30 Days of The West Wing: Day 4 - Your least favourite episode

No Exit

Now, this was hard. There were a couple episodes in Seasons 4 and 6, and the gimmicky episodes like Access and The Debate, that I didn’t really enjoy because this show does set an impossibly high standard for itself. But in the end I went with the episode that annoyed me the most. I found No Exit’s storyline terribly contrived, the characters were caricatures of themselves and the whole thing was just a bit ridiculous. Whilst I was really beginning to love Will in Season 4 and early Season 5, I found him kind of unbearably arrogant during this episode and instead of being shown that Will is a great speechwriter and tactician, we are merely told. The Jed/Charlie/Fiderer segments were mildly amusing and there was an appearance from my favourite character in all the land, Ron Butterfield, but there were more plot holes than you can shake a stick at (i.e. why were they trawling through Debbie’s car when they already determined the source of infection?! anyway…). More than anything else, it was the scenes between C.J. and Donna that annoyed me the most. They’re my two favourite characters so naturally I didn’t want any sort of conflict between them, but it was as though the script writers had promptly forgotten who these characters were. Donna was reduced to a character whose life revolves completely around Josh and C.J. was written as being uncharacteristically callous. Her comments about Donna outgrowing her job were on the nose but there’s no way she would have been so insensitive about Donna’s relationship with Josh, when she must know how much she’s in love with him. And then there was Donna’s bitchy line about C.J. going home to reruns of Letterman - Donna has always been brilliantly sassy but never, ever bitchy. Ugh it was all wrong. Maybe I was overly sensitive when I watched this episode because I’ve only ever seen it once, but I always remember how mad it made me.

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