In the eighteenth episode of the second season of The West Wing, amidst a terrorist plot and a badly written speech, Toby must cope with stunning news about President Bartlet. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch The West Wing.
Good lord, this was intense.
I initially felt a little wary about the idea of contrasting one of the most uncomfortable scenes in the history of the show with a set of scenes where the rest of the staff told horrible jokes. It seemed so strange to me to put something so terribly serious with something undeniably silly. At the end of “17 People,” though, just as Toby reminds Bartlet that he’s been complicit in what’s happened, we watch Toby rejoin the group, and the horrible weight of what he’s just learned is now deadening. It’s awful. What this episode does, though, is make me realize just how fucked up this situation is.
Tony begins to put the pieces together after realizing in “The Stackhouse Filibuster” that Vice President Hoynes’s behavior doesn’t really make that much sense given what information he does know about the man. I loved the opening sequence and how that conveyed the passage of time, how it showed us that Toby was obsessing about this one detail, and how it made us believe that he was distracted for nearly a week because of how much Hoynes bothered him. So when Toby started digging, I knew it was only a matter of time before he found out something.
But that’s the thing about “17 People”: I went into this expecting that the President would eventually tell Toby, and probably the rest of the staff, and everyone would be sad for a moment, and then they’d all agree to keep the secret and everyone would be friends, and I’m sure it’s at this very moment that most of you are shaking your heads at me. Yes, this is a naïve view of things, I admit that. Hell, it’s not even that good if you ignore how naïve I’m being! We have seen, time and time again, how the media in America have taken any detail of the President’s life or the smallest political maneuver, and they’ve managed to blow it out of proportion until the world believes the apocalypse has arrived. I should have known that Toby would be upset. I should have known this!
Regardless, I’m not sure that would have made this easier to watch, you know? It’s the silence that gets to me and will always get to me whenever I watch this episode again. Toby just sits there. He doesn’t say anything at all for a few seconds, and then it’s just short, terse questions. Even worse, then he steps outside the Oval Office to collect himself, and we’re left wondering what the hell he’s thinking. When that is finally revealed, it’s done so in a way to make everything awkward forever. It’s fitting that Toby is the one to think of the legal implications of the information he’s learned while also detaching himself from any sort of emotional reaction to Bartlet’s revelation. It’s foreshadowing, in a sense, for where Toby would eventually take his anger. When Toby does crack, it’s not until they’re discussing the events of this season’s premiere, with Toby expressing concern about the possibility of Bartlet having an attack and then repeating the same bout of confusion when he was under anesthesia. Well, by “expressing concern,” I mean TOBY IS YELLING and then BARTLET IS YELLING and then everything hurts. 🙁 I mean, Toby doesn’t even ask how Bartlet is! Not once! And it’s also clear that while Leo and Bartlet thought about the difficulties of keeping Bartlet’s MS a secret, they both did not expect Toby to react this way. God, there are so many times when the look on Leo’s face is nothing but frightened shock, and it’s so upsetting to see.
And now I’m worried. What if this does get worse? What if someone outside those seventeen people finds out what happened? This is going to be a nightmare of a legal issue, isn’t it? And it sucks for Bartlet because he’s not going to be able to have a right to privacy about his medical issues because of how complicated this is. Oh gods, what’s going to happen?
There were two other things I wanted to bring up. First of all, something rubbed me wrong about Ainsley’s assertion that the Equal Rights Amendment, and I figured it out. Her logic is, essentially: I got what I wanted as a woman, so therefore, no one else needs this law. As far as I understood it, she was offended by the notion that she needed protection in a legal sense, and she reasoned that laws that already existed covered her in terms of equality. Now, she has every right to feel this and express this, but there are other woman without access to the education and the money that she got who desperately need the ERA in present times. It’s a mentality I’ve seen a lot in activist work, where a person believes that their singular success is a complete rebuttal to everything else. It’s like saying that because Obama got elected president, we don’t need the Voting Rights Act. Clearly, racism is over, and people need to stop being victims! Um, no.
Also:
“If you were in an accident, I wouldn’t stop for a beer.”
“If you were in an accident, I wouldn’t stop for red lights.”
Hi, I’m Mark Oshiro, and I am utterly fucking done right now.
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