TWW: College Kids & Red Mass
Apr. 11th, 2022 04:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shallownessThe West Wing 4.3 College Kids
I have to admit that the bit I remembered most clearly from this episode was CJ rallying potential voters at the Rock the Vote event. I wonder if I murmured, ‘Aren’t the Barenaked Ladies Canadian?’ the first time I watched it, too.
I loved that this followed right on from the previous episode, with Bartlet musing about the three wanderers walking, as we’d seen at the end of the last ep, into Washington (strictly speaking weren’t they in Washington when they started walking?) as he dealt with the Qumaris falsely accusing Israel of what he’d done. I could see why Leo was worried he wasn’t hunkered down, but the whole riff about being in a gang returned by the end of the ep.
And the podcast made the excellent point that the title card said ‘That Morning’ as if, indeed, this was ‘20 Hours in America part 3’ (except it would have been some other number of hours ), which I had noticed but not registered, if you know what I mean. After all, I’m neither binge watching or watching it weekly as I did originally.
It seemed a bit more frenetic in tone than 20HiA, with the Rock the Vote gig featuring music acts, among Debbie’s past sass coming to haunt her, Leo flirting with/bringing Jordan in on the Qumar thing and Toby and Josh trying to fix the father from the previous ep’s problem. Not to mention your general campaign/governing things – where every time the team got pre-emptively excited, the little things they’d been assuring themselves they didn’t need to worry about kept rearing up as big problems. Oh, and the investigation into who was behind the pool bombing. Lots of welcome returnees in this ep, then.
They didn’t make a big thing of it, but CJ and Donna made valid points about Title IX helping women’s sport in the USA, although Josh definitely wasn’t listening to Donna as he spotted Amy, and learned why he really ought to be worried that Stackhouse wasn’t taking his calls. (Hrishi noticed a callback to Mandy, and made me go ‘Aha!’ because I had been thinking that Josh/Amy were a more successful iteration of Josh/Mandy. FWIW, I had taken it as read that they’d broken up.)
I wasn’t quite as critical of this ep as the podcasters were; when Bartlet made a joke about lying about his medical history, I did draw in a sharp breath, but assumed it was more about him having moved on than anything.
4.4 Red Mass
Here we had Charlie big brothering Anthony, with a young intern/assistant we’ve never met before, I think, whom the podcast named as Emily, as a useful device. Charlie was STRICT, but he got his breakthrough.
What confused me about the Red Mass (well, I also didn’t understand why it had that name) was why it was Catholic. Would non-Catholic Presidents have gone to a mass?
Meanwhile, we saw the dynamics of the nascent Stackhouse campaign. I was also confused by this because isn’t he a Democrat and hasn’t Bartlet got the Democrat nomination? I was also struck by how Amelia! AKA Amy is a far more successful Mandy type (as discussed above.
CJ and Josh were seeing how Ritchie (despite his clear failings) (but because of how they were sold) could win. She and Sam came up with a way of, essentially, making it a very high-stakes debate. Toby got increasingly irate throughout this episode. It’s going to be dramatic, but the President Bartlet who is willing to raise the topic of needle exchanges, as at the end of the episode, has surely got it.
We also got to see Josh passionately defend his President and ridicule Ritchie. Donna was the one who had foolishly made plans for a Saturday (although this close to the election, surely not! Can’t be bothered to rewatch to see how dryly she was talking about those plans.) As we could see, the whole team was working through the weekend. I don’t know that I registered what Josh was doing as mansplaining, as the podcast claimed, as much as just being generally patronising there. They made a stronger case over Emily talking about using sex as a weapon in the workplace and Jed offering his daughters as ‘joke’ marital prizes, though.
The administration and law enforcement got the win on the domestic terrorism front. They wanted one of the five debates to be about foreign threats (the audience was left to imagine how a buffoon like Ritchie would handle what Bartlet was handling, let alone debate it) and Leo was pressing the Israelis to hold off until their disinformation campaign could stick. Or something. I wasn’t clear what the Israeli foreign Minister’s worries were about Qumar vs Israel except in the broadest terms, and I’m not sure if that was what was haunting Leo about their conversation, but the plane crash elicited a gasp from me. I loved how Sheen and Spencer played Bartlet and Leo’s physical reactions to the news. The gifted yarmulka was well used.
But the line about putting the Stars and Stripes up in Mecca just made me sigh in a facepalmy way, and I was relieved that Sam and Leo retreated to not knowing, but not giving up on the Middle East. As they discussed this on the podcast, my take was that Leo intentionally let Sam in on the assassination, perhaps more for emotional reasons than anything. The podcast confirmed that Sam’s reaction to weak candidates was as significant as my memory was insisting.
[Edited for typos 29/12/24.]
I have to admit that the bit I remembered most clearly from this episode was CJ rallying potential voters at the Rock the Vote event. I wonder if I murmured, ‘Aren’t the Barenaked Ladies Canadian?’ the first time I watched it, too.
I loved that this followed right on from the previous episode, with Bartlet musing about the three wanderers walking, as we’d seen at the end of the last ep, into Washington (strictly speaking weren’t they in Washington when they started walking?) as he dealt with the Qumaris falsely accusing Israel of what he’d done. I could see why Leo was worried he wasn’t hunkered down, but the whole riff about being in a gang returned by the end of the ep.
And the podcast made the excellent point that the title card said ‘That Morning’ as if, indeed, this was ‘20 Hours in America part 3’ (except it would have been some other number of hours ), which I had noticed but not registered, if you know what I mean. After all, I’m neither binge watching or watching it weekly as I did originally.
It seemed a bit more frenetic in tone than 20HiA, with the Rock the Vote gig featuring music acts, among Debbie’s past sass coming to haunt her, Leo flirting with/bringing Jordan in on the Qumar thing and Toby and Josh trying to fix the father from the previous ep’s problem. Not to mention your general campaign/governing things – where every time the team got pre-emptively excited, the little things they’d been assuring themselves they didn’t need to worry about kept rearing up as big problems. Oh, and the investigation into who was behind the pool bombing. Lots of welcome returnees in this ep, then.
They didn’t make a big thing of it, but CJ and Donna made valid points about Title IX helping women’s sport in the USA, although Josh definitely wasn’t listening to Donna as he spotted Amy, and learned why he really ought to be worried that Stackhouse wasn’t taking his calls. (Hrishi noticed a callback to Mandy, and made me go ‘Aha!’ because I had been thinking that Josh/Amy were a more successful iteration of Josh/Mandy. FWIW, I had taken it as read that they’d broken up.)
I wasn’t quite as critical of this ep as the podcasters were; when Bartlet made a joke about lying about his medical history, I did draw in a sharp breath, but assumed it was more about him having moved on than anything.
4.4 Red Mass
Here we had Charlie big brothering Anthony, with a young intern/assistant we’ve never met before, I think, whom the podcast named as Emily, as a useful device. Charlie was STRICT, but he got his breakthrough.
What confused me about the Red Mass (well, I also didn’t understand why it had that name) was why it was Catholic. Would non-Catholic Presidents have gone to a mass?
Meanwhile, we saw the dynamics of the nascent Stackhouse campaign. I was also confused by this because isn’t he a Democrat and hasn’t Bartlet got the Democrat nomination? I was also struck by how Amelia! AKA Amy is a far more successful Mandy type (as discussed above.
CJ and Josh were seeing how Ritchie (despite his clear failings) (but because of how they were sold) could win. She and Sam came up with a way of, essentially, making it a very high-stakes debate. Toby got increasingly irate throughout this episode. It’s going to be dramatic, but the President Bartlet who is willing to raise the topic of needle exchanges, as at the end of the episode, has surely got it.
We also got to see Josh passionately defend his President and ridicule Ritchie. Donna was the one who had foolishly made plans for a Saturday (although this close to the election, surely not! Can’t be bothered to rewatch to see how dryly she was talking about those plans.) As we could see, the whole team was working through the weekend. I don’t know that I registered what Josh was doing as mansplaining, as the podcast claimed, as much as just being generally patronising there. They made a stronger case over Emily talking about using sex as a weapon in the workplace and Jed offering his daughters as ‘joke’ marital prizes, though.
The administration and law enforcement got the win on the domestic terrorism front. They wanted one of the five debates to be about foreign threats (the audience was left to imagine how a buffoon like Ritchie would handle what Bartlet was handling, let alone debate it) and Leo was pressing the Israelis to hold off until their disinformation campaign could stick. Or something. I wasn’t clear what the Israeli foreign Minister’s worries were about Qumar vs Israel except in the broadest terms, and I’m not sure if that was what was haunting Leo about their conversation, but the plane crash elicited a gasp from me. I loved how Sheen and Spencer played Bartlet and Leo’s physical reactions to the news. The gifted yarmulka was well used.
But the line about putting the Stars and Stripes up in Mecca just made me sigh in a facepalmy way, and I was relieved that Sam and Leo retreated to not knowing, but not giving up on the Middle East. As they discussed this on the podcast, my take was that Leo intentionally let Sam in on the assassination, perhaps more for emotional reasons than anything. The podcast confirmed that Sam’s reaction to weak candidates was as significant as my memory was insisting.
[Edited for typos 29/12/24.]
