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The West Wing, Season 6, Episode 19 (Patreon)

Published:
2025-03-25 01:24:08
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

Ninety Miles Away

Files

Previews only

WW6 19

Comments

D Gyre

Alright, Cuba time!

D Gyre
>>168825545

Completely unrelated but I just got done covering the Cuban Missile Crisis recently and it always gets me how both Kennedy and Khruschev were out of power in just a few years and then also deceased within a decade but Castro lived well into the 2000s, and was in power, despite HUNDREDS of assassination attempts. I find the Cuba history interesting so that's probably part of why I still feel this is a great episode more than others. Also a great episode for Kate's character I think.

dys

We did have an actor cast as a real person not too many episodes ago, Lawrence Lessig played by Christopher Lloyd. I'm not a native Spanish speaker but speak it a little and John Spencer's Spanish sounds quite good here, not like accentless native speaker but better than mine.

Jeremy Vetting

I always thought it was implied that Kate's husband at the time hit her. That that was what her CIA friend was apologizing for. That he knew and did nothing.

Weird Magic

Two episodes are widely considered the worst in the series...this is the second of those two. Probably (IMO) more because it took such a left turn from both the campaign and the actual west wing. I think they took a chance on something outside the box and it didn't work. Que sera sera. Originally airing on March 16, 2005, 'Ninety Miles Away' is Episode 19 of Season 6 of The West Wing. It is the 130th episode overall and has an IMDB rating of 7.2, placing it as the #22 ranked episode of this season and #129 out of all the episodes shown so far.

Pam Nail

I feel like someone won a contest and the prize was they got to write an episode of the show and this was it. I'm sure there are people who like it, but for me this is the bad fanfic episode. From "Fidel in the shadows," which never fails to crack me up and take me right out of the episode, to the weird callback to Margaret's forgery skills, to the maddening teases of Kate's backstory (which make me feel like I know even less about her than before), to CJ's line about "help[ing] you two run the place" (which sounds a lot like it was written by someone who's still twitchy about CJ being chief of staff). The scene with Leo and Framhagen is pretty great, but it's purely about the issue and the real history and has nothing to do with the characters or any of the context of the show (except Leo's incredible parting line). [rot13 for spoilers] Naq V srry onq sbe Xriva naq Wbr orvat fb fher gurer jnf tbvat gb or zber gb guvf jura vg vf yvgrenyyl arire zragvbarq ntnva, rvgure ba gur pnzcnvtaf be va gur Juvgr Ubhfr. Ohg gura ntnva, gurl'yy trg gurve Ivavpx rcvfbqr, juvpu fubhyq znxr hc sbe vg. :C

Roland

I don't remember much about this story at all. Is the implication that Kate was involved in getting Leo drunk (and possibly Roofied?*), i.e. dirty tricks by the CIA to sabotage the 1995 peace talks? *she adamantly told Leo that he wouldn't remember....

Brian Harris

Rough, kinda sloppy one. I feel like there’s a ton of stuff that didn’t make it onscreen that might have lifted some of the ambiguity. I guess the ambiguity is sort of the point - if you live lives like Kate and Leo have lived, you never really get to be known, not even by others like you - but I’d love to know the full story, because I don’t think this episode covers it.

Martin Nicholls

It's funny, I was skim reading the JFK files over the weekend, and Cuba is all over them, and I realised that this episode was coming up. Weird timing. Gonna let AI figure that one out over the summer when I have some time.. By the way the rest of the world's relationship isn't that different to the US - there's no embargo where I live (I have a bottle of _very_ nice Cuban rum), but there's no investment in Cuba, that's not a thing you can do because Cuba. I also don't think the almost total normalisation of migration from Cuba to the US is a good idea - it totally removes pressure on the Cuban government to reform for the benefit of the Cuban people (mad idea, clearly). I don't think Cuban Americans do either - which is why they're blowing up Biden for putting the people now affected by the Trump stuff for putting those people in that position. At the end of the day they tried to acquire nuclear weapons to threaten the US, I'm not 100% sure that's something you can rationally expect to come back from without at least some level of reform - call me old-fashioned. It'll all be okay as long as we keep Framhagen away from John Rambo. There are messes that have been going on much longer than Cuba that are going to stay messes until one of the parties figures their stuff out - we wouldn't, for example, reward North Korea for its behaviour, and if somebody was planning on doing so quite correctly all hell would break lose; and North Korea's original sin was much less than Cuba's. I still want to go scuba diving there some day (and I'm a massive fan of mojitos), and not being a US citizen it's technically very easy for me to do so :)

Martin Nicholls
>>168836171

Nah. There's not even a flicker of suggestion of that. There's more than a little bit of a suggestion she was physically abused, one presumes by her husband, but that doesn't get much traction either. She's adamant he wouldn't remember because of how drunk he was, and by his own admission previously he was into "pills" too so who even knows what else he was doing. She has a double reason for not telling him - firstly she was on some op down there and because the state he was in I imagine she would have thought it personally embarrassing the state he was in.

Skinny_Obelix

This is one of the episodes where I feel like "The West Wing after Sorkin" got its bad name. They're obviously trying something, but it didn't work for me. I have no idea what happened in the writing staff, but it feels like the main writers went with the Santos campaign, while another group were left with the White House where they were allowed to experiment. There are some other things that should be discussed after the end though.

Youtalkingtome
>>168836171

I agree that she wasn't involved in getting Leo drunk but the way they told this story was very strange. A lot of ambiguity in this episode. I can't wait to see how it shakes out next week

Youtalkingtome
>>168836083

I totally feel like I know less about her. Maybe that's the point. I'm mixed on it. One one hand it's really cool and on the other I am so curious!

Roland
>>168836171

I mean, I agree that my theory is very speculative, and Occam's Razor always applies, but it does also fit the facts as we know them: The CIA was running an operation. It may have just been monitoring the gathering, but could easily have been more. The CIA was opposed to the peace and reconciliation effort. The Senator was also opposed to the peace and reconciliation efforts (at some point in his career, maybe from the start?) The Senator knew how easy it would be to get Leo drunk and incapable, and easy to get him away from the gathering. The gathering collapsed in acrimony. Leo wasn't there and believes he could have salvaged it. Kate suffered an injury, likely domestic abuse. Maybe the collapse would have happened regardless of Leo"s presence, it sounds like a miracle things had progressed as far as they did. Or maybe someone influenced by the CIA threw an emotive grenade into the mix. Maybe Leo and the Senator would have gone off and gotten drunk anyway, or maybe that was pre-planned. Was there indication that Kate's husband was also CIA? If so, her injury might have been the result of a recent fight about policy and tactics. + Either way, I didn't hate the episode, it's a huge swing at the fences that could have worked under other circumstances. After all, the real passing of Castro was a huge deal, as were the Obama Administration's normalization efforts But the Cuba episode suffers from coming in between the amazing Santos / Russell arc episodes. It feels like a distraction rather than an addition, which is a shame. I might re-visit the TWWW podcast episode at some point to see if there's additional background information, but I'll certainly wait until after next week's TWW episode.

Paul T Hewes

Such a meh episode. It really marred the 2nd half of season 6, which had become significantly more watchable than all of 5 and the first part of 6 combined. I mean, any reason to get get more Kate Harper on the screen, but it was just so blah. Afterward this one they dont really miss too far on almost any episode again. All the way through to the end ...

Curtis Higareda
>>168879514

I feel same way...I almost always skip this episode on my re-watches. I'm even going to wait to watch this reaction until the next one comes out so I have a better episode to watch after lol... but yeah, this season definitely ends with a bang and the next season really doesn't miss at all.. looking forward to it!

Tessa

Far from my favourite episode, but I always love the callback to Margaret forging the President's signature. I love how she criticises CJ's own signature, like she's practiced it but failed

D Gyre

Wow I definitely didn't realize people disliked this episode to this degree! The administration basically tried to pull off a big piece of diplomacy while keeping the NSC and intelligence community in the dark, and it didn't work. They were absolutely monitoring the talks in Florida in 1995, and yes its left open but possibly even nudging the talks towards collapse. She 100% knew who he was in 95 and was likely also watching him as well as the foreign attendees at the talk. I always took the apology as he was her handler, and knew that she was both enduring some kind of abuse in her cover and that being under cover was also damaging her emotionally, and he didn't pull her out, didn't protect her the way he should have as a her handler, leaving her in that situation for the mission. Also on her being quiet about what happened as some people have commented about, in Kate's position/background you don't talk about past work. Period.

Jeff

I didn't like this one very much when it first aired, but over the years I've grown to appreciate it. It's interesting that so many of the comments conveyed their dislike of the ambiguity, but that's the main reason I liked it. It gives us a deeper understanding of Kate's history and her life of keeping secrets. And it reminds us that Leo's alcoholism -- which he never had the luxury to keep secret -- not only affected his life in the past, but will continue to do so in his work and his life forever. Kate's character reminded me of a friend from high school who became a Navy SEAL. Throughout the years I would ask him about his work, and he always gave me a very practiced, vague answer, along with a sly smile that said, "You know I can't tell you, so don't ask." That's the life of anyone who has worked in intelligence for their country, and this episode explored the challenges and near impossibility of keeping secrets in the modern age.

Youtalkingtome
>>168879514

I can't wait! I enjoyed this episode but I definitely wish I could watch the next one already. I need to see how they're gunna end this particular story

Weird Magic
>>168879514

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Weird Magic
>>168836083

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MrRuss50

Like others here I frequently skip this episode on my rewatches. Its not that its a terrible episode its just that the campaign arc is so damn good, I want to be with them. Toby sucking up his ego after their fight and calling Josh was a nice scene. Although the Guatemala joke goes over my head. I'm reminded even a weak WW episode is still better than 99% of other shows.

Michael Bennett

Lots of comments about this not being people's favorite episode. I can't disagree, it's the worst episode of the season. But that says more about the rest of the season than this episode. It's a pretty decent piece of television on its own, the timing is just difficult. "No, Senator, we just drank back then. We were never close." What a mic drop after Framhagen went on and on about how people got along better when they were utilizing. I liked Bartlet refusing to let the politics ruin the opportunity to actually do something. And I think that by announcing it and taking ownership, it actually lessens the fallout for the primary races. Sure the other candidates will have to comment on it, but the President said "I'm doing this", not them.

Youtalkingtome
>>169157439

I agree with you. What does that say about this season? Just phenomenal all the way around. This show is perfect.