Agreed. I was rolling my eyes at the constant Daniel Craig references, but I thought I could overlook that until Marcia Gay Harden strolled in right on (contrived) cue, and then the badness snowballed. And the smash cut to the credits? Awful. I usually like that sort of thing, but it was such a cheesy, unearned way to punctuate the episode.
Too bad that probably the best episode of the series so far completely fell apart in the very last scene.
ETA: Also, since when does Leona like the News Night crew? She’s treated them with nothing but utter contempt up until this point. Now she’s bellowing about their greatness after they royally fucked up? Huh?
We haven’t caught up to the part where she cut her hair yet, if I understand what you’re asking. The timeline has been an absolute mess this season. I get what they’re doing, but for a show that can be hard to follow, WRT the dialogue and all the politics (but they do do a good job of explaining the TV jargon), they don’t need to mess with the timeline as well, at least not across the entire season.
Ya know, I wonder if that’s the real reason they cut and dyed her hair. Sure, they can attach some symbolism to it, but it’s the best way to give the viewers a sense of time.
The problem is that this episode resolved the two timelines into one. So during that final scene between Will, Charlie and, Leona, if the camera panned out of that room to focus on Maggie she would have red hair. Which is sloppy storytelling.
EDIT: When the lawyer burst in and said don’t fire them, that implies that the lawyer had already interviewed them in order to come to that recommendation.
And they said it was 5 days of interviews, so during that last scene Maggie’s hair had been red for at least 5 days.
EDIT 2: Actually, conceivably the two timelines may not be merged yet. Next episode could start with Charlie first getting the news about the lawsuit and then hearing that a lawyer would be coming to the news room to interview all parties involved. Then Maggie dyes her hair, and then we cut back to “present,” resuming after Leona’s drunken speech.
I totally disagree, in fact I wish the show was more like those last 5 minutes more often, they were over the top silly fun with Sorkin (and Fonda) knowing, for a little bit, exactly what the show is and not taking themselves quite so seriously. It’s not like the rest of the episode wasn’t silly, it just pretended it wasn’t. The rest of the episode before it featured things like (cue movie trailer voice over guy)
5 minutes of people dramatically watching Television,
a CIA operative concocting phony government conspiracies to fuck with the lives of dozens of strangers instead of just killing a guy he is pissed at, or better yet…doing nothing
trained reporters and litigators being so stupid that they don’t know the difference between OBVIOUSLY leading questions and good questions until the critical moment.
I could go on. It did the job but it doesn’t hang together all that well.
The Leona drunk stuff was frikken amazing though. I would pay to watch a show with just her, Charlie and Slone hanging out at a coffee shop all day. Maybe Don can pop in for a few guest spots there too.
I couldn’t care less for the hair storyline. I think this was a good episode but it could have been stretched to 2 episodes. A rise, then a fall. Also, the episode unravelled after the “reveals”. The unravellings were all pretty crap except for the shot clock revelation.
Sam’s source: Crap. And that slap was just ridiculous.
TBI: Crap. Memory loss transformed into complete, detailed, false memories with such conviction that he’s willing to testify about a war crime that implicates himself? It’s less TBI and more schizophrenia.
Just playing along: Crap. Play along to a point, but to stand by this massive story with court martial implications? A couple bridges too far.
And Will’s source. Did he even have a source, or was he just pulling things out of his ass just to prop up Sam?
I also figure that when Jim doesn’t like a story he would have been more proactive in trying to poke holes in it. I also don’t know why he went from being fine with Jerry to being disdainful. I also don’t understand the DC inferiority complex. Also, isn’t it kind of a weak case for wrongful termination?
It’s good episode in that it’s a great premise and it built up to an exciting climax. The resolution and fallout was ill thought out and rushed.
Journalistic ethics question: Any responsibility to continue protecting the Navy guys identity once you learn he intentionally fed you a false confirmation?
Any reason to go on the air and say “we had doubts about the story but So-and-So at the Department of the Navy leaked to us a faked manifest and confirmed the story was accurate…?”
And what the hell is up with nobody, absolutely nobody, challenging a producer on a story he’s obviously using for political points? It’s painfully obvious he’s not interested in actually proving the story true or not, he’s angry and offended about what he sees as America’s fall from the high ground and only wants to use the story to make some other point. At this point, Jerry doesn’t even care whether the Genoa story is true, he only wants to use it to make some other political point.
Mac should be all over that and remove him from the story entirely, and she doesn’t. Journalistic integrity, indeed.
But The Social Network made a BOATLOAD of money! And that was structured by time shifts between the action, and a deposition about the action! So using the exact same structure here is critic-proof!
I tell you it is! So stop criticizing!
hyperventilates
I think you’re right about that ‘real reason.’ I’d guess that the Hair is 99% about signposting the time (like George Smiley’s glasses in the recent movie version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,) and 1% tacked-on “characterization” for Maggie.
I mean, honestly. How does angst over the death of a little boy (a death for which Maggie bears no responsibility at all) lead to what’s essentially self-mutilation (the hacking-off of one’s hair)…? It doesn’t make a lick of sense, psychologically.
Can someone remind me what was the story Maggie was chasing in Uganda? Because, as I think was pointed out upthread, the Operation Genoa story was huge and it seems odd that no one traveled to do any investigation firsthand. (Admittedly, this would have required someone to travel to a remote and unsafe region of Afghanistan but it’s a big story.)
Maggie’s “Africa story” confuses me also. She said she wanted to be the African authority in the office but it seemed like she was only there to cover a fluff piece about soldiers building an orphanage. No Koni coverage, no Egypt coverage, no Libya coverage.
The Genoa story on the other hand is massive - one of the biggest news stories in US history, if it was true. Come to think of it, if it was just white phosphorus, there would be many survivors? Tests to see if serin was used? So many examples of “institutional failure” to be found. I might be siding with Dantana on this one…
That whole idea is pretty sloppy. If there were several institutional failures, and Jerry Dantana also faked the interview video and lied about it, why is he suddenly off the hook from getting fired for something so egregious?
Would they have aired the interview had they known what the general actually said? I don’t think so.
And even if the Operation Genoa story actually occurred, Jerry Dantana would still be worthy of firing. (BTW, am I the only one who expected that the lawsuit was going to be a libel claim? I think they surprised us with the idea that it’s a wrongful termination claim.)
I’m very familiar with the issue. But when you used (coined?) the term ‘rathered’ it had the connotation that Dan Rather was somehow screwed. I’m agree that Dan probably wasn’t in on the falsification, but it led him to where he certainly where he wanted to go. And I’ve never read any plausible conjecture that Rather was somehow set up by the right.
I was taken aback that anyone was trying to make poor old Dan the aggrieved party in this. He was trying hard to bring down Bush with forged documents and Dan was bitten in the butt. Impossible to make him sympathetic as you were trying to do.