him as a person and not just as a project. Her leaving signals a shift, a departure in more ways than one, that more than his nascent illness, leaves Vinick a little dispirited.

It’s part of the classic blueprint and philosophy that this show has employed from the beginning. In the early parts of the episode, the Santos team is all atwitter about how to capitalize on their newfound success and the fact that Santos had campaigned against nuclear power prior to the San Andreo accident. There’s tons of talk about campaign verbiage in shades of “look to the future” and “21st century ____.” But in the end, the team decides to stick with what’s worked for them, an image of consistency and stability rather than forward-looking buzzwords, with a “right from the start” tagline to emphasize that.

Meanwhile, Vinick is presented with a similar option in the fallout (no pun intended) from the San Andreo accident and his plummeting performance in the polls: he can either choose to stick with the moderate 50-state strategy that Bruno has been pursuing from the beginning, or he can shift to appeal to the Republican base as his VP candidate, Bob, the RNC chairman, and a rising star RNC fundraiser and campaign manager heir apparent advise. It’s clear that Vinick is reluctant to pursue these “values voters” because doing so would represent a departure from the principles that made him the legislator he’s been for decades. Sheila essentially makes the decision for him, stating that it’s the best chance for him to win and for her to keep her promise to get him elected. But people in the world of The West Wing get punished for not standing up for what they believe in, and it’s clear that Vinick is already feeling the sting of the compromise he’s been pressured to make.

But Vinick isn’t the only person in the episode struggling with what the future holds. President Bartlet, at this late point in his Presidency, is worried about his legacy. He gazes at sketches wondering whether he’ll be remembered as a man who needed a cane or as the vigorous man he sees himself as, and whether his accomplishments over the last eight years will be overshadowed if he gets the country into a protracted war in Kazakhstan. It’s an interesting look at how the awkward period where one president is on the way out and another is likely to come in changes the decision-making in these crucial moments.

To that end, I liked how it led to a sort of White House cold war with the Vinick and Santos camped holed up while the candidates waited to speak with the President about this big decision. (I also loved Leo being brought in to give his old friend advice and Deborah Fiderer being her usual pugnacious self.) The moment when the President and the two candidates were in the room was sobering. If Bartlet goes through with this, gone are Santos’s education plan and Vinick’s tax cuts.

As we’ve learned over seven seasons, so much of what it is to sit in the Oval Office is to be reactive, to have to adjust your plans to handle unexpected developments and unaccounted for realities. Seeing these two hopefully be told that much of their plans would be preemptively dashed by the guy who wouldn’t have to stay in office to see the consequences, even if he believes it to be the right thing to do, made for an interesting dynamic for the three men who, for time being, hold the country’s future in their hands.

That said, where the episode was weakest is where it felt like “The Cold” was speaking more directly about the then-contemporary Iraq War rather than the conflict presented in a fashion that felt a bit strained. The show is no stranger to shoehorning in commentary on real life current events without much consideration for how organic it is to the universe of the show, but it always bugs me just a little when I can “see the strings” in that regard.

So much of the legacies of these individuals, whether it’s Bartlet and Leo and C.J. as the decision-makers of an administration, or Santos and Vinick as candidates, or Sheila and Bruno as campaign managers, or Josh and Donna as partners, are directed by forces beyond their control: foreign incursions, nuclear disasters, and spur of the moment romantic enthusiasm. They, and we, don’t know when some event will come in, upset the applecart, and change the nature of this race, this country, and these people, all over again.

9.4/10. We’ve done Let Bartlet Be Bartlet. We’ve done Let Santos Be Santos. I suppose it was time for the old guy on the other side of the aisle to get a turn at holding steady, trusting his instincts, and doing the right thing in the face of every opportunity to compromise, give in, or make the convenient but unethical choice. I guess it was time we let Vinick be Vinick.

And, to be honest, I loved it. It’s usually the sort of the thing that bugs me on this show, the way The West Wing’s universe lets fortune smile upon those noble creature who won’t dare sully themselves in the muck of that dirty little thing you call "politics." But whether it’s the way the character’s written, the charm of Alan Alda, or my own political leanings which probably hew closer to Vinick’s policies than Santos’s, that same old spell worked on me in “Two Weeks Out,” and the moral choices the episode presents.

The lesser moral choice in the episode is how to get Vinick’s campaign out of the rut it’s been in for the last two weeks. We open with old man Arnie’s hand getting crushed from excessive handshaking (a kind of cute but nicely symbolic bit), and it’s another sign that this election is wearing on him. Vinick didn’t necessarily expect this election to be a cakewalk, but he expected to come in as the frontrunner, someone who was shooting for a 50-state electoral map rather than the guy having to scrape by to get 51%.

But that was before San Andreo, and that was before Kazakhstan. So instead, Santos is trying to figure out how to chart a new strategy between now and election day to pull out the victory. He’s come out against gay marriage, something that, behind closed doors, he’s clearly uncomfortable with. He doesn’t like having to offer sops to the “values voters” that new campaign-manager Jane wants him to court. He doesn’t like the impression that he’s chasing Santos’s tail as they hit the same swing states. He doesn’t want to have to focus his campaign on the Southern states, voters which, as Jane admits, never especially liked him anyway. He’s tired of being tarred with the nuclear accident. He’s tired of having to do things that go against who he really is.

It’s tough, because all he’s hearing from everyone is that he needs to go in directions he doesn’t like or want. Jane wants him to double down on his pitch to the GOP base. Bruno doesn’t like it, but admits he doesn’t necessarily have a better plan. And Bob pretty much bends whichever way the wind is blowing. Meanwhile, Josh is getting secret campaign advice from Toby(!) and is positioning Santos to take California right out from under Vinick in the wake of the near-meltdown in his backyard.

Vinick can’t take it. He doesn’t want to cop to Jane’s southern strategy. He doesn’t want to throw in the towel on himself as a moderate. He wants to win, but on his own terms. So he doubles-down on his straight-talking ways, the frank honesty and forthrightness the voters know him by, deciding to give a make-it-or-break-it marathon speech about nuclear power in front of the plant where the accident occurred. His advisors warn him against it, with Jane coming close to quitting, but he wants to get this story, or at least his part of it, out of the news cycle, and he believes that addressing it head-on is the best way to exercise this particular demon.

And by god, it works. He goes out there, speaks openly and truthfully, and says that despite the accident, he still believes in nuclear power. He talks about the risks we take every day for things that better our lives. He places the blame for the accident on federal regulations, and when asked if he regrets pushing for a more abbreviated process that skipped over those regulations, he dodges for a bit but then admits he does. He says if he could do it all again, he would do a lot of things differently, that politicians should change their minds with new information, be smarter in their positions and opinions than they were when they started. In the process, he comes off as earnest and human, winning back Bruno and, in a great nigh-wordless performance, earning the begrudging admiration of fierce ideologue Toby. He wears out the press, gets his mojo back by being himself, and saves his chances in California, and with them, his shot at the presidency.

But there’s a bigger moral choice to be made. When Vinick is in the depths of his frustrations at the way the campaign’s gone, Bruno offers him a golden ticket. Innocently enough, Bruno found a briefcase Santos left at a spot where both teams campaigned. Less innocently, he rifled through it, finding Santos’s journal and a mysterious checkbook made out to a young woman who worked for Santos when he was mayor, a woman with a young daughter who might be Santos’s.

He presents this information to Vinick, and with it, a choice: should Vinick use this stuff, and quite possibly guarantee himself a victory in the Presidential election, or should he give it back graciously and use nothing, and win or lose on his own merits?

What makes this episode a cut above is that it takes a seemingly obvious question (using this type of privacy invasion, however guilelessly it came about, is unquestionably shady), and actually makes a decently compelling argument on both sides. Beyond the sheer ethical issues of how Vinick’s campaign came across this material, Vinick immediately disclaims any interest in wanting to use and raises the point that even if their suspicions were true, it wouldn’t change his mind if he were a Santos voter. Bruno responds, not entirely unreasonably, that it’s not for him to decide what matters to voters, that they deserve to get all the info and make an informed judgment based on what they care about, not what Vinick thinks they should care about.

Bruno also offers a pragmatic argument, that Santos didn’t get a full vetting because he was a surprise winner in the primary, that the press will find this stuff sooner or later, and that if Santos wins, it could come out when he’s in the middle of “World War III” in Kazakhstan. It’s hard to know how much Bruno is a true believer and how much he just wants to win, but he at least lays out a plausible moral case for why Vinick should use this dirt.

Vinick, however, sticks to his principles once again. He returns the briefcase to Santos; he tells his opponent they won’t use any of what they uncovered, and rather than spilling the beans to the press, encourages Santos himself to come clean. Of course, Santos being the mythologically pure individual that he is, was simply paying child support in the stead of his deadbeat brother, and had no personal failings on that scale. But the point stands. Vinick had a chance to, at least from his perspective, win the election through underhanded means, and despite the fact that he was at the end of his rope, that he felt his last chances slipping away from him, stayed true to his beliefs and his integrity.

There’s an odd mix of enmity and mutual admiration between Vinick and Santos, a sense that in other circumstances, they would be on the same side. They share many of the same principles even if their positions differ markedly. Much of that is a product of what The West Wing is, a show about people who stay true in the face of overwhelming opposition and pressure to take the easy way out. Sometimes that’s cloying; sometimes it’s unbelievable, but sometimes, by god, it just works, even on crusty cynics like me.

7.1/10. This is, as is a bit of a West Wing tradition, a breather episode, something that is a little more focused, and a little less eventful, as things build up to the big event on the horizon. With the election (and election episodes) coming shortly, it’s a time for the show to stop and take stock a little bit.

So we get an unusually focused episode of the show, one that really only has two stories. The first is the chaos surrounding the Santos campaign as it makes a final push, and how that is beginning to wear on Santos himself as well as his family. The second is Toby being pressured by the U.S. Attorney for D.C. to tell him who gave him the information about the military spacecraft, with the carrot of a plea deal for only one year of jail time on the one hand, and a stick that if he doesn’t tell who told him, the U.S. Attorney will add a second indictment for obstruction of justice and subpoena the senior staff of the White House, causing a major optics problem for the Democratic Party five days before the election.

Each of these stories works well enough on its own, though neither of them really moves the ball forward in terms of the larger narrative of the show very much. Instead, both basically feel like setup, a chance to show us where Santos’s head at as we head into election day, and to introduce a Toby-related issue that could cause serious problems as that fateful day in November is set to arrive.

But what’s really interesting is the parallels and contrasts between Santos and Toby that “Welcome to Wherever You Are” draws.

The most impressive part of the episode is how well it depicts the utter chaos that is the staff of the Santos campaign as they dart back and forth across the country in the campaign’s final days. There’s some great video and sound editing at play, showing the semi-frantic nature of the Santos brain trust mixing and matching everything from statements about ex-cons getting their voting rights back to sketches on Jay Leno. The cacophony of noise while Santos is trying to do an interview or talk to a staffer is very well done, letting the viewer feel the organized tumult that is going on all around the candidate.

Toby, on the other hand, is in a world of quiet, a world where he has nothing to do but stew on his own future and his own past. He sits and does the crossword puzzle. He waits outside his wife’s house. He waits and wonder’s what’s going to be. Toby is a man who’s used to being a part of that tumult. While the show has only glancingly looked at the effect of the White House busy trap on the personal lives of the senior staff, you get the impression that it’s all Toby really knows, whatever toll it may have taken on him. He is born, or at least conditioned, to expect that sort of high-intensity eventfulness on a day-to-day basis. And now, in the slow, sometimes silent confines of his new life, he’s lost.

Everybody wants to be seen with Santos, everyone wants a piece of him to get their moment in the sun and get a campaign boost. Nobody wants to be seen with Toby, to be wrapped up in the stink of his criminal case, not even the mother of his children.

That leads into the other interesting parallel here – we see both Santos and Toby in relation to their families. Santos gets into a minor fight with his wife over comments she made when pressed by the media about whether ex-cons should vote, after an event done at his behest (or at the staff’s behest through him), that puts him in an awkward position. He doesn’t have time to look after his kids because he’s being rushed around (leading to his son to throw up during a photo-op from too much unsupervised candy consumption). And there’s no one else to attend to these things because everyone else on staff is wrapped up with the flurry of messages and messaging that goes on in the campaign.

(This seems as good a point as any to mention that we spend an oddly significant amount of time with Bon Jovi hanging around the campaign in this episode. I’m not sure if he had an album coming out on an NBC-affiliated label, or he was a big fan of the show and this was the best place for producers to work him in, but it was kind of a big waste that wasn’t really funny, wasn’t especially cute, and didn’t really add anything to the episode. Maybe I just didn’t spend enough time in Jersey.)

Meanwhile, Toby has all the time in the world to spend with his family, for now. But he has to deal with the sting of the fact that he can’t take them trick or treating with their mother because she has a race to win herself, and his presence would make her look bad. He fights with his wife as well, when she tells him to take the deal and blame it on his dead brother, who can’t suffer any consequences from the leak, and which would spare his family and his professional colleagues from further embarrassment or guilt by association.

Both men find themselves having to balance their family interests with their greater goals. Santos wants a good relationship with his wife and his kids, but also imagines the good he can do as President and wants to fight for that, despite the strain it puts on his family. Toby loves his kids, wants to be around for them growing up, and wants to be a part of his ex-wife’s life to boot, but he also doesn’t want to give into political extortion or give up the source whom he sees as allowing himself to do something noble.

And so both men blow up. Santos rails at his staff. Toby, with no staff to turn to, rails at his wife and then the U.S. Attorney. Both are at the end of their ropes.

The difference is that Santos gets a subtle reassurance. Josh tries to calm him down by talking about how the people he didn’t get enough time with could be made cabinet members after the election’s over. In the process, he inadvertently reveals to Santos that he thinks they’re going to win, even if he doesn’t dare say it until asked directly. (It’s a great little second-long smile from Bradley Whitford that sells the moment.) Santos sees a light at the end of the tunnel, that even nervous, semi-pragmatic Josh thinks it’ll be okay, that this will all be worth it, because the election will come out in their favor.

And Toby has a similar confidence, or maybe even hope, that an attorney appointed by President Bartlet wouldn’t threatening sabotaging his own party’s reelection to collar and corner Toby. He’s essentially making the same call, that sticking this out will be worth it because the election will work out the way he hopes. It’s true to Toby’s stubbornly sticking to his principals, to his hard-nosed beliefs, even in the face of a more pragmatic option. We’ll have to see whether his decision blows up in his, or Santos’s face.

I wouldn’t call “Welcome to Wherever You Are” a great episode of The West Wing. It does good work with both of these characters as it ferries them along through the story. But it does show two men who couldn’t be in more different positions -- one the party’s great champion and its pride, and the other the party’s great pariah and its liability – and shows how despite their differences, their lives are closer together than you would think.

6.7/10. The idea of “Election Day pt. 1” is a great one. Taking the time before the election returns really kick into gear to explore the relationships between the characters, reflect on what come’s next, and show how many of these people, Josh especially, only have one mode and don’t know how to function when they’re not in it, is a canny choice for the lead up to the finish. The problem is that little of it is especially good, and much of it feels fairly scattershot.

The most prominent through line in the episode is that latter point – the idea that Josh and Bruno and the cadre of people who work for them have been so focused on election gamesmanship that they don’t know how to turn it off when there’s not much more to do. It’s a nice parallel when the episode shows the two of them freaking out about the same exit poll numbers that each swears can’t be right. And we get little details like Josh and Lou wanting fifteen different versions of Santos’s end-of-the-night speech to cover every possible contingency, Josh micromanaging the setup of the ballroom, and dealing with changes to the speech from the transition team.

The upshot is clear – all Josh knows is crisis, and when faced with a situation in which all these contingencies are already planned for and there’s nothing more to do, he tries to create one out of whole cloth because he can’t stand sitting on his hands. In a show that almost always has a Crisis of the Week, that’s a bold choice, and the most solid part of the episode. The problem is that the episode hits that same note over and over again without much variation or intrigue. Josh’s freak out toward the end of the episode is fine as an exclamation point on that theme, and his failed “inspire the troops speech” is a good signifier that he can only see more problems to fix, not successes to be proud of. But at some point you just want to say, “We get it! Josh can’t relax!”

Or maybe he can. After years, years of teasing it, The West Wing finally pulls the trigger on Josh and Donna. After a scene where every member of the Santos staff is basically paired off (and even Bruno is using his current position to hopefully get himself into another), the last two folks left in the room are Josh and Donna who, after so much fumfering around, get together.

So we do the awkward morning after thing. And it’s fine. To be fair, I don’t know how you pay something like this off – which the fans desperately wanted but which doesn’t make a lot of sense – in a satisfying way. But the development is kind of underwhelming, with the standard post-coital awkwardness and neither knowing how to approach their friendship or budding relationship afterward. There’s the occasional fun moment, like Donna telling Josh she already knows how he likes his coffee, but for the most part it feels like The West Wing briefly turned into an episode of Melrose Place with an odd amount of focus on everyone’s romantic lives.

After all, even “Congressman Casanova” and Helen Santos find a productive use of the first bit of time off they’ve had in weeks. We get a scene of Lou and Otto, where the Otto is a bit more sentimental about their dalliance than the prickly (and frankly pretty mean) Lou is about it. And, of course, we get another scene exploring the relationship between Will Bailey and Kate Harper. There’s the noteworthy reveal that Kate voted for Vinick, and I appreciate the show depicting the senior staff as not so monolithic in their political preferences, but for the most part, it falls into the same Melrose Place territory. Will talks about going off to run campaigns in California again, and Kate talks about sticking around to serve whoever the next president is, and the pair try to navigate the awkwardness of their undefined relationship, which is about to face a big transition.

That’s the other major thread in this slack tide episode – what comes next. The staff of the Santos campaign, the Vinick campaign, and the White House have poured their lives into something that basically comes to an end on this very day. Two-thirds of these folks are going to have to find something else to keep them busy not long after election day, and while most of this facet of the episode ends up feeling pretty meandering, it’s a nice note to hit for the characters at least.

That idea works best with Charlie and C.J. (who are, admittedly, two of my favorite characters on the show, which biases me). We haven’t seen Charlie in a while, and when we do, he’s pressuring C.J. to start looking at other jobs for when the Bartlet administration ends. She, of course, is still “living out the first line of [her] obituary” and doesn’t want to focus on anything beyond what’s in front of her. But then Charlie says something undeniably sweet when pressed on why he keeps pushing this – he admires her, and wherever she goes, he’d like to keep working for her. In an episode that spends so much time and energy on romance and relationships, the most heartwarming and compelling moment in this episode is one between colleagues, not lovers.

We also see Matt and Helen Santos thinking about what will happen tomorrow, whether their lives will, perhaps, go back to normal, albeit with a crushing loss to contend with, or whether they will change forever. After the hustle and bustle of the campaign, the thought of raking leaves in the backyard doesn’t sound so bad. And Bruno, who’s asked by Bob if he wants to go into business together, politely declines and says he’s done when this is over. Bruno’s not an old man, but you get the idea that he has a little more self-awareness than Josh about this. When he’s this close to the flame, he can’t help but stick his hand in the fire, and his only salve is getting himself the hell away from the conflagration.

There’s a lot of interesting ideas in “Election Day pt. 1”: the calm before the storm that leaves everyone anxious for the thunder to start rolling, the summer camp romances that inevitably emerge when you throw everyone on the same bus for six months, the ruminations on what happens after this is all over. It all fits together like somebody jammed a bunch of play-dough together rather than feeling like a well-oiled machine of an episode. But maybe that’s intentional. In a show, and for a set of characters, who are constantly moving forward, it’s ambitious, if nothing else, to show what happens when nothing’s happening, so they can’t help but reflect on the past, wonder about the future, and find the oldest way to pass the time in the present.

(And, for those of you waiting with baited breath, I'll talk about the events of the very end of the episode in the write up for the next episode.)

8.0/10. I didn’t care for the way part one of “Election Day” handled the death of John Spencer and, with him, Leo McGarry. Making someone’s death into a dramatic act break, so close to their actual passing, felt crass and exploitive. Obviously John Wells & Co. had a difficult challenge in integrating Spencer’s death into the show, but that choice is tin-eared in a way that makes it seem like The West Wing is cheaply taking advantage of the passing of one of its most important actors.

And yet, part two of the episode makes good in every way that the end of episode stinger treatment Leo’s death receives does not. While a Vice Presidential nominee dying obviously factors into the main plot of the episode, “Election Day pt. 2” spends more time reflecting, more time grieving, more time looking at the impact Leo McGarry had on the people who were in his orbit, than on the election at hand.

Much of this comes down to the incredibly talented actors The West Wing has on hand. While Kristen Chenoweth overdoes it a bit, and Santos’s wounded reaction rings somewhat false given that we’ve only seen him and his VP have two conversations, we get a number of incredible scenes of the people whose lives Leo touched reacting to this terrible event. In particular, Allison Janey and Martin Sheen do an outstanding job at communicating the way two people in their positions must be absolutely composed, but how they are also each so devastated by this. The hurt in their eyes is underplayed, but immediately palpable, in a fashion that creates a sense of realism to this.

There’s a wistfulness to Bartlet’s exit that hasn’t really been explored deeply on the show yet. But when we see him comment to C.J. that there’s something strange about watching yourself be replaced on national television, and then reminisce about how he met, argued with, and almost lost Leo once before, you get the sense that for one the President is forced to take stock, to realize that this incredible journey he’s been on is about to come to an end, and the people who have been with him on it will be moving on, in one way or another.

It also provides a poignant ballast for Josh on the night where his election dreams will soar or implode. In part one, it seemed like nothing in the world could distract Josh from this election, that even when there’s nothing for him to do, no fires to put out, he was running around with a match just be able to run in with the fire extinguisher. But once he hears about Leo, he’s only half there. Election results pour in, and gone is his exuberance and neurotic pouring over exit polls. All he can think of is the fact that his mentor is no longer there.

After all, Leo is the one who essentially inspired Josh to do this. He told Josh to find his guy, who advised him what he was going to face, who stood up for him when the party leadership wanted him out as campaign manager. Leo is Moses, standing at the gates of the promised land, but not being able to enter. And Josh feels guilty because he brought Leo onto the ticket, put him through the ringer of campaign season in a way that put a man who’d already suffered a recent heart attack through more strain. It’s a dark cloud that puts the election into perspective for the man who has been on a mission to get to this day for two seasons.

“Election Night” could have been nothing but electoral suspense and horse race drama. Instead, by addressing Leo’s death in the midst of the hoopla, the show gives these moments weight beyond the plot-rigged heavy machinery.

That’s not to say that “Election Night” doesn’t still use the death of the VP nominee to drive the plot of the episode. Leo’s death provides fodder for one more decision for both Santos and Vinick on whether to address or exploit it. Since each of them are men of impossible integrity, Santos refuses to sit on the information until the polls close to persuade undecideds, and Vinick refuses to leak or otherwise try to use the info himself. I’ve said before that I enjoy these little moral choices, but this show has just gone to that well so many times with Santos and Vinick. You can only play this game for so long before these supposedly big moral choices start to have any force.

“Election Night pt. 2” also sets up a similar dilemma as to the issue of contesting the election. Santos, whose decision turns out to be purely conjectural, seems to listen to Josh when confronting the issue of whether to file a lawsuit if there’s a close call in one of the final two states that will decide the election. Josh tells him that he’s still young and popular enough that he can make another run at this thing in four years, and that nobody likes the guy who yells at the ump because he doesn’t like the call. Vinick faces the decision for real, choosing not to contest the vote in Nevada, or argue that the voters aren’t getting what they bargained for without Leo, because he believes that the results, however much he may dislike them, reflect what the country wants.

Again, these decisions ring a bit hollow since the show has done this type of thing with the two candidates so many times over the course of the season, but I suppose it’s nice to see the two of them sticking to their guns when the presidency is truly on the line to really drive home the “Never compromise. Not even in the face of Armageddon,” mentality each possesses.

And to the point, the show had to inject some intrigue into this beyond having an hour of staffers watching election results. As I mentioned in a prior write up, the episode held little suspense for me because, by some odd quirk, the very first episode of this show I ever watched was its series finale. But despite that, the march to Santos’s victory here felt a little perfunctory. There were enough twists and turns along the way, but they all felt rote for the big dramatic election. The story of Santos’s victory on this day was solid, but not exactly novel.

Still, it’s a jubilant moment. Watching Josh and Donna hug, Matt and Helen Santos do the same, and the candidate and the man behind him offer one another their thanks at the same time is a nice, lasting image for this storyline to end on. Santos gives a nice victory speech about acknowledging how close the election is and what Vinick’s service means, and Alan Alda gives the perfect wounded dog reaction to watching him be patted on the back by the man who just beat him for the highest office in the land. With any luck, in its remaining episodes, The West Wing will explore both the unexpected chaos of actually becoming the president, and the listless pain of coming that close and losing.

But the jubilation is tinted with grief. When Josh looks at Leo’s picture in the closing moments of the episode, we see a man who was so important to making this day, this victory happen, who will never get to see it. The characters on The West Wing, and the people who make the show, owe a debt of gratitude to Leo McGarry and John Spencer for taking this grand enterprise this far. And it’s a sign that even in our most joyous moments, there are hints of sadness at the people who brought us to them, whom we’ll never have a chance to thank.

9.3/10. I think we’re close enough to the end of The West Wing that I can safely make a somewhat startling confession – I like the Wells years of the show (Seasons 5-7) better than the Sorkin years (Seasons 1-4). I realize this is pretty much blasphemy, and it’s not as though there’s not a lot to like about the first half of the series, but overall I respond to the later seasons of the show much more than its early goings.

Part of the reason for that is something very much on display in “Requiem.” Wells & Co. are much more devoted to the idea of balance, to the idea of needing legitimate challenges from within and without the party to keep everyone in government honest, to temper one branch of government’s good intentions against those of another, even when there’s a cost. Sorkin’s philosophy was much more stubborn and myopic, of the idea that you should stand by your ideological purity and anyone who disagrees should get out of your damn way.

You can see this sort of philosophy reflected in Amy Gardner, who’s never been my favorite recurring character on the show. Her single-minded devotion to her cause, a great cause though it may be, leaves her taking some pretty unreasonable actions of the course of the series. But as Santos puts it, it’s easier to throw rocks at a house than to try to build one, and the idea of her being folded into the administration, having to balance her agenda with the myriad other important legislative issues.

On the other hand, it’s interesting that in an episode which gives two-seconds to almost every notable tertiary character The West Wing’s ever had, we also get a brief moment with the long-absent Ainsley Hayes. Hayes was one of the few characters in those early years of the show who provided a challenge to the hegemony of the Bartlet administration without being treated as a snarling villain or unreasonable obstacle.

But beyond the cornucopia of guest stars in the episode (which left me wishing we could have gotten two seconds of Rob Lowe as Sam Seaborn), the story that really exemplifies this is Santos deciding whether to intervene in the race for speaker. Josh advises him to hang back and not to mire his office in the house-specific leadership contests. Santos wants his old buddy from Congress to win because he’ll be there to help enact his agenda (lobbying reform), but the guy’s down a few votes and it’d take the intervention of the President-elect to change that. He doesn’t want the current vote-leader to win, because he basically straight-up tells the President-to-be that he’ll resist his agenda in order to help preserve the House Democrats’ seats.

So Santos tries what is often the solution to these sorts of intractable problems on The West Wing -- he tries a third option, one that involves a bit of political gamesmanship but will hopefully achieve the administration’s desired goals without upsetting the applecart. The catch is that when he makes a move to prop up the “just for show” third candidate for the speakership, Santos realizes he’s getting a propped up rubber stamp, someone who wouldn’t really be a leader in Congress, but would instead be seen as a Santos stooge with no credibility, mostly because that’d be an accurate assessment. At the same time, Josh is frustrated himself, feeling like Santos is deferring to a flattering party elder rather than him, emphasizing that he too does not want to be just a yes-man.

So instead of backing his buddy, or taking the magical third option that so often appears, Santos just takes the hard choice. He listens to Josh. Santos brings in his buddy to tell him that the President-Elect can’t back him, instead advising him to back down, not just because of the impropriety of it, but because Santos realizes he wants someone who isn’t just a puppet in charge of the House of Representatives, someone who will stand up to him, who will pursue Congress’s interests as the framers who set up the checks and balances intended rather than just rubberstamping Santos’s ideas, even when it’s someone from within his own party. There’s a startling idea for The West Wing baked in there – that the executive shouldn’t be monolithic, that there’s merit in reasoned and fair opposition, and that sometimes your agenda has to take its lumps to do right by our system of government.

But even more than that, there’s a personal cost to it. Making that choice, one I would argue was the right choice, hurts Santos’s relationship with Congressman Fields, someone who helped him a great deal when he was an up-and-comer in the political world and who is a trusted ally. Doing the right thing has to have consequences – something we’re seeing in Toby’s story this season – because that helps give it weight. (As an aside, Charlie waiting to walk to the burial with Toby is a quiet but incredibly sweet moment in this episode.) Taking the right course of action isn’t always some magical thing that makes everything okay. Sometimes it helps in the long run, but means you have to pay a price, even lose a friendship and a mentor, in the short term.

And in the wake of Leo McGarry’s death, everyone among the senior staff is feeling that sense of loss. Sure, some of them are having a semi-amusing comedy of manners when it comes to sleeping arrangements between C.J. and Danny (hooray!) and Josh and Donna (still eh), but for the most part, the people we see sitting around together at the residence have all been moved in some way by Leo, are all doing their best to remember who he was and what he did for them, without lingering on the thought that he’s gone.

And for no one is this truer for than President Bartlet. For the early part of the episode, we see a lugubrious man, who is hardly there in the midst of all his grief. But when he has to face the public, to face his friends, he is all smiles, all about celebrating the memory of his best friend, about remembering Leo the way he’d want to be remembered, as a source of joy, of amusement, of fond reminiscing. The standout scene of the “Requiem,” an episode that isn’t short on them, is the gang all sitting around with the President, laughing about Leo’s tall tales and feeling for all the world like a real group of people remembering their dear friend. In my write up for the last episode, I lamented the crassness of using John Spencer’s death for drama a bit, but it lends an air of verisimilitude, where these actors are just as much remembering a departed friend as their characters are.

It’s remarkable work from Martin Sheen, but also from Stockard Channing. She doesn’t have much to do in the episode, but with just a few, very strong looks, she absolutely communicates how Abby Bartlet both understands the profound pain her husband is experiencing at the moment, and also the act he is putting on not to have to feel those feelings, so as to stand as the figure of strength at the center of this world that he’s supposed to be and to not make his personal hurt anyone else’s problem. When Mrs. (Dr.) Bartlet tells him it’s time to wrap things up, it’s not just her watchdogging his MS. She’s telling him it’s time to stop, to drop the façade he’s trying so hard to keep up, to face the difficult feelings he can avoid so long as he’s maintaining the act.

Because Leo was often the one telling the President to make the hard choices. Leo was the one who told him they don’t always know how it’s going to work out. He was to President Bartlet what Josh is to Santos, not just a Chief of Staff, but a man who would speak truth to power and give his honest opinion when he thinks the most powerful man in the world is making a mistake. “Requiem” gives us the beginning and the end of that relationship for a President: the arguments and frustration we see between Josh and Santos as they navigate the difficulties of wanting to move in different directions, and the sorrow and masked hurt of President Bartlet, who realizes that as he reaches the end of his journey, the man who walked with him down that path, who spoke up when he thought they weren’t headed in the right direction, is no longer beside him.

8.2/10. Josh is, as a friend of mine succinctly put it, an asshole. That’s not necessarily a completely terrible thing, at least in his line of work. There’s a sense of a chicken-and-egg to his personality as explored in this episode. Surely only someone with a devotion to perfectionism and workaholism would try to do things as crazy and taxing as Josh does, but then again, the job he’s in reinforces these qualities, demanding that people devote their lives to this type of effort.

There’s a goodness within Josh, even when he can be oblivious or harsh or dismissive or self-centered. He has good intentions, however much his methods leave plenty to be desired. He cares about people. He mourns Leo. He visits Toby while he’s radioactive. He feels guilt for what happened to his family and others close to him. That’s part of what makes it so frustrating when he’s short with those people, when we see him pushing himself to the limit and lashing out at those around him.

In some ways, this version of Josh, the one who’s a little rougher around the edges and whose flaws the show is more willing to confront than during the Sorkin years (when Josh was often an author avatar), is the type of character who bridges the gap between the era of aspirational heroes on television, and the ear of difficult men like Tony Soprano, Don Draper, and Walter White. It’s too far to call Josh an antihero. The ethos of The West Wing is too steeped in optimism for almost any major character on the show not to be trying to do their best for a good cause. But he is flawed, sometimes obnoxious despite his talents, and in episodes like “Transition,” The West Wing isn’t afraid to confront the way Josh can push himself to the limit and lean into those flaws.

But the catch is that having someone call him out on this makes it much more palatable. There’s different ways to do it, and the protagonist need not always take the dressing down to heart, but having someone else in the show, someone who knows the protagonist and can see through their B.S., tell them that what they’re doing is wrong can be, in the right hands, powerful stuff.

Which is why it was so delightful to see Rob Lowe’s Sam Seaborn brought back not just as a pleasant 11th hour surprise on a show taking its victory lap, but as someone who, despite technically become Josh’s subordinate, is someone who has a relationship with him, and the chutzpah to give him an ultimatum. (And, in the process, leave me with some egg on my face after complaining a little about his absence in the prior episode.) As in “Welcome to Wherever You Are” The West Wing uses a number of great cinematographic and editing techniques to help convey the tumult of Josh in sleep-deprived, taking on too much state, culminating in him chewing out Otto for trying to follow his confusing and conflicting directives.

It’s then that Sam steps in, and gives one of those speeches that feels like classic The West Wing. He talks about how being Chief of Staff, even and perhaps especially to a guy he truly believes in like Santos, is an incredibly difficult job at one’s best, and it’s the kind of thing that’s going to crush Josh, and everyone around him if he keeps up this toxic atmosphere, if he doesn’t take some time to recharge and reevaluate. And if that’s the case, Sam won’t be around for it. It’s something Josh needs to hear, and having it come from Sam, someone who has the gravitas that comes from being on the original team and someone who hasn’t seen Josh for a while, making him able to evaluate his old friend in snapshot differences rather than gradual changes. It’s a big return that’s used for substance, not just flash.

But one of the great things about this episode is that Donna, while not exactly passive, doesn’t bother trying to effect a change in Josh. She knows him better than Sam does, but she’s also already spent enough time and energy on him at the expense of herself to make his flaws her life’s work. She knows who he is, and is willing to accept him, flaws and all, but only if he’s willing to live up to his end of the bargain.

What I love about that part of the episode is that Donna seems okay with either outcome. She clearly cares about Josh, and all else being equal, she’d like for him to be someone who’s worthy of her love, someone who will make time for her and for them in the busy life of White House Chief of Staff. But she has no illusions about who Josh is or what he’s like. She sets some basic terms, something as simple as taking time to talk about whatever it is they’re doing, and if he can meet them, great; if he can’t, well that’s too bad, but she has her own life to worry about, and isn’t going to sit around waiting for Josh to, if you’ll pardon the expression, figure his shit out.

We get a bit of that independence with Donna in the rest of the episode, as the plot of “Transition,” apart from Josh’s much-needed vacation, is filling the various jobs in the Santos administration with the likes of Sam, Lou, etc., and we get a hint at Donna’s fate. I have to admit, Chief of Staff to the First Lady is a bit of a letdown. As with the “getting the band together” episode of The West Wing that Josh references for “style points” when he goes to shanghai Sam again (a lovely little touch, and a nice handwave), it seemed like there were natural slots for the Santos campaign team in the Santos administration. Josh was going to be the new Leo. Lou would be the new Toby. And Donna, as spokesperson for the campaign, seemed poised to be the new C.J. The fact that she’s not genuinely a part of the administration is disappointing.

But there’s good reasons for it, the most important being that, as she points out, she can’t work for Josh anymore, whether or not their “thing” works out. That’s an important step (made particularly justified with the semi-galling reveal that he basically wants to give her Annabeth’s old job, presumably with Annabeth tabbed to be the new Press Secretary?). And though it didn’t exactly work out, Amy showed that being the First Lady’s Chief of Staff can be a position with legislative heft behind it. It’s not quite the culmination of Donna’s professional journey that I might have hoped for, but it’s probably more realistic than a lot of career trajectories The West Wing has gone with over the years.

That goes for the three-term Congressman who becomes President too. President-elect Santos’s and President Bartlet’s clash on what to do with Kazakhstan turning out to be a game of good cop/bad cop, without even their own chiefs of staff knowing it’s a ruse, is a cute twist, but also kind of a letdown. There’s real hay to be made with a conflict between an incoming administration that wants to be able to set the terms of the foreign policy slate it’s about to inherit, and an outgoing one that doesn’t want to be treated like a lame duck just yet. But the series is approaching its end quickly, and I suppose I can see the show not wanting to have to resolve an issue of that magnitude with so little runway left, even if the whole thing feels a little too convenient a method of commenting on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that were ongoing at the time.

Maybe it’s better that Josh didn’t know though, if only because in his current state of mind, he might have blown his top at the soon-to-be leader of the free world and found himself on a plane to the private sector rather than to some tropical island. It’s an ending that’s probably happier than Josh deserves, but one that shows he can recognize his own faults to a degree, and through the grace of his friends, make a small step toward being better, toward not letting himself get to that place. Flaws make characters interesting; meaningful growth, those same people seeing their flaws and trying to improve on them, makes them worth rooting for.

8.0/10. In some ways, a writer’s greatest ally is mystery. You can keep people hooked for a long time, even if your plotting starts to sag, even if your characters start to drift, even if your writing starts to stumble, as long as you can keep people trying to guess “what’s next?” What makes “Institutional Memory” such an interesting episode of The West Wing, then, is that there’s not a lot of mystery to it despite the fact that the central question of the episode is what’s next for these characters we’ve grown close to: C.J., Toby, and Will.

That’s because the very beginning of the season told us a lot about what happens to them when this job and this period of their lives are over. We don’t necessarily know what C.J. is up to, but we know she’s getting some sun and having kids with Danny only a little ways down the road. We don’t know for sure that Will runs for and wins that difficult Congressional seat in Oregon, but we know he’s a Congressman by the time he’s shaking hands with Bartlet at the dedication of his Presidential Library. And we don’t know for certain whether Toby gets a pardon, but we know he’s at Columbia, on speaking terms with Bartlet, and most importantly, not in jail, three years from now.

The upshot is that despite the fact that the episode plays around in the uncertainty of what’s to come for all these characters, we already know, more or less, what that is. That means The West Wing has to make that journey, these decision points, interesting in and of themselves, not just as a means to solving a mystery that can coast on the intrigue of learning how things turn out.

That tack works well enough for Will Bailey. He and Kate’s romance has been fairly superfluous. They’re kind of cute together now and then, but mostly they’re just kind of there, seemingly slapped together because neither has anything more interesting to do. That said, the idea of Will going to the DCCC makes sense, given his experience running campaigns at both a high and a low level, as Kate points out.

But the switch for him from the back end to the front end of politics is an interesting prospect. The fact that he became de facto White House spokesman gives him the stand up experience to excel at the public-facing side of the job (or at least survive it). And while I’m not super invested in the pair's relationship, there’s something nice about Kate recognizing Will's potential and pushing him to go for it.

Toby, on the other hand, seems poised to be cut off from the political world that had once been his lifeblood. He’s too proud and at the same time, too ashamed to ask for anything less than the punishment he's set to receive.

In the shadow of this, the possibility of his dear friends trying to get him a pardon is a story with legs and emotional weight. Andi showing C.J. pictures of their kids, and emphasizing that Toby's children will grow up while he's behind bars and that he was once their good friend, is a nice reminder of what’s at stake for him personally, but also in relation to these people who were in the trenches with him for so long.

And the reciprocal scene where C.J. meets Toby face to face for the first time since his confession is charged in all the right ways. Admittedly, there’s some awkward intimations that C.J. never made time to find a man because she had all these men around her, and some weird romantic tension played up between her and Toby. But Richard Schiff and Allison Janey are both such great actors in these roles, and have such a rapport, that you can feel their years of friendship, the way they’re pushing each other to do what they don’t necessarily want to but what’s best for each of them, in every exchange in what is the episode’s sequence.

The biggest decision and the most focus, however, is on C.J. as she decides between a return engagement in the Santos White House, or the prospect of a new frontier with an eccentric billionaire who wants to give her ten billion dollars to save the world. As with the Toby sequence, there’s some off-putting subtext to this storyline, where as much as this big choice is about her job, it’s also about her allowing herself a relationship. There’s meat to that, to the way that all of these people: Josh, Toby, Leo, and yes, C.J. have worked themselves to the point that they’ve basically closed themselves off from having a romantic life. The optics are just a little off in the context of the show’s most prominent and successful woman.

That said, as I’ve said before, C.J.’s my favorite character, and I am a sucker for her and Danny, so I was largely on board here. I like the tension between C.J. feeling like she has a duty to the office of the President on the one hand, despite the fact that she is beleaguered and, if she’s honest with herself, yearning for a different sort of life after eight years of the grind of the West Wing, and also kind of loving the idea of getting to slow down and really dig into one problem rather than having to constantly put out fires stemming from the fifty crises a day that pop up when you’re working for the commander-in-chief.

Of course, she’s also choosing between a life where the most she can have is a sporadic booty call where she and Danny never really have “the talk,” and one where she can have the time to be with that teddy bear of a man. I think what saves that part of the story for me is the fact that Danny doesn’t want her to pick one job or another, he just wants to be a part of the conversation. He’s accepting and happy to be “Mr. C.J. Cregg” but just wants to be a part of her life, to get to talk to her, to get to be in the future of this amazing woman. Most of all, he wants her to pick what she really wants, the thing that will make her happy.

And she does (or at least, we think she does)! And Will becomes a Congressman! And Toby stays out of jail! And despite the fact that we know all of this, that we know there’s happy endings in store, there’s still stakes to these big decisions, these life-altering paths because of the way the characters we care about struggle to make them, wrestle with the choices presented to them. The West Wing is a show that’s often gotten by on its crises of the week, but which is made compelling by the stories of the people handling those crises. That holds true even when the crises are all but over, when the future is known, and all we’re left with is these great characters, figuring out how to get there.

8.6/10. When I think of The West Wing, I think of going big. The series has never been especially subtle, and when you think of its most iconic moments, the ones that most often take place in season finales, they tend to hew toward bombast: assassinations, explosions, nominations, kidnappings, and grand declarations and recriminations in ornate cathedrals.

That’s why the most impressive thing about “Tomorrow,” The West Wing’s series finale, is how damn small it is. Despite Wells & Company's probable inclination to stick with the show’s usual M.O. and go out with a bang, “Tomorrow” takes a more contemplative stance, one that speaks to the small details of the transfer of power, the prosaic issues that emerge as one administration ends and another begins, and the quiet, human moments of the people who are passing the baton.

Even the crisis of the week is small. President Bartlet and the senior staff can’t get out of the office without pouring water on one last fire. This time, it’s a train derailment thanks to a New England snowstorm. We get an abbreviated version of the ol’ West Wing block and tackle, with what remains of Bartlet’s advisors giving him a rundown of the situation, and the President himself getting a pair of Governors on the phone to resolve this minor cross-border dispute. It’s a nice last gasp for these daily issues that were the show’s bread and butter, which serves as a grace note for the style of storytelling that once dominated the series.

But what’s really striking about the episode is its restraint, the way it doesn’t belabor points that the show might have gone to greater lengths to underline in other circumstances. While Will Bailey notes that the train derailment incident may have been the staff witnessing the final act of governance of the Bartlet Administration, it’s not Jed’s last act as President. Instead, after hemming and hawing and mulling it over for much of “Tomorrow,” he signs a pardon for Toby, only to rap his knuckles on the desk in frustration immediately after.

It’s an incredibly well-done subplot that helps pull the series across the finish line, one that draws strength from how reserved it is. We don’t even see Toby in the episode (something that, I admit, makes me a bit sad). We don’t hear Bartlet vocalizing how he’s conflicted over whether to bail out his longtime friend with whom he’s still clearly perturbed. We don’t have C.J. engaging in a spirited colloquy with the President over the pros and cons of the pardon, or a vigorous defense of her friend.

Instead, the episode takes on a “show, don’t tell" ethos. The fact that the President added Toby’s name to the potential pardon list but-- without having to detail his internal opposition--keeps delaying the signing of it, saying he hasn’t decided what to do yet, tells us all we need to know about how Bartlet feels.

In the same way, the show lets the actors' performances tell the story here. The scenes between Bartlet and C.J. are great bits of nigh-wordless acting, with Allison Janney in particular going a great job at showing how C.J. is trying to stay detached and objective about the issue, so as not to influence the President, but how her affection for Toby and her hope that the President will absolve him subtly bleeds through. Martin Sheen, as always, holds up his end of the bargain as well, communicating the internal struggle going on in the President's head, and his mild regret and frustration but ultimate resoluteness when he does sign that pardon.

The episode uses these same techniques to circle back to the idea of the Inauguration being a day of change for everyone, about the quiet end of one administration and the semi-humble beginning of another. The clockwork rhythm of the portraits and knickknacks being packed up and replace, the “you can do it” speeches offered by C.J. and Deborah Fiderer (who is fantastic here) to their successors, the way that the spirit of Leo McGarry hangs over the episode, all helps to mark the ways in which the new class is starting, and the old class, the one that we came to know over seven seasons, is walking out the door.

Most of the members of the old class get a moment in the sun here, however briefly. In the episode’s most heartwarming scene, the President passes his father’s constitution on to Charlie. Again, he never needs to say that Charlie is like a son to him, and the two don’t hug or anything, but the gesture says so much, and whatever’s left is said by the looks of affection and sincere gratitude on the pair’s faces. Afterward, Charlie, Will, and Kate find themselves with nothing to do for once in their lives, and decide to go to the movies in an amusingly quotidian touch. Finally, in the episode’s most blunt scene, C.J. walks out the White House gate and responds to an inquiring passerby, with some relief and appreciation, that she does not, in fact, work at the White House.

And in the end, we see President Santos sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office. He’s flanked by Josh, Sam, and Bram (and it should be noted that for a campaign that had major contributions from women and people of color throughout, the only senior advisors we see in the room are a trio of white guys), and suddenly there’s a new daily crisis to be fixed. There’s a real sense that the dance goes on, that we take these little pauses to stop and appreciate that a big change is upon us, but then, at least we hope, things flow into business as usual once more, even with (some) different faces conducting that business. Despite the scenes we witness of the Inauguration, the pomp and circumstance of the occasion is undercut by the episode’s focus on the undeniably small and personal and even logistical in the midst of all this ceremony.

That extends to the way the episode treats the incoming and outgoing Presidents here. As The West Wing has done often in its later years, the episode employs a certain parallelism between President Bartlet and President-Elect Santos. Most of what we see from Santos takes the form of little moments shared between him and Helen, where he admits his nerves at the monumental task ahead of him, and they joke around to ease his mind a bit. It’s Santos at his most relatable and authentic. Rather than the perfect candidate who has the right answer for every question, he’s just a normal guy who’s still somewhat shocked that he is where he is, confiding in and having a sweet rapport with his wife, hoping that he’s up to to this incredible challenge.

And on the other end, much of what we see of Jed Bartlet is him reflecting on what he accomplished and what he failed to, confiding in Mrs. (Dr.) Bartlet in the same terms. The show didn’t always utilize Stockard Channing’s talents to their full potential, but the Bartlets as a pair were always one of the show’s great strengths, with an earnestness and honesty between the two of them that always served the show well. It’s nice to see this episode lean on that strength here, showing the ways in which Abigail understands her husband, can pierce through his various fronts, and even seemingly read his mind and reassure him as he steps away from the biggest job he’ll ever do.

But the parallels don’t end there. At the end of the episode, we watch as both Santos and Bartlet unwrap something, and we see their reactions. We never get a glimpse of what exactly President Bartlet wrote to his successor, but in another superbly understated moment, the way that Santos reads it, smiles, and even tears up a little, says more than any dialogue, read in voiceover or otherwise, possibly could.

In the same way, one of the show’s last images is of Jed unwrapping a gift from Leo's daughter Mallory, something that she thought her father would want him to have. It turns out to be one of this series’s holy artifacts – the “Bartlet for America” napkin. And while Jed is wistful and seems even a little regretful about what he left on the table in his time in office, about this incredible time in his life ending, the way his face lights up upon seeing that gift is incredible. In an instant, you can see all the stories of the show, the years of crises and setbacks and victories and moments great and small flash on the now former President’s face, as he warms himself with that thought, allowing him to look fondly on the days to come.

There’s no grand oratories in “Tomorrow.” For a show known for its loquacious bent, we don’t get to hear Santos’s speech, there’s no big monologue from Bartlet summing up his time in office, and there’s not any charged exchanges of high-minded principles. In place of these things, The West Wing’s series finale offers a series of quiet, deceptively complex, achingly human moments among the people who are ending this journey and beginning another one.

The real world of politics is typically not nearly so grandiose as The West Wing's depiction of it. It's as full of bean-counters and pencil-pushers as it is visionaries and operators. But the beauty of this series, and its finale, is the way that it could balance the big work of government--the levers and pulleys and boardroom debates that we imagine when we think of governing--with the stories of the people who were pulling those levers and having those debates. In “Tomorrow,” everyone who orbits the West Wing, including the Presidents themselves, are shown to still be human beings, as impacted by the enormity of these occasions and these changes as anyone, which shows in little moments, little gestures, and little ways.

Contains major spoilers !!!!!

Huge and utterly dissapointing. After TFA I said this movie would make or break the story. For me it broke.

Where to begin? Let´s start with my biggest problem.

After that rebel cruisers bridge was hit and Leia was thrown into space we saw her drifting in the cold empty vacuum of space. This was a powerful scene and I had tears welling up in my eyes thinking that would be a great ending for the character dying how she always lived. Fighting. I did not realise, or care, that it would have been a huge coincidence had they written this scene at that point not knowing Carrie would pass away. But as I said powerful scene. And then she opens her eyes and floated back into the ship still beeing alive. At that point I was seriously considering leaving the cinema. It´s scifi but, please, without as much as a hint of an explanation that is just awful writing. It is Disney all over it. Anyway I stayed and watched the rest but in general I was done with the movie.

There are tons of other things I didn´t like.

• way to much unnessesary and stupid humor. Most of the time it does not fit and just destroys scenes. Holding for General Hux - that might have been OK once but two or three times it just becomes goofy. And there is more of this througout the movie.

• the writing was all over the place. So much things going on that do little to nothing for the general plot and just add playtime. Like that whole thing with the codebreaker, going to the casino. Just sugarcoating CGI.

• and speaking of playtime - way too long. About five times towards the end I thought it was over. It could have ended when the reached the rebel base- no let´s add another battle. When they realised they where trapped. With Luke going out to face Kylo. At some point I would have been OK with the movie ending with the First Order defeating the rebels, everyone dying, and the franchise done with. But of course that is not happening and the movie ends.....no, just show us a kid with a broom looking at the stars and indicate he could be the hero of a future movie.

• in many ways the continuation of storylines is not satisfiying. They introduce Snoke in the first movie without an explanation who he is, where he comes from and how he got there. Would have been OK, could have done later. So now he´s dead without so much as a fight and there are questions left to be answered.

• what about Rey ? Are we really to believe her parents were some drunk and drifting scavengers that sold her for money like Ren said ? That would be very stupid because how in the universe could she master the Force in ways even the best Jedis or Sith couldn´t without as much as years of training. Another void in the storytelling.

• too many, shall I call them, homage scenes ? A lot of times I felt I had already seen this movie. The scene in the throne room f.e. Snoke = Emperor, Rey = Luke, Ben = Vader, the destruction of the rebel fleet playing in the background and the Ben killing Snoke is like Vader killing the Emperor. I know that was said about TFA as well but I feel it´s much worse here. The Battle of Hoth reviseted would be another thing where they re-did some scenes to a T. All that was left was tow cables.

Those are just some examples of the things I disliked and maybe there could be satisfactory explanation later. There is a lot more but it would take too much time to write it down. But I doubt I will go to the cinema for the next one.

To be fair there where some positives in this movie.

• I liked the scenes with Rey and Luke althought they did not really lead anywhere. But some nice insights into Lukes story after ROTJ.

• The conversations between Kylo and Rey where very interesting and I thought there was really potential to steer the story to something new and exciting. Not happening.

So overall I was not satisfied. I really like TFA, it built some expectations that where all crushed with this. As far as I am concerned I am done with this new story. I am not not very eager to find out what else the canibalise and how they try to write themselves out of this. There is nothing left.

This is my view of the movie. If you liked it I´m happy for you.

May the Force be with us. Always.

A clear money-saving episode needed to free up funds for the big finale. It's kind of frustrating in the way that it brings all the ongoing stories to a halt while we mess around in Sloan's head, but it manages to be entertaining because it's all about Bashir and O'Brien. I love these two together, and their friendship has been a massive part of the show from an early point. This is a last hurrah for them, and it's a shame that it's all a bit silly.

Having the crazy mind trip (which is pushing the realms of the believable in a franchise that's all about wondrous technology) just using the existing DS9 sets is noticeable as a means of preserving the budget, and makes the whole thing feel gimmicky and cheap. It's also a bit bizarre that Sloan, who is not a doctor in anyway, knows the intricacies of the cure they're looking for. A case of just needing to use the actor they'd already established as the Section 31 guy.

But I just like Miles and Julian, and they get some really good fun scenes here. It's a very dumb episode, but I find Section 31 super intriguing and entertaining as a plot line so I can get behind this one somewhat. There's also a gorgeous scene between Odo and Kira early on.

Still, I think Bashir/O'Brien deserved much better final outing than this.

Here I am, entering the final stretch of episodes. I don't want it to end.

The ten hours starting here tell one continuous story to wrap up the show. It was a massive undertaking for Star Trek in a time when serialised television was still in the infant stages. The Sopranos had just begun by this point, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was entering its stride and The West Wing was around the corner - and of course, Babylon 5 had done its thing.

Star Trek was also a notoriously episodic franchise in world where episodic television was successful, and DS9 was daring to do something different, much as it had done all along. The six-episode experiment done at the start of season 6 had worked well so now we were ready for something much more ambitious.

'Penumbra' is a tentative start, very much focused on characters and setting up the direction for how things are going to end. All the events on the station are quite low key with the highlight being SIsko's general state of contentment. Wanting to move to Bajor and asking Kassidy to marry him feel like very natural steps for his journey by this point.

The real excitement comes from the fallout of the very complex relationship between Ezri and Worf as they are forced to spend time together and face their issues. Sparks fly in more ways than one and it's really enjoyable to see it all happen apart from the fact that Worf is being a big old jerk face. They are definitely not a good match in the way that Jadzia and Worf were, but it feels right that they finally sort this stuff out. I can see this focus on relationships being a turn off for the sci-fi fans who want to see wondrous technology, space battles and alien problems solved by human ingenuity, but the characters have always been the reason I watch anything.

Also, seeing Dukat as a Bajoran never fails to make me smile. A nice twist. However, I think the best part of the episode is Damar mocking Weyoun once he's left the room.

I was disappointed when we didn't get a real account of how things changed. It's shown like it almost happened overnight. But this episode's insight on the political formation of the society, before it happens, was interesting. It's not the US and the laws that really changed, it's a coup, well prepared by a religious organization. Nice touch that Serena was part of it, that makes her character really exist instead if just being the crazy hysteric wife.

Congratulations to Mexico on actually sending a woman ambassador. Strange though that they haven't got a live child in six years. Gilead does not have the monopoly on fertile women, they just industrialized it. And there actually aren't that many. What we're seeing are probably most of them. The country's not that big, and the main ruling class is here. There may be one or two other big cities left, that's it. So do they really have enough to sell ?. And couldn't Mexico have at least as many fertile women some of whom would have a baby at some point ? Gilead's medecine level does not seem that high either because of the religious society, so no help on that.

Still really don't get the Nick fling.

Moss's end monologue was a great performance.

Now the ending's bullshit. So the Mexican aide knows the faces of thousands of missing person and the name of all their loved one so that he recognize her and match her to her husband ? Or he knew beforehand so they have a network of spy that is so good that they know exactly who is in commander's houses and who they were and who he was going to meet, etc ? That's ridiculous.

With a number of strong episodes throughout, the first season of the show is powerful and gripping - and yet, I never found myself all that wrapped up in it. It felt like it meandered a little too often, I'm never quite sure where it's all leading. Elisabeth Moss is astoundingly good in the lead role, but she stands head and shoulders above most of the other cast. Any episodes, or indeed moments, that weren't focused on her cause the show to fumble. Yvonne Strahovski and Alexis Bledel do stand out as particularly strong performances, and I can't help but feel heartbreak whenever Madeline Brewer (Janine) is on screen.

In fact, somewhat ironically, it's the male cast which really let things down. Joseph Fiennes becomes a caricature by the latter half of the season and the character of Nick is an absolute stain on the show's otherwise decent offerings (it was a struggle not to fast forward any scenes he's in). Moira was also difficult, the writing for her struck me as completely unnatural (her only interactions with people seemed to be to insult them and tell them how wrong they are) and it was only in the later episodes that that got turned around.

It's the story and setting here which are the reason I kept coming back each week. It's a brutal show with shocking moments each episode. Part of you scoffs at how far-fetched it is, another part of you becomes fearful of the path our current world is going down.

My only other feelings is that the desaturated look of the show actually makes it feel a bit cheap. There's very little sense of a large world when watching this, but that's okay. We're focused on Offred's world and that's the important story.

Strange, the intro scene seems to imply they are tagged, I would assume with some localization device, otherwise what's the point ? That's basically the only purpose of this scene but it's not brought back after, for instance for tracking Moira.

We finally know what happened to Hannah, and wow, Serena is not just crazy, she's evil and much smarter than previously shown.

Funny, that's not quite the body part I was thinking they were going to remove as punishment.

Moira's escape and refugee handling in Canada is interesting. They seem quite used to it.

The execution scene is really good. Very predictable, as soon as you see Lydia's reaction, you know it's gonna be Janine, and you know they're not going to do it. If that had happened mid season, maybe the outcome was not that obvious, but in the finale, that was sure. But it was a necessary and important scene anyway.

What's wrong with Lydia by the way ? That disturbs her ? After all she's done, breaking them into obedience, handing them over to be raped, plucking eyes out, taking their children, making them kill people, etc.

As most of the time, the worst part is Offred. She just spent half her time crying now. And how could she be so careless ? She's given something from the resistance, told not to open it. What does she do ? She opens it, spreads the letters on the floor, falls asleep there ? Plot luck makes it that she's not dound, but how fucking stupid was that ? She has her shining moment during the execution, but right now it almost feels out of character. She's the one doing t because she's the main character, that's it.

Well, I never knew that the sound of a pen clicking could be so satisfying. I feel like that last scene was an important moment for Serena and June - for the first time there was a genuine connection between them, without any secret agenda or manipulation. They have a common goal and they're working together to achieve it, breaking the rules and risking everything in the process. I love it. I know these two have a fucked up relationship and that Serena is directly responsible for what June's life looks now, but I can't help but be fascinated by their dynamic. And maybe I want them to be friends. A tiny bit. They'd be unstoppable if they teamed up.

I have the memory of a goldfish, so I don't even know if we've ever seen Odette before, but I was devastated when Moira saw her photo. Absolutely crushed. Also, baby Gavin!!! What a cute little pumpkin. And $250,000 for a baby? Holy shit. I knew healthy children were rare in this show's reality, but I didn't realize they were that scarce. Any woman with working ovaries and uterus could become a freaking millionaire.

That scene with the Handmaids introducing themselves to each other was so moving and powerful. The music in the background nearly made me cry. This is how the revolution starts. And I'm so happy Emily and Janine are back.

"I tell, therefore you are."

Welcome to the world, baby Holly. What a shame you had to be born in this shithole called Gilead. I do have to say, I love the fact that the baby is a girl, just like June predicted. It's a subtle fuck you to Waterford who obviously wanted a son. Holly came out of the womb already trolling that asshole - she's definitely her mother's daughter.

It was a genius idea to create a montage of three drastically different labor scenes: June with Hannah, surrounded by family, giving birth in an environment filled with love; Janine with Charlotte, supported by friends, but stuck in a creepy ritualistic scenario created by Gilead; and finally June with Holly, facing this ordeal on her own in the most primal and instinctive way. It was incredibly powerful and I couldn't stop myself from shedding a tear or two.

Fuck, Serena, if all you ever wanted was a baby, then you could have hired a goddamn surrogate like a sane person. You definitely didn't need to start a religious cult that would overthrow the government and turn your country into a nightmare. What the actual fuck? You didn't just want a baby. You wanted power. You wanted everyone to adhere to your insane beliefs, even if it meant becoming little more than your husband's property and allowing him to rape a woman on a monthly basis. Damn, at least have the guts to own up to it.

Not quite the "feminist Western" which Netflix seemed to promote it as, but that's fine because it didn't need to be. Godless is a lush and rich Western miniseries which somehow feels fresh while still embodying many tropes of the genre. We have a tired sheriff with an overeager deputy, a band of outlaws seeking revenge and a mysterious stranger on the run. All this happens in and around a town populated almost entirely by (badass) women.

It's to the shows credit that it makes each of these clichés feel unique and interesting. The sheriff is losing his eyesight and is regarded as a coward by the women he's charged with protecting, while simultaneously struggling with feelings of resentment to his own little daughter. The evil outlaw (played superbly by Jeff Daniels) is actually a man capable of incredible compassion and acts of love alongside his brutality. And Whitey, the overeager deputy, turns out to be one of the most enjoyable and unpredictable characters in the whole thing.

But it's the girls of La Belle who do manage to steal a good portion of the show. Maggie is tough as nails and doesn't back down an inch when confronted with male posturing, as well as being engaged in a very natural relationship with Callie. Meanwhile, Alice lives her life exactly on her own terms as she raises her son along with her (awesome) Native American mother-in-law.

Godless is not an action-fest, although when things go down it's extremely satisfying. This is more of a measured story which lets things breathe. The cinematography is absolutely glorious and my jaw dropped at the staging of several scenes. I found it to the show's benefit that we spent so much time just taking things in as my attachment to the characters grew more and more. To give a specific example there's an episode in which a lot of time is spent with horses, and while it doesn't further the plot significantly, it pays off down the line and only allowed me to enjoy the experience all the more.

The cast are uniformly excellent, and it's easy to forget that three of the main characters are Brits. The writing is also of a high quality, and while this is not in the same league as the poetry and magnificence of Deadwood, it's very much going for a different vibe and doing its own thing. This feels more like an epic Western whereas the HBO show had a tighter focus on the comings and goings of the town it was set in.

That's not to say the show is perfect. I'm definitely not the first to notice, but there are a number of plot threads which are introduced but go absolutely nowhere. We meet characters like John Doe who have a mystery set up and then no more is given to us. We don't really get any huge revelations into Bill's past with his wife or situation, and what the Indian and his dog were all about. The (fantastic) German character Martha is only introduced at the very end. And we don't even get a proper explanation as to why Roy betrayed Frank in the first place. It definitely feels to me like there is plenty of room for a continuation, but this appears to be a one-off.

But I absolutely loved Godless. It manages to be incredibly satisfying despite its flaws, is one of the best looking shows you can watch right now and when it kicks off the thrills are absolutely glorious.

[8.7/10] The close of “Something Beautiful” makes me think of a scene from “Nailed”, the penultimate episode of Season 2. In that episode, Chuck McGill confronts his brother and Kim about his suspected switcheroo with the Mesa Verde files. He impugns Jimmy’s character and says Kim should open her eyes. And he tells Kim that Jimmy did it for her, that it was a “twisted romantic gesture.”

But Kim defends Jimmy. She admits that he’s not perfect, but essentially argues that he’s a good person, a person she pities for how much he wants his brother’s love, a love that he’ll never get. She chastises Chuck for denying him that and judging him, for threatening to inflict such consequences on Jimmy, denying his theory as crackpot. But when she’s alone with Jimmy, she betrays her true feelings. She punches him in the arm. She expresses her frustration, because she’s no fool; she knows he did it, and she knows Chuck’s right -- he did it for her.

So when Kim returns to the offices of Mesa Verde, the crown jewel of her ill-gotten gains, and sees their vaunted “models” of their expansion plans, it’s overwhelming for her. The camerawork and editing is tremendous, zooming in on this miniature world and making it larger than life, especially with Kim’s place in it. She sees a tiny man and woman in front of the building, the sounds and the feelings rush back, and she can’t help but remember how this all started. It started with this man that she loves taking revenge on his brother on her behalf. That’s not something Kim Wexler can shake as easily as Jimmy seemingly can.

Sometimes you start something, and you don’t know how big it’s going to get, or the difficult places it’s going to take you. “Nailed” is also the episode where Mike knocked over one of Hector’s trucks. In a bitter echo of that scene, “Something Beautiful” opens with Gus’s henchmen recreating that tableau with Nacho and the dead body of Arturo, to make it look like the same goon who attacked Hector’s soldiers before have struck again. It is, in keeping with Gus’s M.O., a meticulous job. No detail is left unattended, and to complete the cover-up, they shoot Nacho in the shoulder and in the abdomen, leaving him to bleed in the desert with nothing but a phone call to the twins to potentially save his life.

There too, the scenes are beautiful, but harsh, as director Daniel Sackheim uses Nacho’s injury and rescue to show both the efficient brutality of Gus’s plan and his goons as Nacho is left to bake and bleed under the desert sun, and the impressionistic resplendence of the flashes of night-lit faces he sees on the operating table of the same veterinarian who associates with Mike and Jimmy.

After that vet gives Nacho his diagnosis and medical advice, he leaves Nacho with one last instruction -- “leave me out of this.” The vet says that the work with the cartel is too hot for him, and he wants out. It’s another bitter irony, because Nacho wants out too. He told his father he was trying. He wanted to keep his family from getting involved deeper with the Salamancas, deep into this morass. But like Kim, he’s too far into it now, and he’s suffering the physical and mental consequence of something he can’t escape from, that’s happened because of him.
And yet, as much as Nacho desperately want out, there are those who desperately want in. Gus, ever the mastermind, has made it so that the Salamancas are without leadership and supply on the streets is running thin. He gets to play the reluctant subordinate to Don Bolsa, agreeing over feigned protest that, if he must, he’ll find an alternative supply of meth with the Salamanca’s pipelines shut off for the time being, a contingency he has clearly been planning for some time. His almost undetectable smile while on the phone with Don Bolsa betrays it. While everyone else is scrambling, in too deep, Gus knows how to play the hand he’s dealt.

But this new situation requires him to go Gale, the latest Breaking Bad alum to appear on Better Call Saul. Gale is as delightfully geeky and puppy dog-like as always, singing along to a rondelay of chemicals sung to “Modern Major General”, reporting his results from the tests that Gus had him run, and practically begging for Gus to let him be the official Pollos Hermanos meth cook.

Gale is one of this universe’s more endearing inventions, to the point that his presence is a welcome little joy in an otherwise fairly heavy episode. It even makes me forgive the show’s increasing, and frankly kind of cheesy, willingness to dip back into the Breaking Bad pool. But here that crossover quality works, because we know Gale’s fate, and what lies in wait for him on the other side of that desperation to join up, the harsh realities that Nacho is facing as he wants out of what Gale wants into.

Sometimes, though, that life on the other side of the glass is just too appealing. That seems to be the case for Jimmy, who returns to the sort of small time hustles we saw him running with Marco back in the day. This time, it means replacing the secretly valuable hummel figurine owned by the copier salesmen he rejected in the last episode with a common, otherwise undetectable replacement, and pocketing the profits.

The ensuing sequence -- where Jimmy’s hired goon tries to make the swap, and inadvertently gets trapped hiding from the company’s owner, who’s in the doghouse with his wife -- is one of the funniest in the show so far. (It had echoes of “squat cobbler” with its absurdity.) The humdrum, almost cliché problems of the owner buying his wife a vacuum cleaner, listening to self-motivational tapes, and ordering pizza in the middle of the night while the would-be thief hides under a desk is a brilliant and hilarious setup, made funnier by how much patience Better Call Saul shows with it. And the coda, with Jimmy misdirecting the owner and rescuing his accomplice with little more than a coat hanger and a car alarm, is the icing on the cake.

But there’s more going on than just comedy here. Mike recognizes that when he turns down the job. He realizes that Jimmy’s after something else, something beyond just an easy score, and that’s a complication Mike is smart enough not to want to get involved in. Unlike Nacho, and unlike Kim, Mike knows when he’s walking into a briar patch he might never walk out of, and he’s been reminded recently enough that few things in the circles he runs in are as clean or “in and out” as he might hope. There’s warning signs going off about Jimmy, and though we know they won’t keep Mike away from the once-and-future Saul Goodman forever, they’re enough to keep him away for now.

And maybe that’s the same sort of realization that Kim is starting to have. At the end of the episode, Jimmy sees the piddling distribution Chuck left for him, reads a mildly condescending but still genuine and heartfelt letter from (so Jimmy knows it’s really from Chuck), and yet he’s nonplussed. Yet again, something that would seem to provoke some outpouring of emotion from Jimmy gets bupkus, while it’s Kim who breaks down and tears up and needs a minute.

Chuck’s letter talks about he and Jimmy’s bond as brothers, about the connection they share despite their differences, about the resilience and hustle Chuck admires in his younger sibling. And there’s two ways to take Kim’s wounded reaction to that.

One is a sense of guilt for having been the thing that motivated the rift between the McGills. Chuck told her it wasn’t her fault back in “Nailed” but he also told her that Jimmy did all this for her. As I’ve mentioned before, part of the larger story Better Call Saul has told thus far is of Kim slowly but surely replacing Chuck as the major person in Jimmy’s life. Maybe being reminded of what led to her getting Mesa Verde, of the bond between brothers that was severed on her account, is too much to bear.

But the other is that she realizes she picked the wrong side. The last time Kim was in Mesa Verde’s offices, she told her counterpart that all that had happened with Chuck at Jimmy’s disciplinary hearing was the tearing down of a sick man. In that scene in “Nailed”, Kim took Jimmy’s side over Chuck’s. Whatever the truth was, she believed that Jimmy’s heart was in the right place, that he was the victim, and that he was a good man.

Now, in the wake of Chuck’s suicide, maybe she’s starting to see his decency, maybe she’s starting to reevaluate the set of events that led her to this place, and her choice to be with a person who seems fine with them all. In “Something Beautiful”’s final image, we see only half of Jimmy’s face, the other half obscured by Kim’s closed door, and there’s symbolism in it. As perceptive as Kim is, she didn’t see the whole picture with Jimmy; she didn’t see the whole picture with Chuck. Now that it’s coming into focus, she finds herself so immersed in something awful, so bound up in it, and all she can do is buckle and try to bear it.

Breaking Bad has already shown us the fates of so many of these characters, how Jimmy, Gus, Gale, Mike, are all sucked in and battered by this world. But Better Call Saul leaves us people like Kim and Nacho, who we can only hope escape this terrible orbit in better shape than Chuck did.

[8.8/10] Better Call Saul has never been closer to Breaking Bad. That’s not just because the episode opens with this show’s first glimpse of Jimmy as the Saul Goodman we met on the prior show, in the midst of his fleeing from justice. It’s just because Gus Fring seems to nail down the plans for the facility that will one day be Walter White’s laboratory. It’s not just because Jimmy visits The Dog House, the fast food restaurant and hangout where Jesse Pinkman sold meth.

It’s because this is an episode about people who are outstanding at what they do, who have near unrivaled skills, and what direction that takes them in. That was the larger story of Breaking Bad, a story about a man who had an undeniable talent, and who could not set it aside when the recognition and lucre came with a side of human misery, and who didn’t know when to walk away until it was too late. It’s a show that lived on the conflicted thrills of watching someone so skilled ply their craft, and earned its emotional resonance from both the uncertainty and foreboding sense of where it would lead him.

“Quite a Ride” positions Jimmy in the same way, as someone who has a gift for persuasion, the ability to make an anthill sound like Mount Everest, and a lack of scruples that mean he doesn't mind skirting the law if it suits him. The difference is that Walt was running from a life he resented, whereas Jimmy seems to be running from his own grief.

There’s a version of Jimmy that could maybe have been happy, at least temporarily, working at the mobile phone store in a semi-normal way. Sure, his efforts to convince a passing customer that he can evade the taxman by buying these phones that are allegedly selling like hotcakes isn’t exactly on the up-and-up, but it’s a pretty straight job by Jimmy’s standards.

But it’s not enough, at least not when he has a moment of quiet, a moment to let his grief catch up with him. Sitting on the couch, watching Dr. Zhivago, Jimmy starts to tear up, as the pain of the events with his brother seem to flood back in a way he’s been able to keep at bay. So Jimmy turns to his drug of choice, his favorite distraction, and the thing that makes him feel better than anything else -- a nice, lucrative hoodwink.

He buys a heap of burner phones from his own store, and ventures to The Dog House to unload them to whatever criminal element is around to purchase them, in another one of the show’s sterling montages. There’s a sense in these scenes that Jimmy is both at the top of his game, but also wants to be punished for it. He doesn't know when to leave well enough alone, and seems to be pulled between the part of himself that wants to see exactly how far his talents will take him, and the part that wants to push him into something so bad that it’ll be the wake up call that snaps him out of this.

That wake up call comes. It doesn't happen when Jimmy wanders into a crowd of bikers who are enough to scare away the rest of the riff raff. It happens when the three young hoods who turned him down earlier in the night rough him up and take his spoils from the evening. He returns home, worse for wear, and after a sweet scene of Kim tending to his wounds, he agrees to go to the shrink she recommended.
He seems to realize that this isn’t healthy, and enough is enough. Just the image of Kim standing across from him, a symbol of his conscience and the better life he can have, is enough to spur him to be better and not let another night like this happen again.

Kim, however, is running as well. Instead of grief, she’s running from guilt, and instead of devolving further into a life of questionable morality, she’s hurtling herself headlong into an effort to regain her ethical moorings. That means working as a public defender in her spare time, going toe-to-toe with the same local prosecutor that Jimmy himself used to joust with. But unlike Jimmy, Kim isn’t just using subterfuge and bombast to get criminals off. She’s using prosecutorial screw-ups to hold the other side accountable, telling the young man she works out a deal for to get his life right or she won’t be there to bail him out, and goes above and beyond to help a young woman too scared to show up to court do what she needs to do.

This is all wildly successful, because Kim is damn good at what she does. She knows how to put the prosecution through their paces; she knows how to read a young screw-up the riot act in the hopes that he won’t be back here, and she knows how to be sympathetic but forceful with her clients who need both a helping hand and a little push.

The problem is that it means Kim is shirking her responsibilities elsewhere, specifically with Mesa Verde. She blows off a call from Paige, her contact at the bank, so that she can see things through with her pro bono client. It’s the negative image of Jimmy’s choices in this episode -- a decision that’s foolish and a little self-destructive, but noble, and one Kim promises never to make again. Both Kim and Jimmy are trying to regain their souls, but in very different ways, and for very different reasons, even if both use their god-given skills to great effect in the process.

Mike is employing his expert skills as well. The top of the line, undetectable meth lab that Gus is putting together is part of his grand plan, and so he needs people he can rely on. That’s why he brings in Mike to scout the architects for his place. For one thing, Mike’s shown -- through his escapades at Madrigal -- that he knows how to cover every detail to make sure that their illicit dealings aren’t found out or shut down -- something the show again conveys with a great visual sequence involving point of view shots from under a hood and communicating the passage of time through quick cut changes in sound and lighting in the back of a rocky van.

But he also knows people, like we saw last week, and he can tell when someone is blowing smoke at him and when someone’s being straight. That’s why Gus trusts him, and why Mike sends the boastful guy who claims he can build the lab in six months packing. And it’s why when Werner Ziegler, the nauseous German architect who tells his would-be employer straight up that the job is not impossible, but that it will be difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. Mike and Gus are birds of a feather, they’re frank, thorough, and careful, and it means when taking on a project of this size, they want people who’ll treat it the same way.

We know, though, that no matter how cautious Mike and Gus are, how close they come to bringing this long-brewing plan to fruition, that it all ends in ruin. No matter how well you plan, how good you are at what you do, there are unpredictable elements that can disrupt everything. For Gus Fring, that unpredictable element is Walter White, but for Jimmy McGill, it’s Howard Hamlin.

After his incident with the burners and the muggers, Jimmy seems on the straight and narrow again. But then, during a trip to the courthouse to check in as part of his suspension, he runs into Howard in the bathroom, who looks worse for wear. This typically ever-composed individual is out of sorts, looking disheveled, complaining about insomnia, and stressing over a case that he admits isn’t particularly significant. It’s clear -- to both Jimmy and the audience -- that Chuck’s death has gotten to Howard, that’s Kim’s speech landed, that the very thought is torturing him. It’s enough for Jimmy to offer some kindness, recommending the same shrink that Kim passed on to him.

It’s then that the worm turns. Howard tells Jimmy that he’s already seeing a therapist twice a week. It’s startling admission to Jimmy, one that changes his path yet again. Howard has all the advantages Jimmy doesn't -- his wealth, his position, and his father’s name. He has lived as traditionally successful a life as someone like Jimmy could imagine, the kind of life Jimmy was once trying to emulate.

But Howard is haunted by the same grief Jimmy is, and he’s no better for all the more that he has. Howard’s visible unmooring in the wake of the same loss sends a message to Jimmy -- that following the right path, doing what’s expected of you, doing things the normal way, don’t get you where Jimmy wants to go, and don’t seem to make you better either. So when he speaks to the D.A. about his plans after reinstatement, he speaks of wanting to go bigger, go better. His refuge from grief is his refuge from everything -- to follow his talents to their apex until it either makes his dreams come true or leads to his end.

“Quite a Ride” suggests the former rather than the latter. We know the heights that Jimmy will hit: the Saul Goodman billboards and commercials running 24/7, the suitcase full of money, the cheesy but lucrative law office he maintains. But we also know his fall, his paranoid, button-down life as Cinnabon Gene, that requires him to be demure and inconspicuous, the greatest punishment there is for someone like Jimmy.

And maybe “Quite a Ride” suggests and end even beyond there. After Jimmy is laid out by the thugs who rob him, he lays on the ground in pain as the camera pulls back skyward. It’s the same shot Breaking Bad used in Walt’s final moments. It’s a visual echo and a portent, one that seems to preview what a myopic quest to make use of your own greatest talent, regardless of the ethical or practical consequences for you and the people you love, gets you. We know where that sort of quest ended for Walt, and as he veers ever nearer to going full Saul, Jimmy gets a taste of that too.

Better Call Saul has never been closer to Breaking Bad, and that’s bad news for Jimmy McGill.