REVIEW: The Newsroom, S2, E4: Unintended Consequences

“It happened.”

Our story opens tonight with Maggie in a different hairdo– a short, pixie-esque and bright red ‘do — being deposed by lawyers in a wrongful termination suit. Whose termination, the circumstances? We don’t know, but we know it revolves around an interview with a Polish general and two words: “It happened.”

We’re led from the beginning to believe this may have something to do with the investigation into “Genoa” from the last two episodes, as Neil gets a tip from his friend in Occupy Wall St about a report on an incident of US troops using chemical weapons in Pakistan. Unfortunately, she then goes on the air in an interview with Will McAvoy and he just absolutely. destroys. her. So she is unwilling to help Neil anymore (natch.) Maggie and Gary take off to Africa, Jim continues in New Hampshire with the Romney campaign.

This all happens in the first 10 minutes, so this is barely spoiler territory. And we’ve been building up to a lot of this, especially the takedown of OWS. Which is absolutely beautiful. More on that later.

This episode, unlike many in a while, was written by Sorkin himself. And there is absolutely nothing like it. No one writes smug and anachronistic pop culture references like he does. And none blends humor and serious issues with an immediate right turn into heavy, heavy drama. Which is exactly what happens with 10 minutes left. And we find out exactly what happened in Africa that HR is so worried about.

Oh, and some stuff happens with Jim on the campaign trail, partially centering around the disclosure about the name of Rick Perry’s family ranch and its racist name. Oh, and Jim uses some background on Romney’s faith to. . . well, just watch. It’s good.

This writing is brilliant, and more importantly, it’s honest. As an example, let me move into mild spoiler territory: Will McAvoy cops to using OWS as a punching bag to give him credence as a “moderate.” But punch at that punching bag he does, especially when he confounds their representative by asking her, very directly, if having a leaderless movement is a good idea. When she complains that he is not taking their movement seriously, he deals them a death blow by saying that, no, they are the ones not taking it seriously.

And this is, and always has been, the problem with OWS. In their attempts to be everything to everyone, they end up being nothing to nobody. To use the parlance of the professional liberal activism of my day job, there is no “theory of change”– they  want to talk about things but they don’t have any idea how to change anything. Which is why they were doomed to fail unless they actually elected some leaders and started working to get these people elected as dog catchers, city council, county zoning boards, Congress. Because, indeed, they were not taking it seriously enough.

The story not being told is the good that came out of OWS, but that will have to wait for a different episode and a different article.

But this is not only the best episode of the season so far, but also among the best episodes of the show. I’m a little sick of this Genoa subplot, because we already know they won’t break the story (since it takes place in our world, and disclosure of something like this would probably take down the Obama Presidency), but I’m loving basically everything else.