In the fourteenth episode of the fifth season of The West Wing, a downed plane near North Korea triggers memories in Leo of his time in Vietnam, but they’re exacerbated when he learns of disturbing news regarding the very man who saved his life all those years ago. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch The West Wing.
Holy shit, WHAT AN IMMENSE WAVE OF LEO MCGARRY FEELINGS. Let me talk about the other characters before I just cry forth all of the emotions that I just felt because WOW. RUDE. SO RUDE.
Bartlet’s portrait
So, perhaps this is indicative of what John Wells is doing with The West Wing: seeding plots along the season, and then suddenly addressing them. This is perhaps the third time that Bartlet’s portrait has been mentioned, and nothing’s come of it. Given how two of C.J.’s plots had larger roles in “An Khe,” I’m curious to see if this will come to fruition at some point. Yes? Maybe? Well, at least we did get some of Abbey in this episode, though it was brief.
Josh / Ryan
Whoa, Ryan is back, and he’s useful again! Except he’s played against Josh’s ego… sort of. I think it’s easy to see Josh as irrational here, since he was giving poor or completely wrong information to Bartlet, and without Ryan, Josh and Bartlet never would have come up with a solution to the tax cut for stay-at-home moms and those who use day care. At the same time, there’s a protocol to what happens in the West Wing, and for people like Josh, it’s just bad form to interrupt other people in the presence of the President. (However, I imagine if you went back through this show, you could find Josh correcting someone else in front of Bartlet. JUST SAYIN’.) On top of that, Ryan is just a temporary intern, and it made Josh look bad. Of course, this is Josh we’re talking about. His image and how he’s perceived by everyone is central to his character, you know? I don’t foresee Ryan playing that big of a role in the future, though, especially since he kind of disappeared for a few episodes there. So… meh? That’s how I feel about half of this season. Just… meh? It’s not terrible by any means, and the initial run of episodes was FANTASTIC, but I feel like things have just sort of slowed down. I don’t know what direction The West Wing is headed at all.
C.J.
Okay, before we talk about C.J. crushing Taylor, can I just feel weird about Ben? I DON’T GET IT. I don’t get it at all. In hindsight, the whole deliberate camera framing so that we wouldn’t see who Ben was until he poked out from behind the door was just so… pointless? Because I definitely didn’t recognize the actor, and I realized that I’d mostly been manipulated by the writers up to this point to inherently care who Ben was, only to have the reveal be as boring and senseless as humanly possible? WHO IS BEN AND WHAT HAPPENED BETWEEN HIM AND C.J. AND MOST IMPORTANT OF ALL, WHY SHOULD I CARE ABOUT THIS?
So, Taylor Reid. Lord, Jay Mohr can do a skeezy conservative commentator extremely well, can’t he? It was frustrating to watch C.J. get steamrolled by his style, which wasn’t about conversation at all; he treated her like a void that he could shout into. That’s why it was so incredibly pleasing to see C.J. jump at the chance to UTTERLY DESTROY this man, and boy, does she ever turn him into a shell of man when it came to the health care issue. INCREDIBLE. INSPIRING. I only hope that I can one day destroy shitty conservative dudebros on live television with the grace and ease exhibited here. MY HERO: C.J. CREGG.
Will
Had like five lines in this episode. Sigh. STOP UNDERUSING WILL BAILEY, WRITERS. IT’S SO GLARING AT THIS POINT THAT I HAVE NO NEW WAYS OF CONVEYING MY FEELINGS ON THIS.
Leo
And for all the fault I can find in “An Khe” and some of the storytelling/characterization choices made by Wells and the other writers, my god, the main plot in this episode is just STELLAR. It’s so good that it easily outshines everything else. I’ll say upfront that I’m biased in this regard; my father was wounded in Vietnam, and I grew up with stories of what happened to him and how his leg was saved by the quick work of his companions and a field medic. Truthfully, the specter of war hung over my childhood and my teenage years, not just because of the stories my father told me. I remember sitting at the counter in our house in Boise and watching the tanks roll into Iraq and Kuwait; it was just twelve years later when war in the Middle East became a reality once again, and my father began to urge me to join the military with even more force than before. I was conflicted. I wanted to please my father, but all those stories he told about his time in war had the opposite effect that he’d intended. They scared me away from battle rather than made me want to join it.
Still, I knew how important this was to my father’s entire life. His military service was part of his identity, and in that sense, I think that “An Khe” does an utterly fantastic (and heartbreaking) job of portraying that sort of loyalty and meaning when it comes to Leo McGarry. The video below is evidence that I DIDN’T EVEN REALIZE I WAS WATCHING A FLASHBACK UNTIL THE SECOND ONE. Initially, though, that’s what we’re meant to take from those scenes. Leo’s past in the Vietnam War makes him sympathetic towards the men in the bomber plane who are shot down, but OH MY GOD, I WASN’T EVEN CLOSE TO FIGURING THIS OUT. The opening scene of Leo speaking kindly about his friend Ken O’Neal is part of what builds this character for the audience. We know that he’s being honored as a humanitarian by the Chicago Business Conference. We later discover that he refused to leave Leo behind in Vietnam, and it was that sort of dedication that saved Leo’s life. So it only seems fair that we give the benefit of the doubt to O’Neal when it comes to Senator Hunt’s accusations.
However, it’s not like the world of Washington is a stranger to the sort of contract procurement we see here, and that’s what ultimately proves to be so devastating about this episode. Leo offers himself up in some sort of ill-planned sacrifice, just to show his friend O’Neal that he’s willing to protect, despite that LEO HIMSELF WOULD PROBABLY SAY THIS IS BAD IDEA. And I don’t think that this is a case of mischaracterization, either. Look how quickly Leo moves not only to defend one of his best friends, but the Presidency as well. He viewed this all as an act to weaken Bartlet and the administration, and he was willing to make himself look bad just to save the others.
And yet, it’s Bartlet who finally convinces Leo to just find out if there’s any truth to Hunt’s accusations. It’s difficult to watch Leo try so hard to resist the truth because… I get it. Leo is a man of obligation and duty; this is nothing new. He believes that he owes the country a debt, and he believes he owes Ken O’Neal a debt, and he believes he owes all the soldiers who didn’t come home a debt, and this maelstrom of guilt and fear manifests itself in an obsession, one that ordinarily isn’t so inappropriate or potentially damaging. But if anyone was going to pull Leo back from this, it was Bartlet. God, y’all, I missed the relationship between these two, and this was a beautiful reminder of how close they are.
BUT NOTHING COULD HAVE PREPARED ME FOR HOW PAINFUL THOSE FINAL SCENES WERE. Watching Leo confront O’Neal hurt so much, not only because we knew Leo was walking into a situation he couldn’t win, but because we were witnessing HEARTBREAK. Look how quiet Leo is during this and the scene at the end. He’s FUCKED UP by this, and he wonders how it’s possible that someone who had done something so incredible for him could end up so… well, corrupt. Bartlet’s line at the end – “Corruption of the best is the worst” – is just TOO MUCH TO HANDLE, especially the more I thought about what this whole situation was like for Leo.
My god, SO GOOD and yet SO PAIN.
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