Written by Deborah Cahn
Directed by Christopher Misiano
“Kate Harper needs you.”
“She doesn’t know I’m here.”
“Imagine her delight when she discovered that you WERE!”
After a network-enforced sweeps break, The West Wing returns with an archetypal episode that showcases all of it’s strengths…and makes you feel as if its never been away.
Undecideds opens with blazing white light, and it’s a colour metaphor that carries on throughout the episode. The most pointed example is during the church service in the final act — just look at those colours. The stain-glass rainbow the director casts over the congregation is poetic, and it leaves open a multitude of unspoken metaphors and symbols in an episode about conflicting power bases, conflicting archetypes, and conflicting ethnic backgrounds.
The entire story is filled with white heat: rage at the killing of a young boy; friction between Latino-Americans and African-Americans; frayed nerves in the Santos campaign; frayed patience in the White House. This is amplified by the structure of the plot, as The West Wing gives us a taste of what it does better than other television shows: juggle the painfully serious and the ridiculously absurd in a single, cohesive episode that manages to generate its own heat. The wedding subplot is a riot, and manages to punctuate the rising tensions of the episode in just the right ways.
And did I mention those gorgeous, thunderous scenes between Toby and Josh, where one man’s vision of what type of person SHOULD be President is crystalized in the most biting, hurtful of ways? Watching that pours a bucket of ice-cold water down the spine of a red hot story.
Finally, there’s the white heat of Santos’ speech to the African-American congregation, following a disastrous visit to the family of the slain boy. There is so much riding on this moment, so much worry and adrenaline…and the moment offers up its saviour. Ever since his breakout performance during The Debate, Jimmy Smits has defined his character as a man of overwhelming passion — the beating, troubled, stoic, open heart of a nation. He proves it here, in a moment worthy of Dr. King himself, offering no easy solutions…but reminding the audience that compassion and the struggle for a hopeful future continue to bind people together. It’s the mission statement of the series in microcosm: the struggle is always worth it.
The episode ends with Santos and his wife walking out into another moment of white heat…cleansing, spiritual, soulful heat. I couldn’t think of a more fitting end to this fine episode.
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