You're listening to The West Wing Weekly. I'm Rishi Keish here way.

And I'm Joshua Molina.

Today we're talking about season 2, episode 3 of The West Wing. It's called The Midterms.

It first aired on October 18th, 2000. It was written by Aaron Sorkin, and it was directed by the Fabulous, by the Fabulous Alex Graves.

He's Fabulous. Aaron's Fabulous too. I should say. I enjoy his work.

For this episode, I'm going to use TV Guide Synopsis. I discovered TV Guide has a synopsis and it seems pretty good.

Here we go.

In the aftermath of the shooting, the administration is polling at 81%.

But those numbers are soft, Sam Cotchens, and no one disagrees.

Moreover, they probably won't hold up for the midterm elections in 12 weeks.

Still, Toby wants to use this honeymoon as leverage for a domestic terrorism initiative.

In fact, he's obsessed with it. The president also seems obsessed with thwarting an old foe who's running for a school board seat in New Hampshire.

Meanwhile, Sam enlists an old law school classmate to run for an open house seat.

That sounds like a good episode.

And it synopsis TV Guide.

Yes. And I would say with one notable exception, I really, really like this episode.

There's one scene that I didn't particularly dig. We'll get to that later.

But I actually really like this episode.

It first aired a little bit less than a year before 9-11 and about a year and a week before the

passing of the Patriot Act. And to me, I feel like Toby's obsession or his focus on pursuing

these extremist groups, these hate groups, possibly without the aid of the constitution,

that to me really foreshadowed the passing of the Patriot Act so soon after 9-11.

...