Operation Genoa takes front and center tonight as the episode opens with a red team meeting, with Mac, Jerry, Charlie, Maggie and Neal filling in Jim, Sloan and Don about the story they've been investigating for the last 7 months. Of course, everyone is still skeptical and it takes Charlie a minute to convince everyone that he believes it happened, but they still need a witness to corroborate. That witness comes in the form of a general, played by Stephen Root (of tons of movies of course, but who I will always see as Milton from Office Space), so Charlie and Mac head out to his house in Maryland to have him confirm the story. After they knock over his trash cans, he first mistakes them for Jehovah's Witnesses and then seems a lot more interested in watching his March Madness game than in talking to them, but he agrees to do an interview in which he's assured his image will be blurred and his voice doctored.
Meanwhile, Will in this episode is concerned about his falling likability numbers and has commissioned his own focus group to figure out how to get people to like him again. We find out that much of this new preoccupation stems from Nina, who he is still dating, and who has urged him to change his image and not let Mac and Charlie do their own show at his expense. Will insists that it's his show too, but isn't fully confident and is all too willing to go along with Nina's suggestion that he appear on ACN Morning to show off his warm and cuddly side (something that we certainly haven't seen any of thus far). ACN Morning seems to be some kind of take off of the ridiculous Fox and Friends where they force him to put on a helmet and throw footballs through a tire. Will of course, smashes the lights behind it instead, and is subject to a sisterly "chewing out" from Sloan, who tells him to be true to himself, etc. I've never quite bought this whole affectionate Will/Sloan relationship, but I suppose if you're a fan of those two, it's a nice moment. Will also promptly dumps Nina after the morning show debacle, and yet again, it's an example of a relationship that has apparently lasted at least 7 months and we never got to see any of it, so the impact of that is pretty much zilch. I also think we should get some kind of a flashback at some point to the days when WIll was this likable, inoffensive, supposedly Leno-ish news anchor, because with everything we've seen of him, I find that to be pretty unimaginable.
In other subplots, Jim's girlfriend Hallie is in town with the Romney campaign, and they make plans to go on a double date with Neal and a girl she brings along who happens to be a Ron Paul supporter, so of course she turns out to be a delightful wacko, as all Paul supporters are. And Taylor, the Romney spokesperson, is also invited to the dinner because Hallie feels sorry for her, which later turns out to be because she was fired by the Romney people for suggesting ways to improve his standing. This is only known after several exchanges between her and Jim over Romney's consistent gaffes of late, and a verbal takedown of Ron Paul from Neal, so this little storyline was alternately irritating and amusing throughout the episode. In the end, Jim and Hallie's night is cut short when she has to fly to Colorado for a press event and Jim runs into Maggie on one of her outings she mentioned last week- getting drunk in a hotel bar and going home with a random guy. He's concerned about the effect of this on her work, namely, her ability to keep a secret on the Genoa story, but it turns out she lets it affect her work in a different way, by leaving the room when Jerry conducts his interview with the general, which as we'll soon see is a huge mistake.
Maggie and Jerry prepare to interview the general, and as mentioned, he insists on talking to Jerry alone. During the interview, Jerry is increasingly frustrated with the general's refusal to confirm that sarin gas was used, instead phrasing it as "IF we used sarin," so in order to push the story along, and buoyed by his own determination, Jerry doctors the tape, including the raw footage. When showing the interview to the group in another red team meeting, Mac asks for the raw footage, and no one notices the doctored clip (although if you ask me, there's a pretty obvious gap where he fudged the audio), but Charlie still insists on another witness. Jerry blows up at this, and we finally see the real reason behind his pushing the story so hard- he's a hard left liberal who's dismayed by the continual loss of civil liberties and Bush foreign policies under the Obama administration, and convinced that the reason no one in the room wants to believe it is because they like and trust the president personally. Echoes of Glenn Greenwald, anyone?
Right after this scene there's a montage of Will reading various news stories and we jump ahead another 5 months, all the way to the Republican convention (and that's a hell of a lot of news they just passed, including the Supreme Court upholding the ACA, which would have been perfect Newsroom fodder, given all the shoddy media reporting on that day), when suddenly Jim gets a phone call from another general involved in the operation who was previously thought to be dead by the news staff. We then jump back to "present day" and Charlie being questioned by MGH, who confirms that was the moment he gave the green light. Charlie is at first defensive, saying with their witnesses and sources that anyone would have gone ahead with the story, and they were getting huge ratings on the night they ran it, but in the middle of the show he realized, rather ominously, that "none of it was true."
So we basically confirm Jerry Dantana (a very good Hamish Linklater by the way) as the villain this season, after seeing him doctor the tape, but I'm curious as to what the motivations were of all of these witnesses who were apparently lying about everything, if none of it was true. Seems very coordinated- some kind of conspiracy, perhaps? Still, next week looks to be rather action-packed, as we finally get to when News Night aired the Operation Genoa story on a Sunday special and then had to retract.
Aside from all that, I'm thinking they really need to get a handle on this time jumping issue. Another scene that occurred tonight is Don confessing to Mac that he doesn't have the courage to ask Sloan out, because that she's now dating a New York Giant, and despite what fairly little we've seen of their budding romance, the fact is that that situation has now been going on for YEARS, which is faintly ridiculous. This show either needs 20 episode seasons, or to stick within a consecutive period of time, even if it means foregoing big news events you want to get to. It would serve the storytelling a lot better.
