Ten years later though, Will sits in his apartment, or during breaks at the anchor’s desk, Googling the phrase, “Will McAvoy hate.” He scrolls through the websites apparently oblivious to the idea that anyone obsessed enough to go to the trouble of building a website called “F**k Will McAvoy” is probably a person whose affection he does not want, but it seems that maybe Will is getting lost between his desire to be a good anchor and his desire to make a people like him. Is it perhaps a rift that the coming Genoa controversy may easily exploit?
Speaking of Genoa, we learn a bit more about it, although it took a lot of quick cuts of temporary senior producer Jerry Datana talking on the phone to get there. Apparently, Genoa was a rescue operation where after two Americans were recovered from Taliban insurgents in Pakistan, the military used poison gas on the enemy, which would make it a war crime. Jerry finds a guy who was part of the mission at episode’s end and brings it to Mackenzie. The question is how do they now convince Will it’s a story because he was the one guy celebrating about the killing Anwar al-Aulaqi, which also happened in this episode.
As for Neal, he continues to chase Occupy Wall Street to the derision of his colleagues with Mackenzie calling it “Fluff and Fold Wall Street” at one point, and laughing along with one of Anonymous’ early videos. Neal believes in the cause though, and when Shelly has him come down to Wall Street on his lunch hour to see the latest demonstration, Neal gets arrested as he films some of the police’s more, ahem, aggressive tactics. Interesting factoid, apparently, there’s an 1845 law on the books in New York that says groups of people can’t wear masks in public.
But sadly, the episode can’t wrap without one last trek down relationship row. Maggie comes home, and yup, Lisa’s seen the video. Erica not only never took down the video, but she blogged about her encounter with Maggie and Sloan (the latter she found rather rude). Lisa accuses Maggie of “parking” Jim with her until Maggie was done with Don, which, yeah, is pretty much what happened. Lisa sets forth that from here on out, she and Maggie are merely roommates in a contractual sense, before e-mailing a link of the video to Jim as an ad hoc break-up note. Maggie, now wanting to get out of town herself, pitches a story in Kampala, Uganda, which Mackenzie approves on the basis that Maggie seems to have done her research and that the area in question is not dangerous. But of course we saw hints last week that this is not going to be the case…
As for general observations about the episode, can we have one week where Mackenzie doesn’t do something out of the I Love Lucy playbook? She throws a drink in Will’s lap when he refuses to support her desire to dig deeper into U.S. policy on drone strikes. And why were Elliot and Don up in arms about Charlie wanting to have Twitter reactions scrolling across the bottom of the screen during their show, doesn’t like half of TV news do that anyway? Anyway, Elliot does get the quote of the night saying that home renovations are like Vietnam, “you can’t get out.” To which anyone who’s renovated can surely attest.
Tell us, what did you think of this week’s episode of The Newsroom? Let us know in the comments below!
