A Son of the Rock

2005

This season covers the build up to and aftermath of Pres Bartlet’s re-election. In the course of it, as a result of a freak result in a congressional district where a candidate died during the campaign, Sam Seaborn is detached from the West Wing to stand in his place and is replaced as speech writer by Will Bailey. We also get a substitution of the pet republican by a new one – whose first day is eventful as he uncovers Vice-President John Hoynes’s love affair. This episode started with the revelation of Hoynes’s resignation and then flashed back to the circumstances which brought it about. The tension that could have been built up by this scenario was dissipated by the fact that we knew what was going to happen from the outset.

In this season the writers seem to have made a conscious decision to try to inject humour. Bailey’s appointment is followed by a mass resignation of subsidiary speech writers and so he has to make do with the help of interns whom he finds indistinguishable from each other. There is also some by-play with the glass window between his office and Toby Ziegler’s and with a pigeon that pecks at Donna Moss’s window.

The running theme is that Bartlet has ordered the assassination of a foreign leader and the ramifications of this (both domestic and foreign) are worked through – especially as the reporter Danny Concannon has sniffed out the story.

I wonder whether the writers felt they had to have Bartlet doing something underhand/constitutionally illegal – as opposed to his earlier concealment of his MS – in order to assuage criticism about him being too well intentioned to be true.

We have a cliff hanger at the end when the President’s daughter Zoey is abducted. He stands down temporarily to avoid a conflict of interest and, there being no Vice-President due to Hoynes’s resignation, the Speaker of the House (played by John Goodman) is sworn in as President. In a further illustration of the bizarreries of the US constitution he has to resign as Speaker first though. (Logically doesn’t that then render him no longer next in line?)