Word: sorkin
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...class decamps to the basement; the nervous kids only want to ask Josh questions about terrorism. And from here on out, for the bulk of the episode, class is in session for Professor Sorkin, who doesn't need to bother even with the scanty dramatic figleaves he usually knits together in order to deliver himself of soliloquys through his characters. Here, the kids just serve up one setup question after another - "Why are they trying to kill us?" "What do we do now?" - that allows for a series of well-meaning, well-expressed, but by now well-worn disquisitions...
...After a while, the real fun of the show becomes seeing what unnatural questions Sorkin will plant in the student's mouth so as to free, Open-Sesame-like, another imprisoned piece of canned wisdom from the staff members. "What was the first act of terrorism?" one student asks - and look! Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff) happens to have on the tip of his tongue an anecdote about the Muslim assassins of the 11th century. A girl asks Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe), "What do you call a society that has to just live every day with the idea that the pizza...
...point Sorkin also indulges his love of cribbing speeches from the Internet. You might recall the episode in which President Bartlet tells off a Dr. Laura figure who's been preaching that the Bible calls homosexuality an abomination, reeling off a list of petty misdemeanors that some passages of the Bible advocate punishing with death; the rant cam pretty much verbatim from a widely circulated anti-Laura e-mail. In "Isaac and Ishmael," Toby explains that the people of Afghanistan are not to be blamed for the excesses of the Taliban. The Taliban, he says, are like the Nazis, ordinary...
...classroom setup the product of an understandable rush job? Maybe. Was it Sorkin subordinating the needs of drama to get out a message? Sure, but post-disaster charitable feelings aside, it's not as though he's never done that before. In the end, you have to wonder whether it ever occurred to Sorkin that it might be the slightest bit insulting to essentially represent the home audience, within the story, as schoolchildren, who need to be gratefully taught his lessons...
...victims. The second is the other running storyline, in which the chief of staff (John Spencer) interrogates an Arab-American staffer wrongly accused of being a terrorist mole (Ajay Naidu, whom you might remember from "Office Space"), which occasionally achieves a nuance and unresolved ambiguity that Mr. Sorkin's Civics 101 doesn...