Greetings, fictional New Hampshire
Feb. 23rd, 2024 07:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shallownessThe West Wing - 6.11 Opposition Research
Very different episode, mainly focusing on Josh and his new dynamic with Santos and the start of their campaign. Certainly enough was going on for me to get invested in said campaign, as Santos was all ‘call me Matt’, Josh was all ‘Senator, I know how to do this’ and they faced quite the uphill struggle in this first state with little money and so much to work out. Oh, and with Will (and cut-outs of Russell) on the other side. Not to mention Donna and the Pained Awkwardness of Being In A Room Together Again.
I did see the press being there for Josh more than his candidate coming before Josh did. There was a decent use of other characters rooting an episode that had started with a road trip. Maybe the conversation with Toby was a little superfluous, although the podcast raised a couple of neat character points about Josh’s interaction with him. But the return of Joey, Liz, who, like her ‘neutral’ father, decided to give Josh and Santos some help, emphasising she was her father’s daughter in many ways, worked.
I very much liked the tension between Santos’s idealism and Josh’s realpolitik, which felt in part the result of them not having had enough time to prepare for this – Santos thinking that his life wasn’t going to get raked over felt very naïve, though. And, as the podcast pointed out, retail politics shouldn’t have come as such a surprise to him either. In contrast to Leo and Bartlet, they really didn’t have a basis of many years’ standing. Obviously, they had to work through their issues and start listening to each other. Although I thought Josh had more of the rights of it than Santos, I very much liked that with his highfalutin’ policy ideas (and he’d zeroed in on a big problem that nobody else was addressing), Santos was demanding that Josh changed his methods – which Donna and Will were parroting back at him with a subpar candidate – too. So, yes, while I felt Josh’s frustration that he’d gone all in and his candidate was settling for two month of influencing policy, I was energised by that demand that Josh (who had messed up of late, who hadn’t been worthy of replacing Leo) do better. The podcast made some neat analogies between Bartlet having originally run to shape the agenda and keep Hoynes honest not to become President, whatever Leo thought, and between Bartlet-Leo, and Santos-Josh and owning the campaigns.
I did feel that Will calling Josh the second smartest political operator after Leo in the whole party was a bit sucking up. But I also wanted Josh to prove that he had picked a winner WHO WAS UP TO IT. And thus that he was following in Leo’s path.
Very different episode, mainly focusing on Josh and his new dynamic with Santos and the start of their campaign. Certainly enough was going on for me to get invested in said campaign, as Santos was all ‘call me Matt’, Josh was all ‘Senator, I know how to do this’ and they faced quite the uphill struggle in this first state with little money and so much to work out. Oh, and with Will (and cut-outs of Russell) on the other side. Not to mention Donna and the Pained Awkwardness of Being In A Room Together Again.
I did see the press being there for Josh more than his candidate coming before Josh did. There was a decent use of other characters rooting an episode that had started with a road trip. Maybe the conversation with Toby was a little superfluous, although the podcast raised a couple of neat character points about Josh’s interaction with him. But the return of Joey, Liz, who, like her ‘neutral’ father, decided to give Josh and Santos some help, emphasising she was her father’s daughter in many ways, worked.
I very much liked the tension between Santos’s idealism and Josh’s realpolitik, which felt in part the result of them not having had enough time to prepare for this – Santos thinking that his life wasn’t going to get raked over felt very naïve, though. And, as the podcast pointed out, retail politics shouldn’t have come as such a surprise to him either. In contrast to Leo and Bartlet, they really didn’t have a basis of many years’ standing. Obviously, they had to work through their issues and start listening to each other. Although I thought Josh had more of the rights of it than Santos, I very much liked that with his highfalutin’ policy ideas (and he’d zeroed in on a big problem that nobody else was addressing), Santos was demanding that Josh changed his methods – which Donna and Will were parroting back at him with a subpar candidate – too. So, yes, while I felt Josh’s frustration that he’d gone all in and his candidate was settling for two month of influencing policy, I was energised by that demand that Josh (who had messed up of late, who hadn’t been worthy of replacing Leo) do better. The podcast made some neat analogies between Bartlet having originally run to shape the agenda and keep Hoynes honest not to become President, whatever Leo thought, and between Bartlet-Leo, and Santos-Josh and owning the campaigns.
I did feel that Will calling Josh the second smartest political operator after Leo in the whole party was a bit sucking up. But I also wanted Josh to prove that he had picked a winner WHO WAS UP TO IT. And thus that he was following in Leo’s path.
