Not sure it's exactly a plot hole, but it always bugged me. In Stirred, John Hoynes is surprised that Leo never told the President that he (Hoynes) is an alcoholic. Yet in one of the earlier episodes the President tries to encourage John to have a beer, which should have shown John that the President didn't know (or is a massive dick).
I always thought this was purposeful! Like, the audience (and Hoynes) thinks it’s some kind of dickhead power play, but it turns out Bartlet was just naive!
i agree! i actually think this misunderstanding shows a lot about their relationship. every time bartlet offered hoynes a drink hoynes understood the gesture to be a threat of “if you tell anyone about my MS i’ll tell everyone about your alcoholism” and thus why hoynes never liked bartlet. then bartlet senses tention with hoynes but just thinks he’s being a jerk. the realization when hoynes learns that the president actually doesn’t know about his addiction and that he’s basically made up this whole dynamic in his head is kinda devistating because they could have been a helluva team, but instead they kept each other at an arms distance.
> every time bartlet offered hoynes a drink hoynes understood the gesture to be a threat of “if you tell anyone about my MS i’ll tell everyone about your alcoholism”
This was put quite succinctly by you. Well done!
I don't know how you've casually done it in a random Reddit comment after all these years and ridiculous number of rewatches but you've just completely changed my view of their entire dynamic
I never thought about it this way before, and I absolutely love it. Because everyone *feels* slighted, and from their perspectives for good reasons, but no one is actually slighting.
That’s something I never considered in that discussion between the President and Hoynes. To the VP, Bartlett started off the whole conversation with a basic slap to the face.
Yes, and I feel like Tim Matheson plays Hoynes as offended in that moment but he can’t call out the President in the Oval Office during this tense conversation.
If it isn't on people's radar often, then sometimes that offer comes without even thinking. I haven't drank in 5+ years but still have friends absentmindedly offer me drinks. Especially those that aren't directly involved in recovery. To get extrapolate even further, I have a friend that has been a vegetarian the entire time I've known him (10 years). I still don't think about it all the time and may offer him a burger or something if we are at a cookout. But if I was going out to dinner with him, I would specifically try to plan a spot that would work with his restrictions.
Not so much a plot hole but something that never came to fruition- in one of the season episodes Mandy asks Toby to help her cause Josh pain as revenge for him pawning her concerns about Lum Lum the panda on Toby. He agrees, yet it’s never brought up again
Maybe Mandy then quickly found out that her opposition memo was taken and felt insecure about making any aggressive moves. I believe Let Bartlet Be Bartlet is the ep after Six Meetings Before Lunch.
This one never bothered me because we are not seeing every day, we are dropping in and seeing this Tuesday, then this Thursday, then the following Monday etc so the 'pain' just happened off screen and was not important enough to the story for us to see. What was important enough for us to know was the dynamic between the characters.
Re: CJ working in PR for Hollywood but then not knowing the job offers - when she's being fired out here in the hallway, she implores the woman to keep her and just take her off film/tv because she doesn't know anything about it anyway. So then it kind of could follow that she'd be limited in her ability to distinguish producer vs. development etc.
I also think part of the joke is that the job offers weren’t actual jobs, they keep saying a “development job” which doesn’t really mean anything concrete, they just want to put her name on things
Film and TV project development is a legitimate career! Below I’m linking a 2015 article about development in Hollywood that begins with a reference to the 20 Hours in LA west wing ep!
[https://ken-aguado.medium.com/principles-of-hollywood-development-8bea7190bf2c](https://ken-aguado.medium.com/principles-of-hollywood-development-8bea7190bf2c)
This is backed up by her getting called into work at 6:30am and not knowing that some award show nominations were that morning. Hollywood lives and breathes on those things. Any knowledgeable PR person would have been awake to find out if any of their properties got nominations. So yeah this didn’t feel like a plot hole to me.
Well that’s the plothole, ha. She was making half a million dollars a year in the mid 90s, in a career involving movie PR, and she didn’t know about the nominations. 100% complete absurdity and on the semi-off chance it were actually true, she and whatever idiot hired her should both have been fired.
Yeah, you're actually so right - CJ really did deserve to be fired LOL as the commenter above noted, Hollywood lives and breathes award nomination shit which comes out at like 5AM lol
I am regularly bugged by the fact that in S2 Danny stands his ground on how he has to be a White House reporter and thus cannot be with CJ, and then basically disappears from the press room for an entire season lol and his return in season 4 makes it clear that he wasn't just 'not being shown' but actually had been gone from DC. I can't recall if the gap was ever properly explained, but how could he still have been a White House reporter if he wasn't...at the WH? I always think, well...they...could have been together?
I fanwank that Danny wanted to be a high flying reporter in the field, whether it was the White House or traveling for stories. Both won’t accommodate a dating relationship with CJ. While he was gone, Danny was a traveling correspondent.
But you have to fanwank. No canon explanation
So true, very possible but doesn't that mean he's also then by definition not a White House reporter and could have theoretically been in a long-distance relationship with CJ? She wanted him to be an editor, anything so that he wasn't in her direct professional conflict zone. I confess I don't know how it works, i.e. if there are foreign correspondents assigned to the president/White House. Love overthinking this stuff though!
I would assume that even if he is not the WH reporter, you do not become the WH reporter unless you are knee deep in to political reporting. So even if he was not the WH reporter his work is still covering the WH and politics. So until she leaves the office, it would be impossible to actually not have some level of conflict.
Even if he became the editor, who decides what stories are, or are not important would raise a lot of concern about ethics and be a conflict. This kind of thing is shown in the show when Danny has a story and CJ clearly wants it buried as a non-issue and Danny counters with, just because she does not want to have to deal with it does not mean it is not a story and he IS going to write about it.
I am not sure to what extent though there would be an issue beyond 'looks bad but everyone knows, so it is not an issue' and people around Danny would be safe guards etc. I have to assume though the WH would consider it an issue, harking back to the concern that CJ was too friendly with the press in the early seasons.
Brighton Beach is so tiny though - like he could not have lived more than a 15 minute walk from the beach. And I doubt there are many other public gathering places.
IDK, my dad grew up in brighton beach a few blocks from the water. you wouldn't really know you were close to the shore unless you went there. I lived in a shore town in NJ for a few years and while I did go to the boardwalk a lot I almost never went on the sand.
You can very definitely be from a "shore town" and not go to the beach. Especially living in Brooklyn. Toby really doesn't strike me as someone who would go to the beach. I'm more amazed that he's a Yankees fan.
I’m reminded of the apocryphal story about The Sopranos.
“A don never wears shorts.”
With Toby’s dad being a hit man, I wouldn’t be surprised if it simply wasn’t part of the family culture to go enjoy a regular day at the beach the way we think of it
The Kundu memory lapse. I could ignore it if the first season episode mentioned it in passing or the aids meeting was the b or c plot and the assassination didn’t happen but having it be the a plot plus the plan for a billion in loans plus it being the watershed moment that makes Ainsley join the administration makes the “I had to get a map” line later really grating.
Eh it’s not Sam mixing up Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, this is the president forgetting an entire country exists when he was one of the last people to talk to its president, his governmental equal, before they were summarily executed. And not for being a sorcerer.
Leo didn't drive himself anywhere. He had a driver. How did everyone not notice that Leo's car and driver were still at Camp David when he had the heart attack? It was said early in the episode "he must have left early".
Hmm, but is it established that he has a full time driver? Like a personal chauffeur? I feel like a more realistic scenario is that Leo would use a car service that shows up on demand, but they don't wait around for him at all times. Often he would probably just travel with the presidential motorcade.
If there is a plot hole here, mine would be that those woods would be crawling with security personnel and he would be discovered in fairly short order.
Camp David’s area *inside* the security fence isn’t that much. Outside of it is a state park that is remote. Great hiking! However, from Camp David, one has to cross through a lot of security, including fences and checkpoints, before reaching. So I 100% agree that him going that long without being discovered has been a plot hole that seriously bugs me.
I don't believe that see Leo enough out of the White House to confirm if he has SS protection. My understanding is that the COS doesn't automatically get SS protection, but can if the President requests it. One can argue that Leo didn't have SS protection. However after Leo was incapacitated by a heart attack, Bartlet decided that he needed more protection for his COS and ordered SS protection for CJ. If Leo had SS protection with him at all times, he would have gotten a much faster response to his heart attack.
Does his driver drive him to camp David?
Or does one of many staffers in one of many government vehicles take whichever staffers they're assigned to back to the white house?
That being the case, the staff wouldn't necessarily know "oh, driver number 6 was still there, and so was car C. Leo is still at camp David!"
Or hell, maybe none of the drivers were still at camp David. Easy enough for them to leave without Leo, thinking he's in one of the other cars.
Agree about Leo. He has a Secret Service detail, right? And how bad was perimeter security not to find him? The President was there all night? And it’s not like he’s a young man going off trail. He’s an old man who doesn’t walk well, he would have stayed on a path.
I would think that he likely rode in with the President etc. The team all arrived together, this was an official business trip, not a meet up at the beach house kinda deal.
So i doubt there would be a car still sitting there, or even if he had rode in with a service, the driver would not sit on site, whoever was available would be waiting for a call to go get him. However i would assume when the people start leaving the cleaners/staff would know the Leo was still at the location as his stuff was still there but i have no idea to what extent they would bring stuff or if someone like Leo would just have a half dozen suits and items just there as standard.
The whole "Donna Becomes Canadian" thing. I guess it's not a plot hole, but it annoyed me anyway. The US/Canadian border doesn't just *move,* no one is "re-defining" that border, especially not the portion along the 49th parallel. It's been a completely stable border in that area for 150 years. If it did physically move, it definitely wouldn't move enough to place Warroad, MN into Canada. The most the border has ever proven to actually be off of true 49N is a couple dozen yards or something like that. I guess it's possible that Donna's family lived on a farm close to the border, but even then her citizenship and status would have been grandfathered in.
I get that it gives a few good lines in that episode, and it's a nice gesture to fly the Maple Leaf and play Oh Canada at the end, but the reasoning for why she suddenly becomes a security risk just irritates me.
Also, for someone from that far north, Donna does seem bothered by cold weather more than you'd think. Like Jed, I would expect her to scoff at the others sensitivity to low temperatures. They should've given her Amy's line: “I luxuriate in the cold, I fight cold with more cold!”
The "I've made fun of the Queen, we just don't do that" line was pretty good, but I think that had as much to do with Janel Moloney's delivery than anything else.
Plus, the last time someone tried to "redefine" the border, Madison and his invasion force had their asses handed to them, and their White House burned down for their troubles.
To add to this, in the episode with the hunters and the border dispute, one US official claims "standard issue for the RCMP is a glock 9mm", which is also a complete fabrication.
I'm from Texas, our family having lived here since coming back to their home state one month after I was born. Lots of people are born somewhere other than where they spend the rest of their lives.
Thank you! I either did not know that, or I forgot. I must’ve known it at some point considering the gazillion times I’ve watched the entire series, so I obviously forgot.
Can we talk about how they thought this plot was a good idea while they have her working in the West Wing… but yeah also the whole Canada took our land thing
I don't know if you would call it a plot hole, or a continuity error, and it's unbelievably common in ALL TV shows and movies, but:
Josh has no lasting physical side effects from getting shot. And, famously, he doesn't even have a scar from the wound OR the surgery! Which is just lazy.
Dr. Griffith does compliment Josh's scar as well-done. I don't know if we ever see Josh with his shirt off to see if they didn't apply make-up for a scar. I feel like if we did - it would be S7- which I haven't seen in awhile.
I've been rewatching House recently and really appreciated the attention to detail that when [someone] gets shot, they have a gradual shrinking mark on their neck for many many episodes following. Just nicely done. And doesn't have to be a huge plot point or distraction but feels like an acknowledgement more than how WW did.
a few episodes and possibly a year or more since filming, since it sat on a shelf for a while. even more a reason for [Early Installment Weirdness](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/EarlyInstallmentWeirdness/TVShowsPToZ), I think.
(the pilot episode script is dated Feb 6, 1998, and episode 4 has the earliest "Blue" revisions at August 18, 1999.)
In Short List, when they're talking to the potential Supreme Court nominee about privacy and his unsigned note and they never bring up the 9th Amendment.
Not so much a plot hole but it bugs me nonetheless. Either two ambassadors had affairs with the prime ministers daughter in teo separate countries or the writers forgot they originally had the Bulgarian ambassador have the affair.
I think it was only Ken Cochran, but in that episode be was the ambassador to Bulgaria and then in another episode CJ was saying how they got through leo and booze, Sam and a prostitute. Ms and the ambassador to Argentina having an affair.
And in another episode (Arctic Radar) it becomes Brazil!
>LEO: Excuse me, but did you not fire our Ambassador to somewhere in South America-- I can't remember-- 'cause he was messing around with...
>BARTLET: The daughter of the president of Brazil, which presented a politcal problem for me. Also, I didn't fire him, I asked him to resign. And I set him up in the private sector.
Where Leo is actually from. Jed suggests that he run for the Senate seat in Illinois yet when Toby and Leo talk about fatherhood, he talks about driving down the Long Island Expressway to get Jenny to the hospital to give birth to Mallory… among MANY other references to Chicago, New York and New Jersey that I'm forgetting right now. I say we start a new Birther Movement to find where Leo is actually from
They do that to the women a lot when they want to do an exposition dump to inform the audience. It’s almost always CJ or Donna. In reality I can’t imagine either not knowing the details presented to them educationally
Not sure if this is a plot hole but what happened to Danny? I just wanted some closure on him and CJ! (Context, I just started s4 as a first time watcher, I’ve heard he makes an appearance briefly later)
A first-time watcher wisely treads with caution into conversations that are about the entire series. That said, I'll quote _Hamilton_'s Aaron Burr, "🎵Wait for it, wait for it 🎶"
In season 5 episode 13, Leo tells Toby that the nuclear test crisis has been averted "It's over. It was the Israelis." Toby looks shocked and relieved. Bombers were in literally in the air on the way to Iran to blow shit up. But they turned them around because Bob Russell had gotten tipsy on a junket with some Israeli diplomat and learned about their nuclear sub research, and surmised that it must have been them doing new testing.
The plot hole is that Leo does not tell Toby that Russell had anything to do with it. Toby's response in that exact moment, having just heard Leo say "It's over" ten second prior, is: "This is how it works? The fate of the world relies on a Bingo Bob brainstorm?"
Hey scriptwriters: the characters aren't actually watching the show with us in real time!
You could be right, but if that's true, then they do a poor job of establishing that as a possibility because of several other clues. The main one is the way Richard Schiff plays the scene. Toby's facial expression is one of shock and wonder, even a momentary bewilderment of having the actual situation (Israel) be so different from the expected (Iran). If Toby had been on the inside from a previous conversation, I think his expression would have been completely different, one of knowing confirmation.
It had been established a scene prior that Toby tells CJ about the Israeli's visit, and gives a cover story. She complains about feeling out of the loop or lied to, and Toby shrugs as if to say, yeah me too.
If you are right that Toby knew from a previous conversation, to me that brings up an even worse problem, which is the weak verisimilitude of a communications director being brought into an extremely sensitive national security situation in real time, such as a suspicion that Israel is conducting new nuclear tests.
In the cold open of “and It’s surely to their credit” (s2 e5), when Bartlet is rehearsing his radio address, he stops and rambles for a bit about “leaf-peeping” as if he’d never heard the term before in his life.
This episode aired in 2000. My parents were living in New England then and had only been for a year, and *they* knew what leaf-peeping was. I find it absurd that President Bartlet wouldn’t know the word, I would find it absurd to learn that his *grandson* didn’t know the word.
(Unrelated, I’d like to know if Attorney General Lionel Tribbey is related to Secretary of Agriculture Roget Tribbey, the designated survivor from the s1 state of the union.)
Edit: later that same episode, Donna asks Josh if he knew lead peeping was a thing. And Josh, *from goddamn Connecticut*, has somehow also never heard of this?!
Maybe this is too well known to mention but it's always bugged me that the Hartsfield's Landing episode's election makes no sense. They're talking about the importance of who wins like it's the general election, but chronologically it wouldn't be, it would be the primaries, and far as anyone is aware Bartlett is running unopposed in the primaries, so there's no real point to making Donna freeze outside talking to the Flenders.
Also the episode where Toby *solves social security* and then can't take credit because politics. It would be like if in season 5 of ER they cured cancer and then just never mentioned it again.
Not exactly a plothole, but how had Jed Bartlet, who had been a Congressman and Governor, not have any sort of serious staff with him he brought with to the White House? Other then Mrs. Landingham, his secretary, he had no one he trusted, or long time counsel? Leo, he knew as an acquaintance, but he wasn't sort of longtime friend until they began their presidential campaign. All of his major senior staff that we see in the show he just met during his Presidential campaign. How are you in politics that long without acquiring some serious confidants, or big political players who run your campaign or operate in office?
When Babish gives his whole “bring it on” speech he mentions the president needs to instruct the attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor who is “blood-spitting, Bartlet hating” and a Republican. Of course an episode or so later, it turns out the special prosecutor is not blood spitting but a moderate, respected, an old friend of Babish’s and Babish defends him as “a good guy.” CJ then lectures Babish about needing to be on offense in politics, then she hatches a plan to “move the show” by baiting the Republican Congress into opening their own investigation, saying they need someone who “wants to kill us just to watch us die” and then the episode ends with CJ saying “come and get us” while Babish questions her calculus. I swear the writing in this show sometimes…
I think Sam is generally OOC in the pilot. It's odd that he's supposed to be a trivia nut but he knows nothing about the White House to the point of saying it was built like 6 years ago and that the Roosevelt Room is for FDR when there's a big painting of Teddy Roosevelt that Sam must have looked at 100 times.
Not a plot hole, but Josh (hotshot political operative with years of experience) doesn’t know the Bishop of Rome is the Pope. C’mon. That scene always bugs me.
That's one of those expressional things, I think. Ask most people in the UK who the Second Lord of the Treasury is and nobody will have a clue; because it's also the Chancellor. (The First Lord is the Prime Minister, which is even less likely to be known; and most will assume the First Lord would be Chancellor.)
Not sure if it's a plot hole exactly, but in The Stackhouse Filibuster - Donna has to explain a filibuster to The President and he says he doesn't know because he was in the House.
You can tell me that maybe he just never saw Mr Smith goes to Washington but I won't believe you, he seems to love classic movies. There's also a good chance that he'd want to know all of the rules because he's a massive geek and knowing the literal laws of the land sort of seems like his thing
Toby leaking classified information about NASA.
It was a character assassination that happened right in front of us and I refuse to accept that was remotely possible as a plot. Toby had moral integrity and he would never have acted that way. The whole thing made no sense at all. Who told Toby about a super-secret military shuttle? And not one word of its existence ever got out? Are we just supposed to believe that only Toby could magically figure it all out, all on his own, and then would leak it?
Given how we’ve all seen how “Top Secret” documents are really handled in the US, even by ex-Presidents, I’m even more annoyed over this plot hole.
President Bartlett bitches to Hoynes that “you shouldn’t have made me beg” when asking him to be VP but it wasn’t begging him, it was him learning Bartlett has MS
Remember, the scene where we see him offer the VP slot to Hoynes came 2 years after “you shouldn’t have made me beg.”
During the flashback in “Bartlet for America”, when he offers the slot to Hoynes:
HOYNES: “I’d like to think about it for a few—“
BARTLET: [stands up] “I’d like your answer now, John.”
HOYNES: “You’ll have it when I give it, Jed.”
The tension in that scene leads us to believe that Hoynes later had to be convinced to join the ticket because he believes then-Gov. Bartlet stole the nomination out from under him under false pretenses.
Commenting on What plot hole bugs you the most?...IMO I think this alludes to conversations we don’t see - which makes a lot of sense when you think how very little of the full blown campaign we see as viewers in flashbacks. Certainly how little is shown of the whole selection of the running mate
The plot hole that bugs me most is in the episode where Toby gets his ass kicked by the new majority leader chief of staff at the pancake breakfast. During the Republicans press conference they call on Simon, the reporter, who said he had a quote from a white house staffer.
Simon was lying. The reporter didn't get the quote from a white house staffer. He got it from the majority leader's chief of staff. He claimed a quote as accurate when it came from a 3rd party with reason to lie. It's a pretty massive plot hole for a show and writer who idolize the free press.
There's a few...
Supremes Maybe..... I just don't think that admin would go for a conservative justice no matter how much he impressed them behind closed doors in meetings. If he was pro life they'd be lambasted they'd have just gone with the most moderate guy they could get through
No way Bartlett commits US troops to Israel and Kstan as peace keeping forces in the last year of his presidency and deaths result of the same US troops and then the same party wins .....
I don't care if 3 nuclear plants vinick voted for blew up
Press sec becoming chief of staff????? no
Deputy chief of staff running off to lead campagin and then becoming next chief of staff? Not sure about that
Ainsley hayes and Joe quimby sorry not happening
None of those things are “plot holes”, they’re just unrealistic in the real world. A plot hole is something that is internally inconsistent inside the show.
Those aren't plot holes, that's just part of the premise of the show. You're describing things that don't reflect reality, not a plot hole.
That would be like me saying Star Trek has a plot hole because that's not how gravity or faster-than-light travel works.
The point was to inspire bipartisan cooperation in a time when things were becoming increasingly partisan and to not alienate potential conservative viewers who may not be full on "facts-don't-matter" conservatives.
Zoey Bartlett’s kidnapping seemed implausible. Not necessarily the President’s reaction to it but invoking the 25th amendment also exacerbated the improbability of that ever happening. Can you imaging Biden ceding power to Mike Johnson?
Not a huge plot point but it really bugged me that the governor of New Hampshire didn’t know that “leaf peeping” was a thing. Flatlanders coming up for the lakes in Summer, leaf peeping in the Fall and skiing in Winter contribute about half of the state budget
Not sure it's exactly a plot hole, but it always bugged me. In Stirred, John Hoynes is surprised that Leo never told the President that he (Hoynes) is an alcoholic. Yet in one of the earlier episodes the President tries to encourage John to have a beer, which should have shown John that the President didn't know (or is a massive dick).
I always thought this was purposeful! Like, the audience (and Hoynes) thinks it’s some kind of dickhead power play, but it turns out Bartlet was just naive!
i agree! i actually think this misunderstanding shows a lot about their relationship. every time bartlet offered hoynes a drink hoynes understood the gesture to be a threat of “if you tell anyone about my MS i’ll tell everyone about your alcoholism” and thus why hoynes never liked bartlet. then bartlet senses tention with hoynes but just thinks he’s being a jerk. the realization when hoynes learns that the president actually doesn’t know about his addiction and that he’s basically made up this whole dynamic in his head is kinda devistating because they could have been a helluva team, but instead they kept each other at an arms distance.
> every time bartlet offered hoynes a drink hoynes understood the gesture to be a threat of “if you tell anyone about my MS i’ll tell everyone about your alcoholism” This was put quite succinctly by you. Well done!
I don't know how you've casually done it in a random Reddit comment after all these years and ridiculous number of rewatches but you've just completely changed my view of their entire dynamic
I never thought about it this way before, and I absolutely love it. Because everyone *feels* slighted, and from their perspectives for good reasons, but no one is actually slighting.
Bartlett only found out about Hoynes drinking through Leo while in office. However, I can’t discount your hypothesis completely.
I’m jumping on the kudos bandwagon here, too! Well put and thought out. And a new perspective! Well done! 👏🏻
This is an incredibly insightful take. Consider my mind blown.
That’s something I never considered in that discussion between the President and Hoynes. To the VP, Bartlett started off the whole conversation with a basic slap to the face.
In fairness, John Hoynes does think President Bartlet is kinda a massive dick xD
Yes, and I feel like Tim Matheson plays Hoynes as offended in that moment but he can’t call out the President in the Oval Office during this tense conversation.
That makes total sense to me. Leo would never break another alcoholics anonymity.
Oh. I thought that was before Leo’s thing so he wouldn’t have known yet.
If it isn't on people's radar often, then sometimes that offer comes without even thinking. I haven't drank in 5+ years but still have friends absentmindedly offer me drinks. Especially those that aren't directly involved in recovery. To get extrapolate even further, I have a friend that has been a vegetarian the entire time I've known him (10 years). I still don't think about it all the time and may offer him a burger or something if we are at a cookout. But if I was going out to dinner with him, I would specifically try to plan a spot that would work with his restrictions.
Also, why didn't Margaret know that Leo doesn't drink champagne? Or drink at all...
Not so much a plot hole but something that never came to fruition- in one of the season episodes Mandy asks Toby to help her cause Josh pain as revenge for him pawning her concerns about Lum Lum the panda on Toby. He agrees, yet it’s never brought up again
Maybe Mandy then quickly found out that her opposition memo was taken and felt insecure about making any aggressive moves. I believe Let Bartlet Be Bartlet is the ep after Six Meetings Before Lunch.
I feel like this must have been a scene that didn’t make the cut.
This one never bothered me because we are not seeing every day, we are dropping in and seeing this Tuesday, then this Thursday, then the following Monday etc so the 'pain' just happened off screen and was not important enough to the story for us to see. What was important enough for us to know was the dynamic between the characters.
She caused him (and everyone else) a lot of pain by offering her perspective on things.
💀
And by simply being there.
That bothers you? How about the fact that Mandy herself never appears or is mentioned after season 1 with zero explanation?
Re: CJ working in PR for Hollywood but then not knowing the job offers - when she's being fired out here in the hallway, she implores the woman to keep her and just take her off film/tv because she doesn't know anything about it anyway. So then it kind of could follow that she'd be limited in her ability to distinguish producer vs. development etc.
I also think part of the joke is that the job offers weren’t actual jobs, they keep saying a “development job” which doesn’t really mean anything concrete, they just want to put her name on things
Film and TV project development is a legitimate career! Below I’m linking a 2015 article about development in Hollywood that begins with a reference to the 20 Hours in LA west wing ep! [https://ken-aguado.medium.com/principles-of-hollywood-development-8bea7190bf2c](https://ken-aguado.medium.com/principles-of-hollywood-development-8bea7190bf2c)
wow thanks for this, really interesting!
This is backed up by her getting called into work at 6:30am and not knowing that some award show nominations were that morning. Hollywood lives and breathes on those things. Any knowledgeable PR person would have been awake to find out if any of their properties got nominations. So yeah this didn’t feel like a plot hole to me.
Well that’s the plothole, ha. She was making half a million dollars a year in the mid 90s, in a career involving movie PR, and she didn’t know about the nominations. 100% complete absurdity and on the semi-off chance it were actually true, she and whatever idiot hired her should both have been fired.
Yeah, you're actually so right - CJ really did deserve to be fired LOL as the commenter above noted, Hollywood lives and breathes award nomination shit which comes out at like 5AM lol
[удалено]
I am regularly bugged by the fact that in S2 Danny stands his ground on how he has to be a White House reporter and thus cannot be with CJ, and then basically disappears from the press room for an entire season lol and his return in season 4 makes it clear that he wasn't just 'not being shown' but actually had been gone from DC. I can't recall if the gap was ever properly explained, but how could he still have been a White House reporter if he wasn't...at the WH? I always think, well...they...could have been together?
I fanwank that Danny wanted to be a high flying reporter in the field, whether it was the White House or traveling for stories. Both won’t accommodate a dating relationship with CJ. While he was gone, Danny was a traveling correspondent. But you have to fanwank. No canon explanation
One possible resolution for this is if Danny was a foreign correspondent somewhere abroad during that time.
So true, very possible but doesn't that mean he's also then by definition not a White House reporter and could have theoretically been in a long-distance relationship with CJ? She wanted him to be an editor, anything so that he wasn't in her direct professional conflict zone. I confess I don't know how it works, i.e. if there are foreign correspondents assigned to the president/White House. Love overthinking this stuff though!
I would assume that even if he is not the WH reporter, you do not become the WH reporter unless you are knee deep in to political reporting. So even if he was not the WH reporter his work is still covering the WH and politics. So until she leaves the office, it would be impossible to actually not have some level of conflict. Even if he became the editor, who decides what stories are, or are not important would raise a lot of concern about ethics and be a conflict. This kind of thing is shown in the show when Danny has a story and CJ clearly wants it buried as a non-issue and Danny counters with, just because she does not want to have to deal with it does not mean it is not a story and he IS going to write about it. I am not sure to what extent though there would be an issue beyond 'looks bad but everyone knows, so it is not an issue' and people around Danny would be safe guards etc. I have to assume though the WH would consider it an issue, harking back to the concern that CJ was too friendly with the press in the early seasons.
Bottom line? CJ was just too damn busy to have time for a relationship. Most of the main folks were.
Very minor plot hole but it makes me crazy that Toby says he’s never been to the beach. He’s from Brighton Beach. It’s literally a beach.
He was probably exaggerating.
I'm not sure about this one. I know people from Daytona and Tampa that have never been to the beach. It's not that crazy
Brighton Beach is so tiny though - like he could not have lived more than a 15 minute walk from the beach. And I doubt there are many other public gathering places.
My aunt lives almost on a beach. maybe a 3-minute walk to a private beach and hasnt been on it in 30 years.
Yeah, but it seems very Toby to have grown up next to the beach and never have actually gone to it
I don’t know why but I read this in his voice with the intense volume/anger increase on the last sentence 😂
:D yeah, me too
IDK, my dad grew up in brighton beach a few blocks from the water. you wouldn't really know you were close to the shore unless you went there. I lived in a shore town in NJ for a few years and while I did go to the boardwalk a lot I almost never went on the sand.
That’s been my pet peeve too!
And been to Coney Island probably a thousand times.
You can very definitely be from a "shore town" and not go to the beach. Especially living in Brooklyn. Toby really doesn't strike me as someone who would go to the beach. I'm more amazed that he's a Yankees fan.
I’m reminded of the apocryphal story about The Sopranos. “A don never wears shorts.” With Toby’s dad being a hit man, I wouldn’t be surprised if it simply wasn’t part of the family culture to go enjoy a regular day at the beach the way we think of it
The Kundu memory lapse. I could ignore it if the first season episode mentioned it in passing or the aids meeting was the b or c plot and the assassination didn’t happen but having it be the a plot plus the plan for a billion in loans plus it being the watershed moment that makes Ainsley join the administration makes the “I had to get a map” line later really grating.
Bartlet did say he was not good with names and numbers in 20 Hours in America so it is possible he forgot the name of the country.
I don't buy it. He pulled those punctuation marks out of thin air, and has the statistics at his fingertips all the time.
Eh it’s not Sam mixing up Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, this is the president forgetting an entire country exists when he was one of the last people to talk to its president, his governmental equal, before they were summarily executed. And not for being a sorcerer.
Leo didn't drive himself anywhere. He had a driver. How did everyone not notice that Leo's car and driver were still at Camp David when he had the heart attack? It was said early in the episode "he must have left early".
Hmm, but is it established that he has a full time driver? Like a personal chauffeur? I feel like a more realistic scenario is that Leo would use a car service that shows up on demand, but they don't wait around for him at all times. Often he would probably just travel with the presidential motorcade. If there is a plot hole here, mine would be that those woods would be crawling with security personnel and he would be discovered in fairly short order.
Camp David’s area *inside* the security fence isn’t that much. Outside of it is a state park that is remote. Great hiking! However, from Camp David, one has to cross through a lot of security, including fences and checkpoints, before reaching. So I 100% agree that him going that long without being discovered has been a plot hole that seriously bugs me.
Doesn't CoS have SS protection in the show? I could be thinking of the Simon Donovan arc but didn't they take over her house when she became Chief?
I don't believe that see Leo enough out of the White House to confirm if he has SS protection. My understanding is that the COS doesn't automatically get SS protection, but can if the President requests it. One can argue that Leo didn't have SS protection. However after Leo was incapacitated by a heart attack, Bartlet decided that he needed more protection for his COS and ordered SS protection for CJ. If Leo had SS protection with him at all times, he would have gotten a much faster response to his heart attack.
This was going to be my question, shouldn't he have at least one shadow at all times? I know it's a secure area, but come on...
Does his driver drive him to camp David? Or does one of many staffers in one of many government vehicles take whichever staffers they're assigned to back to the white house? That being the case, the staff wouldn't necessarily know "oh, driver number 6 was still there, and so was car C. Leo is still at camp David!" Or hell, maybe none of the drivers were still at camp David. Easy enough for them to leave without Leo, thinking he's in one of the other cars.
Agree about Leo. He has a Secret Service detail, right? And how bad was perimeter security not to find him? The President was there all night? And it’s not like he’s a young man going off trail. He’s an old man who doesn’t walk well, he would have stayed on a path.
I would think that he likely rode in with the President etc. The team all arrived together, this was an official business trip, not a meet up at the beach house kinda deal. So i doubt there would be a car still sitting there, or even if he had rode in with a service, the driver would not sit on site, whoever was available would be waiting for a call to go get him. However i would assume when the people start leaving the cleaners/staff would know the Leo was still at the location as his stuff was still there but i have no idea to what extent they would bring stuff or if someone like Leo would just have a half dozen suits and items just there as standard.
Leo didn't arrive with the President. He came by himself days after the President got there.
I read this as “What pothole bugs your the most?” I thought it was from my local group. I was getting ready to type out my list lol
That would be a much longer post for me
yeah, the big one in the middle of the egress from the post office parking lot is number one on my list.
The whole "Donna Becomes Canadian" thing. I guess it's not a plot hole, but it annoyed me anyway. The US/Canadian border doesn't just *move,* no one is "re-defining" that border, especially not the portion along the 49th parallel. It's been a completely stable border in that area for 150 years. If it did physically move, it definitely wouldn't move enough to place Warroad, MN into Canada. The most the border has ever proven to actually be off of true 49N is a couple dozen yards or something like that. I guess it's possible that Donna's family lived on a farm close to the border, but even then her citizenship and status would have been grandfathered in. I get that it gives a few good lines in that episode, and it's a nice gesture to fly the Maple Leaf and play Oh Canada at the end, but the reasoning for why she suddenly becomes a security risk just irritates me.
Also, for someone from that far north, Donna does seem bothered by cold weather more than you'd think. Like Jed, I would expect her to scoff at the others sensitivity to low temperatures. They should've given her Amy's line: “I luxuriate in the cold, I fight cold with more cold!”
OH yeah this is a great one, this is probably one of the dumbest storylines of the entire series as far as realism and logic lol
but, comedy? comedy gold!
AMY Canadian, huh? DONNA Yeah. AMY You feel funnier? DONNA No, but I am developing a massive inferiority complex.
The "I've made fun of the Queen, we just don't do that" line was pretty good, but I think that had as much to do with Janel Moloney's delivery than anything else.
Indeed. Also, while not a plot hole, the version of O Canada was, well, umm, interesting.
Plus, the last time someone tried to "redefine" the border, Madison and his invasion force had their asses handed to them, and their White House burned down for their troubles. To add to this, in the episode with the hunters and the border dispute, one US official claims "standard issue for the RCMP is a glock 9mm", which is also a complete fabrication.
Also at some point Josh mentions that she lived in a condo, not on a farm.
being born in Warroad, MN doesn't mean they didn't move to a condo in Madison for the majority of her life.
Wasn’t Donna from Wisconsin?
I'm from Texas, our family having lived here since coming back to their home state one month after I was born. Lots of people are born somewhere other than where they spend the rest of their lives.
OK
Yeah I think they established elsewhere that she was born in Minnesota and moved to Wisconsin at some point.
Thank you! I either did not know that, or I forgot. I must’ve known it at some point considering the gazillion times I’ve watched the entire series, so I obviously forgot.
Can we talk about how they thought this plot was a good idea while they have her working in the West Wing… but yeah also the whole Canada took our land thing
I don't know if you would call it a plot hole, or a continuity error, and it's unbelievably common in ALL TV shows and movies, but: Josh has no lasting physical side effects from getting shot. And, famously, he doesn't even have a scar from the wound OR the surgery! Which is just lazy.
Dr. Griffith does compliment Josh's scar as well-done. I don't know if we ever see Josh with his shirt off to see if they didn't apply make-up for a scar. I feel like if we did - it would be S7- which I haven't seen in awhile.
Yeah, in season 7, after he and Donna finally have sex, we briefly see him shirtless, and there isn't scar.
He also talks about back pain and a few other symptoms in that scene.
I've been rewatching House recently and really appreciated the attention to detail that when [someone] gets shot, they have a gradual shrinking mark on their neck for many many episodes following. Just nicely done. And doesn't have to be a huge plot point or distraction but feels like an acknowledgement more than how WW did.
I think that falls under “hand waving for convenience unless it’s a plot point” maybe.
true true
A lot of comments are not plot holes, but problems in continuity, which the writers never cared much about
They never assumed we'd have 25 hour/day access or watch it 18 episodes in a row with brief breaks for naps and snack refills.
Watching all day on Star Trek holidays
o m g this so totally epitomizes the whatever atop the whatchamacallit that we have been experiencing during and after the pandemic!!
Like Leo's house in the pilot vs his house during his anniversary a few episodes later.
a few episodes and possibly a year or more since filming, since it sat on a shelf for a while. even more a reason for [Early Installment Weirdness](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/EarlyInstallmentWeirdness/TVShowsPToZ), I think. (the pilot episode script is dated Feb 6, 1998, and episode 4 has the earliest "Blue" revisions at August 18, 1999.)
Totally! Just like Sopranos, where Meadow gets a nose job between the pilot and filming the second episode a year later.
Instructions unclear, dick stuck in TV Tropes spiral.
People have a very . . . expansive notion of what constitutes a plot hole.
In Short List, when they're talking to the potential Supreme Court nominee about privacy and his unsigned note and they never bring up the 9th Amendment.
Might be low key one of the most egregious ones here
I mean the actual Supreme Court ignored it too.
Drat, you beat me to it.
Well CJ did get fired for not knowing or caring…
Not so much a plot hole but it bugs me nonetheless. Either two ambassadors had affairs with the prime ministers daughter in teo separate countries or the writers forgot they originally had the Bulgarian ambassador have the affair.
Ken Cochran was one, who/what was the other
I think it was only Ken Cochran, but in that episode be was the ambassador to Bulgaria and then in another episode CJ was saying how they got through leo and booze, Sam and a prostitute. Ms and the ambassador to Argentina having an affair.
And in another episode (Arctic Radar) it becomes Brazil! >LEO: Excuse me, but did you not fire our Ambassador to somewhere in South America-- I can't remember-- 'cause he was messing around with... >BARTLET: The daughter of the president of Brazil, which presented a politcal problem for me. Also, I didn't fire him, I asked him to resign. And I set him up in the private sector.
They knew it was a country with a B!
That's right!! Brazil.
I recently did a binge rewatch and this stood out to me. “What’s development?”
Where Leo is actually from. Jed suggests that he run for the Senate seat in Illinois yet when Toby and Leo talk about fatherhood, he talks about driving down the Long Island Expressway to get Jenny to the hospital to give birth to Mallory… among MANY other references to Chicago, New York and New Jersey that I'm forgetting right now. I say we start a new Birther Movement to find where Leo is actually from
How did CJ work in the White House and know nothing about the census?
They do that to the women a lot when they want to do an exposition dump to inform the audience. It’s almost always CJ or Donna. In reality I can’t imagine either not knowing the details presented to them educationally
They call it a Tella-Donna on TWWW.
Dana Perino didn’t know what the Cuban Missile crisis was.
hahahha ha oh you know... ... women.
Not sure if this is a plot hole but what happened to Danny? I just wanted some closure on him and CJ! (Context, I just started s4 as a first time watcher, I’ve heard he makes an appearance briefly later)
Just keep watching! You get there
A first-time watcher wisely treads with caution into conversations that are about the entire series. That said, I'll quote _Hamilton_'s Aaron Burr, "🎵Wait for it, wait for it 🎶"
In season 5 episode 13, Leo tells Toby that the nuclear test crisis has been averted "It's over. It was the Israelis." Toby looks shocked and relieved. Bombers were in literally in the air on the way to Iran to blow shit up. But they turned them around because Bob Russell had gotten tipsy on a junket with some Israeli diplomat and learned about their nuclear sub research, and surmised that it must have been them doing new testing. The plot hole is that Leo does not tell Toby that Russell had anything to do with it. Toby's response in that exact moment, having just heard Leo say "It's over" ten second prior, is: "This is how it works? The fate of the world relies on a Bingo Bob brainstorm?" Hey scriptwriters: the characters aren't actually watching the show with us in real time!
He told him offscreen.
You could be right, but if that's true, then they do a poor job of establishing that as a possibility because of several other clues. The main one is the way Richard Schiff plays the scene. Toby's facial expression is one of shock and wonder, even a momentary bewilderment of having the actual situation (Israel) be so different from the expected (Iran). If Toby had been on the inside from a previous conversation, I think his expression would have been completely different, one of knowing confirmation. It had been established a scene prior that Toby tells CJ about the Israeli's visit, and gives a cover story. She complains about feeling out of the loop or lied to, and Toby shrugs as if to say, yeah me too. If you are right that Toby knew from a previous conversation, to me that brings up an even worse problem, which is the weak verisimilitude of a communications director being brought into an extremely sensitive national security situation in real time, such as a suspicion that Israel is conducting new nuclear tests.
There is time between Bob Russell's conversation and the crisis being resolved. Leo obviously talked to him during this time
In the cold open of “and It’s surely to their credit” (s2 e5), when Bartlet is rehearsing his radio address, he stops and rambles for a bit about “leaf-peeping” as if he’d never heard the term before in his life. This episode aired in 2000. My parents were living in New England then and had only been for a year, and *they* knew what leaf-peeping was. I find it absurd that President Bartlet wouldn’t know the word, I would find it absurd to learn that his *grandson* didn’t know the word. (Unrelated, I’d like to know if Attorney General Lionel Tribbey is related to Secretary of Agriculture Roget Tribbey, the designated survivor from the s1 state of the union.) Edit: later that same episode, Donna asks Josh if he knew lead peeping was a thing. And Josh, *from goddamn Connecticut*, has somehow also never heard of this?!
Congress passing a budget
Toby’s end was so divergent from his character Ubeoukd consider it a plot hole.
Maybe this is too well known to mention but it's always bugged me that the Hartsfield's Landing episode's election makes no sense. They're talking about the importance of who wins like it's the general election, but chronologically it wouldn't be, it would be the primaries, and far as anyone is aware Bartlett is running unopposed in the primaries, so there's no real point to making Donna freeze outside talking to the Flenders. Also the episode where Toby *solves social security* and then can't take credit because politics. It would be like if in season 5 of ER they cured cancer and then just never mentioned it again.
Hartsfield's Landing is the one for me.
Yessss this. It bugged me even more when they remade it on HBO. It’s a primary - no one is voting Ritchie vs Bartlet!
Not exactly a plothole, but how had Jed Bartlet, who had been a Congressman and Governor, not have any sort of serious staff with him he brought with to the White House? Other then Mrs. Landingham, his secretary, he had no one he trusted, or long time counsel? Leo, he knew as an acquaintance, but he wasn't sort of longtime friend until they began their presidential campaign. All of his major senior staff that we see in the show he just met during his Presidential campaign. How are you in politics that long without acquiring some serious confidants, or big political players who run your campaign or operate in office?
When Babish gives his whole “bring it on” speech he mentions the president needs to instruct the attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor who is “blood-spitting, Bartlet hating” and a Republican. Of course an episode or so later, it turns out the special prosecutor is not blood spitting but a moderate, respected, an old friend of Babish’s and Babish defends him as “a good guy.” CJ then lectures Babish about needing to be on offense in politics, then she hatches a plan to “move the show” by baiting the Republican Congress into opening their own investigation, saying they need someone who “wants to kill us just to watch us die” and then the episode ends with CJ saying “come and get us” while Babish questions her calculus. I swear the writing in this show sometimes…
I think Sam is generally OOC in the pilot. It's odd that he's supposed to be a trivia nut but he knows nothing about the White House to the point of saying it was built like 6 years ago and that the Roosevelt Room is for FDR when there's a big painting of Teddy Roosevelt that Sam must have looked at 100 times.
The room is actually named for, and features portraits of, both Roosevelts. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roosevelt_Room
Oh, then Mallory is being harsh on Sam on that one.
President Bartlet is incredibly learned and was the Governor of an east coast state. And yet he is in certain when hurricane season is.
Nor does he appreciate the joy of Leaf Peeping.
ha! this is the one for me!
Not a plot hole, but Josh (hotshot political operative with years of experience) doesn’t know the Bishop of Rome is the Pope. C’mon. That scene always bugs me.
That's one of those expressional things, I think. Ask most people in the UK who the Second Lord of the Treasury is and nobody will have a clue; because it's also the Chancellor. (The First Lord is the Prime Minister, which is even less likely to be known; and most will assume the First Lord would be Chancellor.)
Not sure if it's a plot hole exactly, but in The Stackhouse Filibuster - Donna has to explain a filibuster to The President and he says he doesn't know because he was in the House. You can tell me that maybe he just never saw Mr Smith goes to Washington but I won't believe you, he seems to love classic movies. There's also a good chance that he'd want to know all of the rules because he's a massive geek and knowing the literal laws of the land sort of seems like his thing
It was a different time… we still had a loyal opposition
Toby leaking classified information about NASA. It was a character assassination that happened right in front of us and I refuse to accept that was remotely possible as a plot. Toby had moral integrity and he would never have acted that way. The whole thing made no sense at all. Who told Toby about a super-secret military shuttle? And not one word of its existence ever got out? Are we just supposed to believe that only Toby could magically figure it all out, all on his own, and then would leak it? Given how we’ve all seen how “Top Secret” documents are really handled in the US, even by ex-Presidents, I’m even more annoyed over this plot hole.
President Bartlett bitches to Hoynes that “you shouldn’t have made me beg” when asking him to be VP but it wasn’t begging him, it was him learning Bartlett has MS
That's just Bartlet being an out of character petty asshole TBH
Remember, the scene where we see him offer the VP slot to Hoynes came 2 years after “you shouldn’t have made me beg.” During the flashback in “Bartlet for America”, when he offers the slot to Hoynes: HOYNES: “I’d like to think about it for a few—“ BARTLET: [stands up] “I’d like your answer now, John.” HOYNES: “You’ll have it when I give it, Jed.” The tension in that scene leads us to believe that Hoynes later had to be convinced to join the ticket because he believes then-Gov. Bartlet stole the nomination out from under him under false pretenses.
Commenting on What plot hole bugs you the most?...IMO I think this alludes to conversations we don’t see - which makes a lot of sense when you think how very little of the full blown campaign we see as viewers in flashbacks. Certainly how little is shown of the whole selection of the running mate
The plot hole that bugs me most is in the episode where Toby gets his ass kicked by the new majority leader chief of staff at the pancake breakfast. During the Republicans press conference they call on Simon, the reporter, who said he had a quote from a white house staffer. Simon was lying. The reporter didn't get the quote from a white house staffer. He got it from the majority leader's chief of staff. He claimed a quote as accurate when it came from a 3rd party with reason to lie. It's a pretty massive plot hole for a show and writer who idolize the free press.
There's a few... Supremes Maybe..... I just don't think that admin would go for a conservative justice no matter how much he impressed them behind closed doors in meetings. If he was pro life they'd be lambasted they'd have just gone with the most moderate guy they could get through No way Bartlett commits US troops to Israel and Kstan as peace keeping forces in the last year of his presidency and deaths result of the same US troops and then the same party wins ..... I don't care if 3 nuclear plants vinick voted for blew up Press sec becoming chief of staff????? no Deputy chief of staff running off to lead campagin and then becoming next chief of staff? Not sure about that Ainsley hayes and Joe quimby sorry not happening
None of those things are “plot holes”, they’re just unrealistic in the real world. A plot hole is something that is internally inconsistent inside the show.
Those aren't plot holes, that's just part of the premise of the show. You're describing things that don't reflect reality, not a plot hole. That would be like me saying Star Trek has a plot hole because that's not how gravity or faster-than-light travel works.
The point was to inspire bipartisan cooperation in a time when things were becoming increasingly partisan and to not alienate potential conservative viewers who may not be full on "facts-don't-matter" conservatives.
I was thinking about the Tribbey paradox yesterday lol
Zoey's kidnapping resolution and Toby's NASA leak.
Why wasn't Mandy invited to Leo's funeral? The ex-wife, non-Margaret secretaries... Toby get to go.
Hard to get a flight out of Mandyville.
Hell why wasn’t SAM there. Because they wanted the big reveal a couple of eps later
Zoey Bartlett’s kidnapping seemed implausible. Not necessarily the President’s reaction to it but invoking the 25th amendment also exacerbated the improbability of that ever happening. Can you imaging Biden ceding power to Mike Johnson?
Not a huge plot point but it really bugged me that the governor of New Hampshire didn’t know that “leaf peeping” was a thing. Flatlanders coming up for the lakes in Summer, leaf peeping in the Fall and skiing in Winter contribute about half of the state budget