The West Wing 1x03, 1x04 - "Proportional Responce", "Five Votes Down"

A very wide swing in quality here – episode three I thought was the weakest episode I’ve seen, while four was the best. Taking them one at a time:

Proportional Response dragged for most of its runtime, dealing with an absurd dilemma – how many foreign lives is an American worth? Fortunately the episode ends up ruling that, no, the President would not be justified in killing everyone else on Earth. On the other hand, the position it actually takes feels like just as much of a straw man – surely Syria launching an unprovoked attack on an American plane should justify slightly stronger reactions than we see here? Bartlett manages to come across as both obsessively vengeful and ineffectual, something I would not have thought possible.

Meanwhile, the Sam and the callgirl plot continues to drag on, with no actual progress being made whatsoever, other than increasing my dislike of Sam. On the plus side, I am starting to like CJ a lot.

The introduction of Charlie – eh. The main issue I had was that the dialogue about ‘what it looks like’ felt to me less like something the characters would think of so much as something the show’s writers would think of. I mean, ‘aide to the President’ isn’t a particularly public role, and presumably the Bartlett administration has at least one high-ranking African-American? It only makes sense in terms of “This is the only Black character in the regular cast” – and, if anything, calling attention to the problem just makes it even more noticeable that the only black fact in the first two episodes was the doomed Morris. And then, having raised the issue, the show dismisses any concerns with a black General saying he “doesn’t have much time for cosmetic issues”. So yeah.

And if you must have your only black character be in the most junior role, at the very least does he need to be so needlessly humble? Can’t he be an ambitious energetic go-getter like everyone else, not the guy who didn’t want the job in the first place and applied for a lower position?

So, I wasn’t in a very positive mood going into ‘Five Votes Down’. Fortunately, this one proved the first episode I unreservedly enjoyed, and if the show continues like this, maybe I’ll make it to the end of season one after all. On the down side, since I’m not tearing it apart, there’s not much to say about it.

What I liked is that for once there was a clear dilemma to resolve, and the stakes and issues were made clear. This was what I was expecting from a show about the White House, not drawn out personal problems of characters I don’t like or vaguely described military actions. The strategy of politics gets a chance to dominate, and it’s not a clear victory in the end – even ignoring the vice-president’s manoeuvrings, it’s made clear that the bill was a compromise measure in the first place.

And while some of the dissenting congressmen are little more than caricatures – the ‘dude’ that won’t support the bill unless he gets a presidential photo-op, for example – the black congressman is portrayed as having honest objections to the bill, and gets the last word in his conversation with Leo. It’s interesting in light of recent political debates in the US over health care, and the strategic debate over whether to compromise and risk diluting one’s goals to uselessness or stick to one’s principles and risk getting nothing. Personally, I’m in the stick to your guns camp, but that’s why I’m not in politics.

I’m finding the vice-president a consistently entertaining character; it’s nice to see someone who can actually play the political game, and play it well. Everyone else seems a little naïve at times. And his scene with Leo shows he’s not a pure villain, either, just… ambitious.

So, looks like I’m going to be tackling another disk after all.