NOEL

Josh speaks to a psychiatrist about the events of the last three weeks: Toby hired musicians for the foyer, an Air Force pilot disobeyed orders, Yo-Yo Ma performed at the White House, and Josh managed to cut his hand quite badly. (c/o IMDb)

This was the episode that turned it all around for me.

More than anything else, I missed tension from The West Wing. I could not make myself care about whether or not Toby gets a bold new education initiative in the President’s speech. I tried to care about CJ unwittingly revealing a grand jury’s empanelling, but the outcome was kept on tenterhooks so long that everything dissipated. And I can’t give a good god damn about a stamp.

But in “Noel,” we have a protagonist, Josh, in denial. He’s meeting with a psychiatrist: Dr. Stanley Keyworth, ably played by Adam Arkin. He tries to play the shrink off with the same bluff brilliance that he uses on his coworkers, but Stanley isn’t buying it. He tries joking, equivocating, overwhelming his listeners with data – anything to avoid the truth. And behind it all is an incident: severe enough to call in a psychiatrist for the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, severe enough that Josh will do anything to avoid reliving it.

Not only does this episode have tension, the director (Thomas Schlamme) builds it with such art. We get the casual reveal of unforeseen but damning details: “How’d you cut your hand? You’re not talking to the paperboy either, Josh.” We get to see Josh gradually unravel in the recap of the last three weeks. We get sepia-toned flashbacks to Josh breaking the glass, flashbacks of scenes that may or may not have happened.

It’s a brilliant construction of suspense, all the more amazing because no one has a gun, or a bomb, or even much of a threat. Yes, Josh may lose his job if Stanley diagnoses him as mad, ma-a-ad, but that’s barely touched on. What’s at risk is Josh’s image of himself. The blows to our self-image scar deeper than any other horror. We think we’re great parents, only for our children to scream how much they’re scared of us. We think we’re hard workers, only to overhear our superiors gossiping about our performance. We think we’re professionals, capable of handling great responsibility, only for our boss to tell us that we have to meet with a shrink.

As a standalone episode, it would work perfectly. But it works even better because we’re invested in Josh as a character. We know he’s smart. We know that, when he’s on, he can come up with inspired solutions. We’re fighting for him not to be broken.

The incident that touches Josh off – and it may not be just the one thing – is an F-16 pilot who goes rogue in New Mexico. Josh is assigned to dig into the pilot’s personnel file and uncover why the pilot might have broken formation. He finds that the pilot had to eject over Bosnia and suffered some injuries in the line of duty. He also finds that he and the pilot have the same birthday. Josh repeats this fact to Donna and Sam, but it doesn’t make much impression on either of them. It doesn’t make much impression on us, either, until three weeks later when Josh is in the Oval Office, screaming at the President to listen to him.

Josh never thought he was hurt, following the shooting, but he never gave much thought to the subject until now. Now, confronted with a man with the same birthday, serving the same government, he wonders what it’s like to be so broken up by a war wound that you’d want to kill yourself. He wonders about it so long and hard that it drives him to distraction. And he can’t sit through a Yo-Yo Ma recital without being reminded of sirens.

The B plot to “Noel,” and we only see it in glimpses, is about a woman who starts screaming during a White House tour. C.J. is inspired to investigate the woman. She discovers that the woman’s father owned a painting that was taken from him by the Nazis during the occupation of France, a painting that, through a complex chain of transactions, now hangs outside the Blue Room of the White House. The old woman saw a painting that she hadn’t seen since her childhood, a painting that reminded her of a lost father and fleeing from fascists, and screamed. She spoke out and she was rewarded.

“Noel” is about repressing pain and reliving it. Rebecca Hausmann forgets about the trauma of her childhood for sixty years, until a chance encounter in the White House brings it screaming back. An F-16 pilot pretends he’s recovered from his crash in Bosnia, until something triggers a flashback and he can’t handle being in the air anymore. And Josh pretends he’s recovered from the shooting – for all he knows, he is recovered – until he’s forced to confront the notion of pain itself. Suddenly he has an obstacle that he can’t reason, delegate or quip around. Suddenly he has to be honest.

“Noel” was the most artful episode of The West Wing I had seen up to that point. Can Sorkin keep it up?