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The West Wing, Season 3, Episode 1 (Patreon)

Published:
2023-08-01 16:36:29
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

Isaac and Ishmael

Files

Previews only

The West Wing, Season 3, Episode 1

Isaac and Ishmael

Comments

MarkyO

I actually like this episode. Not many people do.

Martin Nicholls

There is a shift. They may or may not directly address it, but for sure certain characters say things that they're only saying because they're in a post-9/11 world. I think we might end up crossing that bridge when we come to it though. I don't think that's a spoiler, more of a don't be surprised if certainly things tonally shift in some ways. It's inevitable, they'd have to, it's a new reality, seismic events in one universe affect events in another. I honestly don't think they'd have been able to get away with not doing so. I never realised before that I'm fairly sure this is the first mention of the oldest daughter by name. By the way I think very very few people thought that everybody is the same. Also by the way, Trump stating a fact about a virus and people deciding that gives them free reign to attack Asian people is as bad a link to draw as assuming that all muslims are terrorists - there's no factual basis to it, it's unfair, and it is wrong: you can't legislate for stupid people who are easily led astray which is one of the main points of the episode. That being said, it's also not unreasonable to point out there was a concerning amount of celebration in certain parts of the world about what happened back then, which is a little bit more truth. I know Irish people who disavowed terrorism after 9/11 who have told me they were for it before - some things are so egregious, and so shocking, that they will change your entire world view and that can express itself in many ways; not all of them good. By the way, I get why they removed it for streaming, but I honestly think the episode loses something without the cast introduction and the pause they have to show the donations line number; more the first bit but, yeah.. A bunch of those kids they have on a bunch of them have gone on to become relatively well-known actors, but the one who plays 'Fred' (Josh Zuckerman - who is in Oppenheimer btw) is in one of the most well known and liked House episodes (Three Stories) and he's treated in exactly the same way, lol. I guess he has one of those faces.. I like this episode, and I'm glad you watched it despite people saying not to because there are some legitimate character moments that you'd miss from not watching it. Also I think it's just a well-put together episode and it shows the ability of Sorkin and the cast/crew to turn around an episode at very fast speed (which West Wing is known for and probably just about killed everybody involved - probably not the best way to create tv) - even as a bottle episode such as it is.

Pam Nail

I was going to upload the intro to this episode, which is not attached to any streaming version, until I realized that the second half of it spoils the hell out of the first several episodes of the new season. So I’ve transcribed the non-spoilery bits below, to complete (most of) the context that live viewers would have had the night this aired. [piano version of opening notes of theme song] MARTIN SHEEN: Good evening. I’m Martin Sheen and I’m with the cast of The West Wing. For those of you who tuned in tonight to see our season premiere, I’m afraid you won’t. That’ll be next week. ROB LOWE: We’re eager to get back to our continuing storylines, but tonight we wanted to stop for a moment and do something different. ALLISON JANNEY: You’ll notice a few things different about this show tonight. For instance, in place of our usual main titles sequence, we’ll be putting phone numbers up on the screen where you can pledge donations to groups that are able to help with victims assistance. JOHN SPENCER: By now, nobody needs to be convinced that when they named “New York’s finest” and “New York’s bravest,” they knew what they were talking about. So we’re pleased to tell you that the profits from tonight’s episode will be donated to the New York Firefighters 9/11 Disaster Relief Fund and the New York Police and Fire Widows and Children Benefit Fund. DULE HILL: A helping hand from our family to theirs. BRADLEY WHITFORD: Now, don’t panic. We’re in show business, and we’ll get back to tending our egos in short order. But tonight we offer a play. It’s called “Isaac and Ishmael.” We suggest you don’t spend a lot of time trying to figure out where this episode comes in in the timeline of the series. It doesn’t. It’s a storytelling aberration, if you’ll allow. RICHARD SCHIFF: Next week, we’ll start our third season. That’s when you’ll see... [snip SPOILERS] [snip MORE SPOILERS from Stockard Channing, Rob Lowe, Dule Hill, John Spencer, Allison Janney and Janel Moloney] MARTIN SHEEN: That’s all for us. Thank you for listening.

MarkyO

OH WOW... HBOMax removed the intro to this episode. Before the episode started, cast members came out and addressed the situation and then talked about the episode about how it doesn't fit in to the timeline and it's written as a play so to just enjoy the episode and they'd get back to the regular story next week.

Pam Nail
>>114250678

Liz is mentioned by name in the pilot (as "Elizabeth") -- her daughter Annie is the one who's sent the Raggedy Ann doll.

D Gyre

I like this episode, but it does oversimplify some arguments, and it's a bit dated. One thing that isn't really correct is that terrorism has 100% failure rate. Over simplifying it to just the big rhetorical goals you can make that argument, but there's a good bit of research on ways terrorism does have partial success. Also the connection between poverty and terrorism isn't so simple, and a significant number terrorists are not uneducated or impoverished

MrRuss50

this episode helps remind me of just how crazy people were acting in the weeks following 9/11. Leo was way out of line but if you think back on it there was way worse than that mentality being spewed out by a larger portion of the country then we really like to admit. Being able to speak on this sentiment at a time when anything remotely anti-American could get you ostracized was courageous of Sorkin.

Peggy G

My favorite episode of the series (& now I gotta wait for y'all to get to season 5 episode 17, which is my 2nd favorite episode). I also think it's a great jumping off point, if Sorkin ever wanted to reboot the series someday somehow. Just have Billy, aka Fred, as one of the staffers in the current day White House or even have grown up to become POTUS himself.

Sandee B

You mentioned that this was shorter than a typical 42 minute network episode. My admittedly, fuzzy recollection of the actual night this aired is that they interspersed nonprofit organization information where people could make donations throughout the episode.

Weird Magic

Originally airing on October 3, 2001, 'Isaac and Ishmael' is Episode 1 of Season 3 of The West Wing. It is the 45th episode overall and has an IMDB rating of 8.2, placing it as the #7 ranked episode of this season and #30 out of all the episodes shown so far.

Taylor
>>114250894

It is definitely a spoiler, but I always laughed at Janel Moloney getting that last little comment in.

Taylor
>>114272415

They did. Little snippets before/after commercials. I also think that maybe part of the reason they don’t have the opening on HBO is due to the telephone numbers. From what I remember, they had a Red Cross number included on screen through the whole opening.

Kelsey Krehbiel

So, here's my 9/11 story. My family lived in DC at the time. I was 10 and in the fifth grade. Not long after the school day started, classmates were being called to the office to leave for the day. It being so close to the beginning of school, it was immediately weird--and then more and more classmates were going. Other adults kept ducking into the room to have hushed conversations with our teacher. By noon, two thirds of my class had gone home. The principal came in before lunch and gave us a brief explanation of what had happened. He explained that he was telling us because we were old enough, but asked us not to talk to the younger grades about it because they would likely need their parents to help them understand. I remember being confused. I remember being scared. My uncle lived in New York and I knew he worked in finance, but had no idea where or of the geography of New York and had no idea if I should be worried about him or not. At 2, when it was time for our class to go to art, the only students left were myself and one boy--my "rival" who I couldn't stand. Just as we were getting ready to go the art room, I was called downstairs to go home. My mom was a teacher in MD, and all of her students had gone home, so she came to get me (My dad was a pastor and his first church had been in NY. He also did a great deal of community organizing, so he was already involved in conversations about relief). I remember how terrible I felt going home. That one other kid? His parents both worked at the Pentagon. No cell phones at the time, or at least they weren't common yet, so he had no way of talking to his parents. I hated that kid, but I felt completely awful leaving him alone. One of my classmates' dad had been Deputy Communications Director under Bill Clinton (and she claims he was the inspiration for Sam Seaborn). He came to our class not long after and explained some of this to us. And also how terrorism cells worked and why that made fighting them so hard. That presentation and this episode have formed the foundation for what I know and understand about terrorism.

Anna

I absolutely love this episode. I got my history teacher to show it in class one day because I was having a debate about the topic with my desk mate. I love that they chose Leo, such a morally centered character, to be the voice of the racist paranoia backlash. As he said, most people would say that was unlike him. But that's the point, a lot of "good" people were reacting in a decidedly ugly way at the time.

Jeff

I haven't watched this episode since it first aired on tv, and I hadn't remembered how good it was. At the time, there were a few tv shows which were based in the real world, so there was a lot of discussion about how to include or incorporate the 9/11 events into their storylines. I do remember that "NYPD Blue" inserted a few scenes of Andy Sipowicz gazing at the New York skyline which had been so dramatically altered. I think it's best that "The West Wing" did not include 9/11 as part of its reality; the whole show really takes place in a kind of "alternate reality" in which history takes a different course sometime in the 80s or 90s (true TWW nerds can correct me on that). So while 9/11 itself doesn't change the tone of the show, the world dealing with the increasing global terrorist threat certainly played a part in the future stories and direction of the show. And I just want to point out how amazing the actors and the whole production team was to put this together on the spur of the moment within a week or two.

Sarah P

Thank you, Joe, for sharing your personal perspective on this. 💙

Sarah P

Well, if you were serious about wanting “where was I on 9/11” stories here you go: For context, I was 12 (For anyone who doesn’t know about this) In 1998, the U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya were bombed. (It was also by Islamic terrorist cells.) It — obviously — led to a security overhaul, and U.S. embassies are built differently than they were before because of it. (It was truck bombs in the parking lot, so now they only build them in ways that that’s not a worry.) My dad worked for the State Department. Two years later we were posted to Nairobi, Kenya. Everyone worked out of a temporary Embassy building, which is where I was introduced to the intense security screening (metal detectors, etc) each car had to go through before entering the lot. (Just want to say about these people, there were Americans and Kenyans, who were injured in the blast and came back to work as soon as they could!) On 9/11, we were several hours ahead because of the time difference. My mom was picking me up from school after an extracurricular. We had radios in our car that connected to the Marines at the Embassy in case of emergencies. I climbed into the car and heard that something was happening on the radio. This was unusual, and my Mom also seemed stressed. I don’t remember if it was something she said, or something heard on the radio, but something alerted me to the fact that some sort of terrorist activity was taking place. I immediately thought that something had happened at the temporary embassy, and that my dad was in danger. When she told me it was about New York, the first emotion I felt was relief — because my dad was OK. They closed the embassy for security reasons and we gathered to watch the news in peoples’ houses. I remember seeing the news footage of the second plane hitting the twin towers. Like most State Department kids I went to an international school that was partially funded by the U.S./Canadian governments, and had mostly North American staff, although the students were a pretty international mix, so I imagine the school response was pretty similar to some people who were in the U.S. at the time. We had an assembly to talk about it.

Actuarial Lurker

My where I was on 9/11 Story: I was 35 in 2001 and worked a few blocks away from Ground Zero and was on the NYC subway pulling out of the Chambers street station (directly under the Towers) just before the first building was hit. I got out of the subway at the 80 pine street station on Wall Street (AIG building) and walked to my office on 17 State Street (near battery park and right near the ferry to the Statue of Liberty/Ellis Island). I saw people's personal mail on fire raining from the sky like a ticker tape parade as i walked the few blocks to work and caught a burning Verizon phone bill that was about to land on my head. It must have floated out of the impact hole of where the first plane hit the first tower. I hurried up to a conference room at work when the second plane flew right past our 37th floor office building window. The whole building shook TWICE- once as the plane passed us at 500 mph when a few secretaries who were looking west screamed, and a second later another when it smacked into the second tower a few blocks away while we were watching the events on live TV in the conference room. We ran down 37 flights of stairs of our own building in case another plane was coming to hit other financial buildings in the area like the one I worked in. We walked over next to the Holocaust Museum and watched the 2 buildings burn. My boss was pregnant with her first child at the time and she and another woman (our head of IT) were saying what are those thuds? I took both of their heads and like in the movie Jurassic Park turned them AWAY while saying "thats the sound of the people on fire umping out the windows and hitting the pavement, you don't want to watch....". A few minutes later the first collapse happened in what seemed to be slow motion, The top of the building listed to the side for a second and then shifted back before the whole thing pancaked and that 40-story high cloud came our way. I yelled follow me and ran back towards our building but everyone else stayed (they were eventually were shuttled to Jersey City in that infamous makeshift boat lift, while I covered my face with my suit and got back to the lobby of my office building. The debris cloud was coming in as people sought shelter coming through the revolving door of our building. I knew the guards and said- "we are all going to get crushed in here or choke on the debris-filled air, can you open the emergency door to the sub-basement?" They did and we went down to the level where the elevators and security cameras from the rest if the building were run and where they had a TV. About 45 people wound up in this makeshift shelter and we could hear the second tower collapse and the military jets swarming above even though we were underground. Once we saw the air space was under control on the TV and I was able to call my wife on the payphone in the hall- all the cell lines were jammed- and let her know I was OK, I went up to my office which was on the 30th floor and go on the internet to see if the Long Island Railroad was running since all ingress and egress to Manhattan had been closed down. Around 6 pm I saw that Penn Station had reopened and I flagged down a cab up by the South Street Seaport. The driver was a Muslim who dropped off 4 or 5 people in scrubs- obviously Docs and RNs headed for the Pit and took me and 3 other business people up to Penn Station for free. All he said to us was that Islam is a religion of peace and this was an affront to Allah. When we got to the train station he picked up a few more emergency workers and headed downtown as I ran into the train station to get back to my house in the Long Island suburbs...About a week later my wife met me at work once our offices re-opened and I said to her what is that smell?...she is an MD and said that sickly sweet "pork-like" smell is what burning human flesh smells like....the next few weeks were almost as bad as 2 or 3 buildings in the area got those "white powder" packages and the whole Wall St area was swatming with military armed with automatic weapons. My wife was back on a plane for a conference the next week once the flight groundings stopped and 3 weeks after that I flew to New Orleans for a conference as well. Her flight only had 3 people on it and the pilots came out to thank them for being brave enough to fly. My return flight from new Orleans to NYC was delayed by a guy trying to board with a set of gourmet knives that he had bought.....I still flinch when I see planes circling Manhattan in holding patters as they wait to land at JFK

Youtalkingtome
>>114258606

It might not be as thought out as the rest of the show, but we get it. They scrambled to put this together and it is very moving all things considered.

Youtalkingtome
>>114267186

I bet he faced a lot of blow back. History rights itself and it's best to not be on the wrong side of it.

Youtalkingtome
>>114290764

That's quite the story. Glad your family was safe! I can imagine the level of stress you must have been under!

Youtalkingtome
>>114294301

Thank you for sharing your story. Truly. This gave me goosebumps reading it. The only person I know that was in New York on 9/11 was a college English professor I once had. Her story was also harrowing. She said she thinks about it almost every day. I can imagine your story is similar. It makes me sad that it is joked about as often as it is. Time is a great healer but at the same time it makes people forget. I know that even though I was a small child when it happened I'll never forget that day.

Luca Siracusa (Bob)

I was born in Italy in August 1999, one month before the show went on-air, so I have no real memory of 9/11 I raallly don't have a story about it, but this episode made me figure out so many stuff and ideas. I kinda felt in the right place to understand the explanations, feeling a part of the classroom and hearing such intelligent men's writing all the dialogues we saw in the episode The highlight of the whole conversation in my point of view is always Bartlet. He goes down there and has more or less 2 minutes. He makes a joke about not having any apples anymore, he makes a joke about being stuck in the White House and then he lays one of the most beautiful way to face "martyrs" I've ever heard "We need heroes. A hero would die for his country but he'd much rather live for it" I just found it really amazing, the twist in the "much rather live" is something I've never thought of and just someone like Jed could came up with something like that in the show As a lighter note: early in the episode Josh tells he didn't know he had to meet with kids and it wasn't on the schedule of what he had to do. Exactly like this episode was not on the schedule of production of Sorkin and the crew while making season 3, but they just had to address it before "going home". Nice way to put it

Youtalkingtome
>>114306833

It was very well handled. Especially considering how soon to the actual events. I love that sentiment. "A hero would die for his country but he'd much rather live for it." Hearing that in the midst of confusion and the aftermath of so much horror. Man this is a great show.

Shawn Looney

9/11 Story: I was living in Washington DC in 2001 and commuting to NYC weekly for work. However, on 9/11 I was visiting Canada for the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). It was very odd being outside the US and watching on TV as both of my "home" cities were under attack. The thing that I remember most was all the inbound international flights being diverted to Canada once the US shut down their airspace. This was a massive influx of people and, without enough hotel space for everyone arriving, the Canadian government (mainly in tiny Newfoundland) put a call out to residents to take people into their homes, etc. to have a place to stay. I think they had beds for everyone within about 2 hours after putting the call out. It was a tiny bright speck of warmth and kindness on an otherwise pretty dark day.

Youtalkingtome
>>114848657

First of all, I'm jealous that you got to attend TIFF. Secondly, it's easy to be a cynic today. Especially under those horrible circumstances. The compassion that people are capable of, truly gives me hope.