If we are to write the history of the fine staff that makes up the News Night team, and seeing as how this is the final season, we kind of are, then the question of what their final legacy will be must be asked. And tonight, we find that the answer is that their legacy will that of a bunch of fuck-ups.
Morally righteous fuckups with the most honorable of intentions, but fuckups none the less.
The episode boils down to a series of ethical debates, and the “hilarious” hi-jinks of Don and Sloan as they banter about their relationship. And as a bonus, we get not only Kat Dennings, but Toby from The Office, Marcia Gay Harden, Sorkin stalwart Mary McCormack, and a genuine, honest-to-goodness McPoyle!
So yeah, a lot of balls in the air here. And honestly, only a fraction of them are the good kind of balls. The other are like, regular, gross balls. And I refuse to be held responsible for however you choose to interpret that; that’s your own stuff to deal with.
FUCK-UP #1 (NEAL): Basically, everybody argues over what to do vis a vis the whole Neal situation, with the added counsel of Marcia Gay Harden’s cheeky lawyer-type character Rebecca Halliday. And for some reason, Neal has to explain the full events of the previous episode to her, even though we already know this shit, mainly because he literally went through it two separate times over last week.
We will call this Sorkin-splaining, and it is a thing that happens.
Also: “Air-gapped computer”; Take another shot.
As everybody argues over their moral obligation to report on the story contained in the leaked files and their duty to protect Neal from his own poor decision making skills. Will, of course is in favor of not running the story and keeping the Feds from slapping cuffs on Neal, because by this point we all know that Will is basically a father figure in the shape of a grumpy bear. Mac, under the impression that Neal will only get slapped with a contempt charge (an impression given to her in a guest shot by Mary McCormack, who has done the Sorkin dance once or twice before), wants to run the story. Not just because she feels it’s the ethically sound thing to do, but also because she has a tiny orgasm every time she disagrees with Will. Rebecca Halliday sides with Will out of common sense, while inwardly wishing she hadn’t passed on The Good Wife.
If this plotline essentially goes round and round in circles, at least it’s a relatively amusing circle. Harden and Daniels give fantastic banter, and Neal shooting sardonic asides from the side of his mouth makes him a more entertaining character than he’s ever been in the history of the show. In fact, there’s a tiny moment during the banter between Harden and Daniels where Dev Patel is trying not to smile, and it seems completely unscripted. It’s charming as all hell and where was this dude in the first two seasons?
More and more people get brought in to debate, pushing Neal to the edges of the conversation in his own story. And so, in true Neal fashion, he makes a move that he feels is the right thing, while simultaneously being a really fucking dumb thing to do: he makes a call to confirm his story, therefore implicating himself in the espionage incident.
Will, being Will, has already figured this out, and takes Neal aside to give him that fatherly talk, warn him to run, and mentions (but not apologizes for) calling him ‘Punjab’ multiple times in the first season, which struck me as some real iffy shit at the time, and maybe don’t bring that up again because remembering the first season is the LAST thing you want people to do…
(I also seem to recall him calling Neal’ Slumdog’, which is not only super racist, but also too fucking meta, even for Sorkin. Then again, I may be thinking of some other show where our ostensible hero said borderline racist things to an underling in order to establish he’s a politically incorrect, rule breaking type of guy. If so, please disregard this parenthetical accordingly).
The FBI swoops down on the News Night team with majestic force, indicating that the whistle blower is a very bad dude, and using a nifty bit of menu-based deception, Will warns Neal to run (which he already had five minutes ago, but whatever. The point is, Neal is off the grid now).
If this is the last we see of Neal (which is unlikely, but if so it’s a pretty great exit scene), then let us pay tribute to another actor too good for the material he was given, and who went out doing what he loved: taking an ethical stance that made shit way harder than it needed to be for everyone around him.
FUCK-UP#2 (MAGGIE AND THE SEXY McPOYLE): On the train back from Boston (with Elliott curiously missing; this perhaps does not speak highly of Maggie as a travelling companion), Maggie happens to overhear an off-the-record phone conversation between an EPA rep (Paul Lieberstein, Toby from The Office!) and a reporter where he throws shade at the Obama administration for their environmental policies.
Maggie, pulling an admittedly clever-ish trick, manages to capture his end of the conversation on her phone. She confronts him with her newfound dirt and he calls her out for engaging in gossip journalism. Legally, she’s in the clear, but ethically? He explains why she isn’t, and she ponders this and concludes that he’s right, explaining… sorry, Sorkin-splaining… his own point back at him, but with a gloss of the sort of high-handed rhetoric that’s part and parcel to working at News Night in the first place.
(Also, I’m loving this new meta Aaron Sorkin who constantly calls himself out on his tendency to write monologues for his characters, and highlighting their increasing ineffectiveness).
As a subplot, this seems mostly pointless; I doubt anything will come of the exclusive EPA Guy gives Maggie, and more than anything it seems like an excuse to give Alison Pill something to do. Which doesn’t bother me all that much; I like Alison Pill quite a lot.
What bothers me is that none of this is very amusing or entertaining. There are almost no jokes except for the running gag of EPA Guy not believing that a reporter would willingly pass up a good story on ethical grounds. Which, as gags go, isn’t the strongest. While it’s nice to see Lieberstein onscreen (he’s so not into acting that as a writer on The Office he continually wrote himself out of the show), it has to be said that the only redeeming value of this plotline is seeing Jimmi Simpson, the once and future Liam McPoyle, playing a charming teacher of law who colludes and flirts with Maggie, asking her out on a date because that sort of shit happens all the time on trains.
Why we’re introducing a love interest for Maggie in a six episode final season is beyond me, but I’m not about to complain about getting more Jimmi Simpson in my life?
Oh, and speaking of irrelevant relationships…
FUCK-UP #3 (THE INCREASINGLY INCONSEQUENTIAL ADVENTURES OF JIM): In case you were wondering how Jim’s romance with Who Gives a Shit (Grace Gummer) was going… as of this week, not so great. She got fired on account of tweeting an offensive joke involving Republicans and the Boston Marathon bombing on the News Night Twitter feed.
She was fired by Charlie, taking the weight off of Jim, who technically is her boss and so was supposed to be the one to bring the axe down and… oh, who am I kidding? No one cares about the fate of Jim’s girlfriend; hell, they haven’t done much thus far to remind us that we should care about Jim. Hopefully this is going somewhere, because (like Dev Patel) Gummer lent more charm to her underwritten role than anyone involved knew what to do with, and it would be a shame if this was it for her.
By the way, everybody who remembers that Will was supposed to be a dyed in the wool Republican, raise your hand.
(Put your hand down, Aaron Sorkin. You’re embarrassing yourself…)
FUCK-UP #4 (SLOAN AND DON, SITTING IN A TREE, BUT NOT THE TREE IN THE EXTENDED EURIPIDES METAPHOR FROM LAST WEEK): Oh, are we still speaking about irrelevant romances? Then I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring up Don and Sloan. After accidentally doing some insider trading, a casual slip of the tongue leads to roughly twenty nine hours (approximate running time) of back-and-forth about the nature of their relationship.
Look, Olivia Munn and Thomas Sadoski have become lethal weapons when it comes to selling the comedy on this show, so it’s not like there aren’t some laughs to be had here (I certainly got a kick out of Don realizing all his typical commitment-phobic moves were about to come back on him), the material itself is beyond dire. This is entry level sitcom stuff we’re dealing with here, where women on diets go to brunch buffets and force their boyfriend to get crab legs and waffles and later they shout the word ‘sex’ too loudly in public, and people play weird mind games to test their lovers and…
I don’t know if the insider trading thing is going to come up again, or if it was just an excuse for the whole ‘She loves me, she loves me not’ nonsense, but this I know for sure: SIX EPISODES, SORKIN! IT’S CALLED TIME MANAGEMENT AND YOU’RE NOT DOING IT RIGHT!
But let’s not stop giving in to our inner Hallie and stop taking cheap yet valid shots. No, let’s focus on the good now…
FUCK-UP #5 (REESE VS. THE WONDER TWINS): In the best plotline of the evening by a country mile, Reese faces off with his half-siblings Blair, crafty and calculating (Kat Dennings) and Randy, dumb as a bag of hammers (Chris Smith), who have secretly conspired to sell their shares of the company (totaling 45%, which they inherit in 10 days when they turn 25) and sell out to Savannah Capital, who already own 6%.
(I’ll leave you to do the basic math on that one…)
Of the four stories of this episode, this is the only one that feels like it has any stakes. Neal’s story has huge stakes, of course, but they’re so grounded in ethics as opposed to character that it plays out more like a civics lesson than good drama.
But Reese confronting the angry and calculating relatives she previously ignored and wrote off is very good drama indeed, even if sometimes the psychology gets a little on-the-nose.
With her relentless snarky screen persona, Kat Dennings is hit and miss for me. But it has to be said that she really tears it up here. She holds her own against Jane Fonda, for crying out loud! That’s nothing to sneeze at.
(Also, in case you were wondering: Thor 1: Hit; Thor 2: Miss; The House Bunny, Hit; 2 Broke Girls: ALL THE MISS; 40-Year Old Virgin: hiss; Nick And Nora: Can’t Say, never saw it; not enough ‘Deerhoof’).
In the end, Jane Fonda shows up to do her patented wisecracking hard-ass bit and offers to buy them out with four billion dollars it turns out she didn’t know she didn’t have. So she has ten days to come up with four billion, or she’ll lose the company she built from the ground up. Which is a hell of a lot more riveting at this point than the mess of threads tangling up our main arc.
It also helps that this is the plotline where Charlie did the most stuff, and the plot that has Charlie is, inevitably the plot that wins. His delivery of the line “Randy, shut the fuck up!” raises this episode up at least a letter grade and a half.
So in week two, we hit a bit of a speedbump. But the News Night team is at their best when they’re under fire, so let’s hope someone shoots Jenna The Intern.
RETRACTIONS AND CORRECTIONS:
– Last week I mistakenly referred to Sloan Sabbith as ‘Sloan Sabbath’. We here at Cinapse apologize profusely for the pain and suffering we may have caused to Sabbith and that guy she seems reluctant to call her ‘boyfriend’.
– In relation to Ms. Sabbith’s recent acquisition of a Bloomberg Terminal, a typographical error made it seem as if she had purchased 24,000 of the advanced hardware systems for financial analysis. This should have read $24,000. 24,000 Bloomberg Terminals would have a street value of 57.6 million dollars.
We apologize for any confusion this error may have caused.
NEXT WEEK: Oh, no! It’s the HR Rep!
