I’m making my way through the West Wing, and have just started Season 4.
The problem is that I’m already forgetting certain details.
Two quick questions:
As much as I love the West Wing, and Sorkin in general, he was infamous for ditching characters without explanation.
Their expression for where Mandy went was “Mandyville.”
Meaning she was simply written out of the story arcs as if she’d never been there.
Having read through the episode summaries for the five episodes Lisa Edelstein appeared in, it looks like after Sam & Josh try to get her to cough up her Republican client list in In Excelsius Deo, she never returns, except as a punchline.
Yeah, Mandy was just dropped with no explanation. Laurie (Sam’s callgirl), I don’t believe was seen after Josh and Sam lean on her. Presumably she got a job anyway as Bartlett said he was going to tell people at the Justice Department to make sure she did.
No, Bartlet said that if she passed the bar exam, she would be admitted to the bar. Beyond that, he didn’t promise her anything. I briefly wondered if she was the lawyer wife Sam had acquired by the final few episodes, but I guess that’s pretty unlikely.
I would just like to point out, for no reason, that in the last 3 years I have watched all 7 seasons of West Wing all the way through.
Twice.
Me too. I watch them on my iPhone while I’m wiling away the hour on the elliptical at the gym.
Me, three, though more like 3 and a half years. I watched them all again in the lead up to the finale, since I had kind of stopped watching it all the time after Sorkin stopped writing it, and then I watched them all last summer.
I’ve been going through the DVDs at zip.ca on and off. Just got up to the first disc of S5, so no more Sorkin. Still kinda like it though. It seems to me that it isn’t just random other writers off the street who are continuing the show, but Sorkin’s assistant writers - younger people who were frustrated with not getting enough chances to shine while the Big Man was around, and who have some of their own ideas they want to try out, but who’ve learned a lot from being around him and seeing/hearing his process. 
Of course, I’ve only seen 4 eps of S5 so far…
Heh. Bravo shows 2 episodes of The West Wing every weekday morning, in order, and then they occasionally have marathons. Bravo gets to the end of the series on a Friday, and then starts right up again with the pilot on the following Monday.
I have TiVo. This is a BAD combination.
I’ve seen the entire series at least 3 times in the last 3-4 years, I would guess. But I finally broke the cycle the last time the series ended, and I now have lots more time to do other things. But every now and then I’ll happen to turn on the TV during the TWW airings, and it takes a LOT of willpower not to watch “just this one episode.” It’s a slippery slope, I tells ya.
There are a lot of great clips of TWW on YouTube, which is a slippery slope, as well. I’ve been known to lose entire afternoons to that.
As it happens, I just watched “He Shall, From Time to Time…” on a library DVD earlier this week. Good stuff. I realized I’d never seen it before in its entirety - I must’ve missed the first half-hour or so when it first aired (it’s the one where Bartlet’s MS is first revealed, after he collapses just a few days before the State of the Union Address), and never caught up with it again.
In that episode, Mandy asks Sam for help in getting Josh and Toby to agree to let her work freelance on the reelection campaign of a moderate GOP congressman. Sam eventually chews her out and insists she not help the opposition. I always assumed that she nevertheless decided to leave, and that they were resentful of her and just sort of agreed by consensus never to talk about her again.
People come and go from the White House staff all the time, sometimes on short notice (for good reasons and bad), and aren’t necessarily mentioned often thereafter by their former colleagues. I don’t think Sorkin’s approach to it was unrealistic.
The departure of Mandy could be explained away in rational terms, but you have to remember that she was there in the season one finale when shots were fired and everybody panicked, and then in the season 2 premier (which takes place literally seconds later) she is never mentioned, shown, asked about, or eluded to.
It is as if when season 2 picks up, we have switched quantum paths and are now in a parallel universe where Mandy never existed. Or, if you don’t agree with the Multiple Worlds theory in quantum mechanics, you could say that shooting the president with a pistol from a third story window created a cosmic rift in space/time that reached backwards, spiraled outwards, and removed Mandy from a career in politics to justify some minute improbability that had been allowed to transpire.
I’m fine with that, because the character seemed weak and annoying. I think she was brought on to be a foil and future love interest for Josh, but Donna filled both roles rather well, so Mandy’s place in the universe was redundant.
IIRC, it was discovered that Mandy had written an opposition memo when she was working for Bartlet’s opponent, and it was leaked in an inopportune moment. There’s a scene where it’s pretty blatant she’s being excluded from a meeting, and CJ hints that’s why.
As for why the actress was dropped, I don’t know, unless they figured the Josh/Donna dynamic was more interesting than the Josh/Mandy dynamic.
Without even coming to a sudden arboreal stop first?
:D:D:D
Maybe she became a travelling prostitute.
On the road to Mandy-lay, and all that.
And we have a clear winnah here!
No, no, you’re confused. Laurie was the prostitute. That was question #2.