Given all the focus on women's rights during the last election season, I figured we were in for an episode that advocated feminism, and tonight we got it, as both Sloan and Maggie face the "slut" label and have to defend themselves to varying degrees. This along with quite a few lectures on a whole host of recent news topics- several characters get their own Sorkin-infused passionate speech tonight, addressing the Trayvon Martin shooting, the Sandra Fluke/Rush Limbaugh dust up, and the ethics of coming out on television.
We start off with a massive time jump- I'd been wondering when that was going to happen and sure enough, it turns out to have been a whopping six months since the last episode, when Maggie was scarred by the Ugandan incident. We're now all the way up to March 2012, it's the Illinois primaries, and Will is hosting the show as usual, but this ep takes place all in one night, during one show (hence the title), and there are a myriad of storylines intersecting throughout the hour involving the various characters. We'll just take them one by one, starting with Will, who gets a rare call from his father in the middle of the show. As you'll remember from last season, we were told that Will's father was a drunk who beat his wife and kids, so their relationship is not exactly friendly. Nonetheless, the call turns out to be from the hospital where his dad has just been admitted, and Will spends the hour in a dazed funk, with Mac bugging him to call and leave his dad a voicemail in case the worst happens, while he's reluctant to do so. He prefers to distract himself with Neal's updates about a female journalist he supposedly snubbed in a restaurant, who's now tweeting about him in real time, and insinuating he's chauvinist (to keep things related to our "war on women" theme throughout the night). Mac doesn't like Neal for bringing this up (and I don't think Aaron Sorkin likes Twitter from the sound of it), but she's more frazzled by an upcoming segment in which a kid who will be interviewed about the suicide of Tyler Clementi, plans to use the opportunity to come out to his parents on the show. This gives her a chance to lecture him about his spotlight stealing narcissism, and rails against turning the news into an entertainment medium (which of course it is, especially cable news).
As for Maggie this week, it's been six months since Africa (and no red spiky hair yet), but she has now become a depressed and cynical partier, apparently going out all night and drinking, sleeping with various men, etc. Jim is concerned about this and tries to warn her, but Maggie goes on a tirade about the sexism against so-called sluts, claiming the real question in this debate should have been what's wrong with liking sex, anyway- while also calling out some phony outrage over the Sandra Fluke controversy, pointing out how often articles about her accompanied links to bikini bodied women and hot celebrities on the internet. Jim is pretty much silenced during these rants, as his job in this episode was to listen to her make her point in several heated speeches, but Maggie also gets to weigh in on the Trayvon Martin story, when she cuts down the 911 tape to exclude the operator asking Zimmerman about Martin's ethnicity. Maggie has brushed Jim off on his worry about her behavior as long as it has not affected her work, but she admits in the end that part of her felt the need to see "justice done" in editing the tape and also confesses that she's afraid to sleep alone at night.
In Sloan's biggest storyline of the year so far, we find out that she'd been dating a guy from AIG since Christmas (again, this is all new and happened offscreen due to the time jump) and has just dumped him, when he decided to get back at her by releasing nude pictures she'd posed for while they were together. Sloan is of course appropriately outraged and horrified by this, as she's forced to admit the pictures are really her to Charlie and Reese, and she confides in Don that she knows she'll now only be known as a "slut and a whore." Don and Sloan spend the episode shut in his office, talking it out, and they continue to be pretty great together- both Olivia Munn and Thomas Sadoski have the light comedic touch that works to play the romantic comedy angle Aaron Sorkin originally wanted this show to possess (too much with some of the other couples in the first season, but it works with these two- they have the right chemistry for it). Don helps her to go from "humiliation" to "rage" on the emotional spectrum, so she can then get revenge on the sleazy ex in kick-ass fashion (a punch to the face and a kick in the groin), and she helps him out of a jam he got into by accidentally leaking a joke to the nutty conservative website World Net Daily- and his call to the "editor" of the site to yell at him to remove the story is pretty funny, I have to admit.
Finally, Charlie gets a visit from an old friend (whom he fondly calls a "secret agent") who defends the hypothetical prospect of the military having used chemical weapons under certain circumstances, because, despite all the progress we saw happening over the last few weeks on this story, it all apparently hit a dead end, as Operation Genoa is once again just a rumor they've been chasing for the past 6 months. But Charlie ends the episode officially convinced it happened, so the story looks to progress quickly now after all that non-action (awfully convenient, but whatever). By the end of the show, Will has gotten the news that his father has passed away, and goes on the air a bit shell-shocked for a moment, but then recovers as he embraces his relationship with the audience as being the one rock solid connection in his life.
An interesting episode tonight, lots of things happening all around- but the excessive leap forward really does create an awkward gap that we've just passed by in terms of character development. I know it has to happen in order to end the season with the election, but they kinda just threw out a lot of the stuff they'd been building the season around- I mean, they skipped over the major relevant time period that Occupy Wall Street had in the fall of 2011, and after dumping on it so hard before it had even really taken off in the timeline, it seems kinda unfair to just pass right over it. This show might actually be one of the few that would be better served by a normal 20-25 episode season, where you can really take us through a year if that's what you want to do. And Maggie seems like a completely different person now, which I suppose makes sense after Africa, but those Sorkin monologues have always sounded especially unconvincing coming from her- it just doesn't fit her faintly goofy personality. I hate to keep harping on her every week, but I really don't think any incarnation of that character has worked. Which is too bad because the rest of them have actually grown on me. See you next week!
