The Newsroom Recap: Is That All There Is?

Back to the newscast at the top of the episode, and Will’s giving a lecture on what RINOs are because that’s hard-hitting news. He’s bloviating about how the Tea Party are the real RINOs but I’ll let Clint Eastwood explain it better:

“I was an Eisenhower Republican when I started out at 21, because he promised to get us out of the Korean War,” [Eastwood] told GQ. “And over the years, I realized there was a Republican philosophy that I liked. And then they lost it. And libertarians had more of it. Because what I really believe is, let’s spend a little more time leaving everybody alone.”

Was that so hard, Will?

Four days earlier and Neal and Lonny are still trying to smoke out Will’s alleged stalker. I don’t mean to diminish the importance of cracking down on internet cranks but it’s been six, seven months and all “Charizma’s” done is post some vague threats on a message board. While some random day player who’s lives under a rock and thinks it’s very urgent that he bring in a messengered envelope marked “Personal and Confidential,” Lonny, who’s gotten comfortable in this gig, tells Charlie they should wait while Neal, who has no idea what the fuck he’s doing, wants Charlie (who is his boss’s, boss’s, boss’s boss) to approve his wasting his work hours posting on message boards. Smooth, Neal. Lucky for you, Charlie’s a drunken old geezer and he approves Neal’s request. While Neal skips out because he beat Lonny and Lonny storms out plotting Neal’s “accident” Charlie sees that the envelope is addressed from “The East River” and opens it.

You say superfluous, I say diversity!

Not content to just verbally rehash the season, now Will’s watching the opening scene from the pilot and reminiscing about how naïve they were that they actually thought the show would only get better from there. Jenny’s asking the panel why America’s the greatest country in the world. Before we get to watch that really “powerful” speech of Will’s, again, Mackenzie and Charlie show up to talk about how much Brian sucks, again, (He just reported the truth, like Will told him.) and drop a deus ex machina on Will’s ass.

The nurse he enjoys berating and belittling has a 96-year-old great aunt named Dorothy Cooper who lives in Tennessee and is having her voting rights denied because she doesn’t have the proper ID that is now required and, due to her age and the circumstances of her life, I believe she doesn’t have her marriage license which shows her name change so getting the acceptable form of ID for non-drivers was exponentially more difficult. Guess the nurse wanted him to earn some of his millions doing a little reporting.

Mackenzie and Charlie are dangling that carrot in Will’s face hoping to lure him out of bed with the chance to be a righteous blowhard on TV but he just wants to talk about the voice mail he allegedly left for Mackenzie that conveniently begins with “I’m not just saying this because I’m high.” Because they’re all old it takes them about an hour and a half of going around with the “I left you the message, I never got it,” until Charlie hears Baba O’Rileystart up in the background and realize, “Duh, Nina intercepted the voice mail.” True to form, Mackenzie still doesn’t get it, so Charlie has to explain it with finger puppets.

Technology doesn’t make sense to me because I’m a girl.