So between last week’s episode and this week’s almost unbearably grim installment, I went to go see Dumb and Dumber To. And it raised one very important question in my mind: How the fuck is Jeff Daniels a person? How the hell can the same human being be both Harry Dunne AND Will McAvoy? Seriously, every time that dude sneezes, prestigious awards should fly out of his ass.
I wanted to start with something positive, because this episode was both deeply problematic and had all of the sadnesses, and reader, I just can’t deal.
I had a sinking feeling Charlie Skinner wasn’t going to survive to the end of the series; it’s pretty damn hard to end a series of this nature without killing someone and as much as I prayed to the Rain Gods, it was never going to be Jim.
So the only question left to ask was “Will Charlie get a sendoff worthy of the awesomeness he brought to the show?”, to which the answer is eventually revealed to be, “Fuck no! That would be literally impossible, so we’re not even going to try!”
Like almost every episode this season, ‘Oh Shenandoah’ is a mix of very, very good, and not very good at all. This episode features some of the best scenes the show has ever done, along with… well, not the worst; that would be too easy. No, it’s just got some pretty bad ones.
‘Oh Shenandoah’ begins with Will settling into his new life as a guy in a jail cell for what his kindly guard assumes will be a weekend stay. Fifty two days later, Will is still there.
Elsewhere, the source he’s been protecting, Lilly, dramatically kills herself offscreen for… you know, reasons or whatever. Seriously, I’m a pretty dumb guy, so maybe I missed some shit. But did they ever explain what Lilly hoped to accomplish with her splashy suicide, besides letting our hero of the hook in as morbid and anticlimactic a manner as narratively possible?
Tossing Clea Duvall casually aside like so much… hmm. What do people toss aside? Well, nothing is immediately coming to mind, and I’ve got a deadline, so we’ll just go with this: Tossing Clea Duvall aside like so much (TBD) was an unexpected end to this whole situation, but it also reduced her character to the status of ‘Overqualified Plot Device’.
Anyway, Will finds himself becoming roomies with The Physical Embodiment Of The Liberal Conception of a Typical Red Stater. Which I admit is a bit of a mouthful, so let’s just name him “BoCletus LukeDuke”.
BoCletus LukeDuke is a wife beater, an anti-semite, and a working class guy what don’t trust them hoity toity Ivy League types.
He is also the ghost of Will’s father or something, because God DAMMIT Sorkin, I’ve been doing my best to meet you halfway this whole season and you’ve been fighting me at every turn!
These are well-acted scenes, as far as these things go, but this is the same exact peeling back of the layers that we did way, way back in season one in Wills therapy sessions with David Krumholtz (which themselves were pale imitations of the scenes between Martin Sheen and Adam Arkin on the West Wing). There’s no new information here, and it all plays as a bit of a stall to give Jeff Daniels something to do while the actual plot moves forward without him.
Lucas Pruits’ TMZ-ification of ACN continues unabated, with poor, doomed Charlie Skinner acting as the surprising enforcer for Pruits’ will.
Charlie was acting so out of character in this episode that even if I didn’t suspect his days were numbered, this would have been a pretty good tip-off. After a brief, quiet admission last week that he didn’t have the energy to fight any more battles against owners, and his declaration that Pruit is his enemy now, Charlie has now done a 180 and acts to defends Pruits choices and force Don and Mac to do stories in conflict with their own morals. Then later, when that shit goes pear shaped, he does another 180 and turns on Pruit. And then he does one last 180, hits his head on a desk and dies.
(spoiler alert)
All this wrangling leads to the highlight and the lowlight of this crazily uneven episode.
The lowlight, shockingly enough, wasn’t the misadventures of Jim and Maggie as they try to catch Edward Snowden and finally admit that they’re idiots–I mean, in love. I mean, that was annoying, sure, but… well, but nothing. It was just annoying, and I don’t really feel the need to talk about it any further.
Oh, fuck me, yes I do.
It’s not just that the shows idea of a grand romantic gesture is to have a guy NOT call the woman to whom he was a complete dick. It’s not just the fact that when Maggie points out all the ways that Jim behaved like a dick last season, he doesn’t have a rebuttal. And it’s not just the fact that after all the work they did to make Maggie a decent character, they took less than five minutes to walk her back to the Flighty Girl Who Roots Against Her Best Interests At Every Turn (And that ‘flighty’ part is not some kind of airplane related wordplay).
No, in the end, it’s the fact that a professional news organization can’t tell the difference between Havana, Spain and Havana, Cuba that gets to me most.
Is Old Media the underappreciated Saviors of Modern Journalism or are they incompetent boobs? Because trying to have it both ways is just plain annoying.
But I digress…
In point of fact, the worst scene is where Sloan Sabbith eviscerates a co-worker on live television.
It’s kind of a lousy feeling when you completely agree with someone but the way they present their argument is so shrill and overbearing that it’s actively embarrassing. And we’ll have to wait until next week to see whether or not that winds up being my epitaph for the show in general, but for now it’s how I felt watching a strangely checked out Olivia Munn pummel an unsuspecting tech nerd.
Are stalker apps a bad thing? Hell yes, of course they are! Was Bree kind of a tool? You bet! But the way they had Sabbith ambushed him on the air like that is implausible, unprofessional, and frankly, just as mean as the internet reporting Sorkin is rallying against in the first place. The show wants us to think Sloan is being a hero that’s standing up to corporate and for the common good, and it just doesn’t track. In reality, she’s just being a bully. And once upon a time, this show had a problem with bullies…
We’ll get to the tragic results of her little act of defiance in just a moment, but let’s take a look at the other plot, the one that gets my vote for best plot of the episode, best of the season, and very possibly some of the best work the show has ever done.
Coerced by Charlie, Don travels to a college campus to try and convince Mary, a woman who has started a website that publicly outs rapists, to appear on air with the man accused of raping her. Don has misgivings about the site, and about putting her on the same stage as her accused attacker, and tries to convince her not to go ahead with it.
This all leads to a riveting (and timely) debate where Don tries to lay down an ethical and moral argument that sounds increasingly puny and meaningless when compared to the horror she’s been through. She wants to go on TV, she wants the world to put a face to her trauma. She wants to fight. She doesn’t want to be just another victim, and none of Don’s well-meaning but biased and uninformed platitudes are going to sway her at all.
In one of those quirks of fate, this episode comes on the heels of the Rolling Stone UVA rape story controversy, which is as potent a real-world analogue to some of the things Aaron Sorkin is talking about in journalism as can be imagined.
Don goes through the elaborate method in which he tracked down the heretofore anonymous Mary (Sarah Sutherland, outstanding), and it’s another thematic jab at New Media versus Old (Don did some old fashioned detective work; Bree has an app for that.) And of course, all this is fascinating in the context of the aforementioned Rolling Stone controversy, which has been declaimed in certain circles as a failure of Old Media to perform their due diligence.
But from a personal standpoint, there’s something else going on under the surface here, yet another quirk of timing. During any other stretch of time, I’m imagining that this would be an ambiguous debate with no clear winner (though I’m guessing Sorkin detractors might see it somewhat differently…) But in a week where we’ve seen our institutions fail us over and over, it’s a little hard to see where Don’s coming from when he goes on about having to place faith in our legal system, and about people being innocent until proven guilty.
Well, yes, Don; But first, they have to go to trial…
In the end, Don takes away the agency of Mary, claiming to Charlie that he couldn’t track her down, which is both a pretty damning indictment of Dons’ Hero Complex and also one of the things that results in our Mister Skinner literally dropping dead.
Look, this is about as manipulative as television (Sorry, I mean HBO) gets. The moment he pauses at that desk, you know exactly what’s going to happen. And the mournful chorus that provides the episodes title playing over Charlie’s final moments is just one of the cheapest things ever.
And yet, I am affected. Because I loved that character, and I loved that performance. And even though this is the next to last hour of The Newsroom that will ever exist, and by that logic everyone else may as well be dead next week, too… even though I know just how thoroughly I’m being played… I’m still pouring one out for my man.
RIP, Charlie Skinner, you magnificent bastard. Now that you’re dead, I am significantly less interested in finding out how this all ends.
NEXT WEEK: We find out what kind of day it’s been…
