The Newsroom Recap: The One Where The Show Actually Gets Great

This is a recap, full of spoilers. 

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As we’re all well aware by now, Aaron Sorkin is never shy about speaking through his characters. All writers do this, to a degree – who, when handed a megaphone, keeps their opinions to themselves? Sorkin has been using his megaphone to play intellectual tug of war over thorny issues and moral quagmires almost his entire career. One of President Bartlet’s favourite sayings was that he liked to surround himself with smart people who disagreed with him; I suspect Sorkin considers himself eminently qualified to be his own voice of shrewd dissent, and irritatingly enough, he pulls it off more often than not. Say what you will about his dialogue being smug, glib, impossibly clever – he can write a fascinating argument with himself.

Part of the reason he’s so good at this is that he finds the validity in the position he doesn’t personally take – or at least, can make it appear intellectually honest, or make it clear why that person is there making that argument in the face of someone we all know is right. (A Few Good Men’s most famous scene is still one of the all-time great film arguments.) Sometimes this leads to characters who are brought in for an episode to be a suit full of evil, reactionary straw; when a position arises naturally from what we know of them after solid character development, it’s enormously satisfying.

That might be the one aspect where this episode still falls short. These characters served the conceit of the show at the expense of consistent development for a little bit too long, and now, in this fifth-to-last episode, many of them crystallise just in time for everything to start falling apart again. If we’d spent two seasons already seeing Neal argue this passionately with Mac for his big stories, Will flailing hilariously in bowls of word salad when he’s worked up, Maggie’s empathy and self-doubt developing into the moral compass and restraint that will make her a good journalist without needing to become hard and ruthless – well, this could have been quite the show.

But ‘Run’ sends an even stronger signal than last week that this season Sorkin intends to play to his strengths: power struggles, bad mistakes, smart people being useless at personal relationships, long discussions about doing what’s right versus what’s easy. It takes place over the course of a single day – another feature of many of the best Sorkin episodes – and the variety of locations, from a single Amtrak car to the AWM boardroom (which, from the looks of that mahogany cronut of a table, doubles as the Evil League Of Evil HQ after dark) keeps the talky, static quality of each individual storyline from dragging it down too much.

Of course, not all the issues being hashed out here are born of leaping off ledges in pursuit of great truths – some of them are the results of profound, inexplicable stupidity. Hallie should clearly be snapped up straight away by a young media outlet where hot takes like “Republicans are big fans of dead eight-year-olds just not from guns #amirite #lel” will beget more hot takes on why she’s the worst which will beget more hot takes about how everyone’s the worst. (I can just picture the interview: “The job before that? Oh, I gave up a face-to-face with a presidential candidate because a puffy-faced boy flopped his hair at me.”)

And you most certainly do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy when chatting slightly above normal speaking volume about what Democrats really think of the President in an Amtrak carriage – in coach, no less! Even Joe Biden knows better than that. (Speaking of Veeps, though, when the nice EPA idiot asked Maggie to speak privately, I did wonder for a second if there was some kind of reverse House Of Cards situation about to go down in the space between the carriages, and started hoping guest star Jimmi Simpson was about to pull Cashew out of his bag.)

Also, I have little to no expertise when it comes to “stocks” or “markets”, but I’m reasonably sure that if your workplace sex friend who’s a genius financial journalist tells you that a particular stock is about to do well, you should maybe consider whether that’s privileged information while you’re counting how many crab legs you’ll be able to buy with the spoils. But it’s an unexpected and yet totally plausible catalyst for Sloan and Don’s delightfully lightweight DTR C-plot, so I’ll allow it.

Olivia Munn continues to be the best thing about this show, from the way she holds Sloan’s WELL THIS IS AWKWARD expression for the entire lift ride, to the way she sells lazy Cool Girl character notes like being homicidally passionate about breakfast carbs and still a size 0, or just, like, not into commitment. When your character can nail a recognisable impression of a character who only just developed a personality, you’re doing good work. (Thomas Sadoski’s frozen, deer-in-the-headlights reaction to Sloan’s “confession” gets an honourable mention, though.)

Meanwhile, Reese’s half-siblings (slash possible cousins?) Jean-Ralphio and Mona Lisa Blair and Randy are the dickus ex machina bearing down on this shortened season. If Leona can’t pull $4 billion from somewhere in the next ten days – well, as an arch Kat Dennings manages to point out through her so-pillowy-they-should-be-illegal lips, you can make more flogging the gear than reading the news into it, so the FBI raid might be the less pressing issue overall.

It’s hard to say whether this can end well for Neal – we all know how the real-life whistleblowers who’ve pissed off the Pentagon are faring. Will’s menu trick is clever, although it’s not quite clear why he encourages Neal to run, except perhaps out of some admiration for that outlaw spirit and Dedication To Truth. And that’s always been Neal’s bag – he’s written as a sort of “pure” journalist in a way many of the others, with their consideration for how the business actually works and their personal reputations, aren’t. Neal started the series as Bigfoot Guy; it’d be nice to see him go out as the guy who helped a doomed network with no credibility left break a truly important story.

The episode proves that this show should always have been asking questions rather than trying to provide all the answers, wondering out loud how to get news right rather than lecturing the IRL news on how to do that. Is it right to do the wrong thing sometimes? Or, to paraphrase Reese Lansing, is it OK to be a douche if you’re on the side of the angels? The answer, according to both Reese and Aaron Sorkin, is apparently yes.

Of course, even in just four more episodes, there’s still plenty of room for things to go pear-shaped for ACN and The Newsroom alike. The truth is one thing; enjoying a Sorkin show is often about whether you can handle the douche.

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The Newsroom airs on Showcase at 7:30pm on Mondays, fast-tracked from the US.

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Caitlin Welsh is a freelance writer who tweets from @caitlin_welsh