No Exit (The West Wing)

"No Exit" is episode 108 of The West Wing. The title is a reference to the play by Sartre, which is briefly alluded to by Will Bailey, who mentions the famous line "hell is other people."

Plot

The President, Leo and Debbie return in the motorcade from the White House Correspondents Dinner.

Debbie has a cold and C.J. is carrying a bouquet of flowers. Resentments fester when the White House is locked down after a suspicious substance is found in the air near the Oval Office. So it's off to the showers whilst donning surgical masks for the President, Charlie and Debbie, on the orders of several no-nonsense guys in HAZMAT suits. Staffers must remain where they are—and with whomever they're with. The pairings for the evening produce little joy among the staffers who are then stuck together without any choice in the matter, including:

• Toby and Will Bailey. Toby's furious that at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, the Vice President made a very serious and sober speech in comparison to the jokey, silly one by the President. Will points out that everyone takes cheap shots at the VP and he's been passive enough about it. Toby then demands veto power over the VP's speeches and Will tells him to forget it, leading Toby to try and leave the office they are in (actually and ironically the office Will had before Toby had him evicted) with the result that a Secret Service agent physically restrains Toby to keep him in the office. Will later says Toby's bitter because Will's starting his career at a level Toby's soon going to leave, and that Toby's too tired to take a younger political staffer and "take me down". Toby later admits the VP made the most appropriate speech of the night and says Will should have written that same speech for the President.
• Donna and C.J. Donna has already been confronted by an angry staffer who was thrown off the upcoming Gaza CODEL when Josh tasked Donna to join it. C.J. recognizes this as typical Josh manipulation but also angers Donna by saying she puts up with it because of how she feels about Josh. Donna later returns the favor when she sees C.J. cancel a trip with her boyfriend for no good reason, and bristles when C.J. asks why Donna didn't ask out a young reporter who was flirting with her. C.J. seems to get under Donna's skin the most when she bluntly says that despite Donna's insistence that Josh has given Donna every opportunity to expand her career, she'd have outgrown her job as his assistant 3 years ago. They stop speaking to each other, but Donna also ignores Josh's bellowing and leaves the White House once the crisis is over without tending to Josh.
• Josh and Kate Harper. Josh is irritated when he learns Kate cut a joke he wrote about the Panama Canal from the President's speech. He also doesn't appreciate her name/rank/serial number approach to conversation. Eventually, she opens up a little and talks about what the crisis could be (she correctly deduces it's a limited-scale biological scare) and also gives some hints to her background of covert operations overseas. When the crisis ends, Kate tells Josh she cut the joke not because it wasn't funny, but because a U.S. nuclear submarine was transiting the Canal in real life and she felt it was best to not potentially publicize that.
• Leo and Abbey. Leo notices that the First Lady is using anti-anxiety medication. He's also not happy that she's decided to do volunteer medical work at a clinic in a rough part of D.C. Abbey also notes Leo needs to watch over his own physical issues, and pointedly tells him that she's going to keep volunteering regardless of what impact that has, because that was the deal she made to return from Manchester and reunite with her husband the President.

At episode's end, the President, Debbie, Charlie and Agent Butterfield discuss the scare, which turns out to have been a live drill, meaning there was no specific contagion but no one was told in advance that there would be the alert-lockdown that took place.

Once Debbie and Charlie leave, Agent Butterfield and the President discuss the incident, which seems to have been prompted by an actual biological attack. They discuss a chemist who is under surveillance by the FBI and has tried to acquire materials from the CDC, to which the President exclaims "on a need to know basis, who needs to know this much."

Notes

Reference List

External links

• The West Wing Episode Guide
• No Exit at TV.com