Disturbing WestWing TV Show
This past Sunday's The West Wing has been troubling me since I watched it.
Spoilers ahead, run away, run away.
I can't see how the writers are going to rescue Toby in this storyline. He's in big trouble. I have a theory about daytime soaps, that there is nothing you can do that is unforgivable. But that's a different genre, TWW needs to be more real.
How can Toby survive this?
I went back and watched the beginning of the season premiere. Where we saw a flash-forward of the opening of the Bartlett Presidential Library, three years in the future, and the old staffers gather for the festivities. Toby is there. He is greeted cordially, without reserve, by the former President. Reference is made to him now being established at Columbia University.
How does he get from here to there?
One thought I've had is that Toby didn't really reveal "classified" info, cause he didn't hear about the military space shuttle from any official source. He was teased about it by his brother, and CJ basically confirmed it to him in a conversation we saw a few eps ago.
So CJ is in some trouble for revealing it to Toby, even if he had never passed it on to the NYT.
But if Toby didn't really know about the shuttle, then why did the NYT use him as a source? Is it possible that Toby wasn't really the source? That Toby only thinks he was the source? And that Brock actually wrote the story based on info from someone else? Will Brock now publicly say that it wasn't Toby?
That would mean that Toby has trashed himself for nothing. Even if Brock had another source, Toby did reveal info which he believed to be classified. So there will be consequences anyway.
I think it's not a coincidence that Toby's "debriefing" by the White House Council was interrupted by Toby's lawyer just as Toby was being asked how he knew about the Shuttle. Is the Council assuming that Toby knew this officially? But he only knew it from other sources? Is that the loophole that will save Toby from jail?
My guess is that, when all is said and done, Toby gets off on the technicality that he didn't actually possess classified info. But in any event, how can Toby continue to be a part of the Show's storylines?
Sad.
Posted by jackhodgson at October 27, 2005 10:53 AM