Written by Ron Osborn, Jeff Reno, and Rick Cleveland
Directed by Alan Taylor

The eighth episode of the first season marks one of the first episodes not written by Aaron Sorkin, and it shows. I can’t think of an episode that’s outright bad, but there are some that are less than others. At the time, The West Wing was a bit of a revelation about how politics worked. That’s emphasized in this episode. The fact that more than twenty-five years later, we have all learned all too well how politics works is a genie you can’t put back in the bottle.

Enemies opens with Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford) and President Bartlet (Martin Sheen) late one night in the Oval Office. Josh wants to go home to bed because he has to be back in four hours, but the President is regaling him with National Park facts.

Chief of Staff Leo McGarry’s (John Spencer) daughter Mallory (Allison Smith) is with him for breakfast. The two are trying to have a personal conversation, but they are interrupted. Mallory doesn’t want to get between Leo and her mother, no matter how much Leo tries to get information out of her.

The President is happy that his Banking Bill is going to pass. Vice President Hoynes (Tim Matheson) enters a Cabinet Meeting and begins the meeting without the President. President Bartlet comes in, and the two clash as the President shows him up a bit.

White House Reporter Danny Concannon (Timothy Busfield) asks Press Secretary CJ Cregg (Allison Janney) to dinner, and she refuses. He also tells her about the rumor of a clash between the President and Vice President at the Cabinet meeting. Despite the clash, the Vice President assures Danny that nothing happened.

Mallory asks Deputy Communications Director Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe) on a date. Sam accepts, but decides to let Leo know as well. In the meantime, two Congressmen add a rider to the Banking Bill to allow strip mining in an environmentally sensitive area of Montana. Josh now wants the President to veto the bill, even though it has been championed by them up until the rider was added. Danny is annoying CJ, and she tosses him out of the office area. Communications Director Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff)y asks the President for a few hours to figure out what’s going on before they kill the bill.

Leo tells the President’s Personal Aide, Charlie (Dulé Hill), to have Sam write a letter from the President for a staff birthday. Normally that’s something done by the staff. Sam tells Mallory that he can’t go to the opera with her because of the letter. Mallory figures out that her father had something to do with it and confronts him.

Josh saves the banking bill by coming up with the President designating a new national park, which thwarts the rider.

Watching Enemies all these years later seems a bit quaint. I can remember when I first heard about a line-item-veto which was supposed to be the solution to circumstances like this. We’d hear about “pork” insrted into spending bills but really had no concept of just how bad it was. I think we understand much better that quite often things that are inserted in these bills that are not desireable to most people, but Congressmen or Senators will add them to a bill that is desireable.

There’s also the animosity between the President and Vice President that’s revealed. This will be impactful down the road as well, but here it’s quite shocking. Vice President Hoynes is still holding a grudge about President Bartlet winning the primary. It’s made clear that President Bartlet had to do a lot of groveling to get Hoynes to join the ticket with him. A dispute over that also seems quaint when we have a President who tried to have his Vice President killed.

The Banking Bill, as it’s called, seems to address many things consumers don’t like, such as high interest rates and other charges as well as providing more oversight. At the time, although there was a banking lobby, there wasn’t soft money in elections to the degree that there is now since the Citizens United ruling. There wasn’t the worry that if laws and regulations were passed that certain segmnts of the population didn’t like that they would throw millions of dollars in soft money into elections against the people behind it.

It seemed like the writers were trying to steer Sam into a relationship with Mallory. That began in the pilot and has continued throughout this first season. It’s dropped downt he road, though, so it’s all for nothing. Leo conspires with the President to block Mallory from going out with Sam when he’s made aware of it. It’s all part of Leo’s struggle with his marriage falling apart. He’s trying to do the fatherly thing, even though Mallory is an adult. Mallory is trying not to take sides between her parents, but it feels like she understands both of them. However, her father deciding now to meddle in her life isn’t something she wants.

I hadn’t realized just how much chemistry there was between CJ and Danny this early on in the series. They seem to enjoy flirting and bickering with each other. If CJ wasn’t the Press Secretary, I think she would go out with Danny. However, she has to at least maintain the illusion of not being biased. It feeds into the conflict with the Vice President and shows that a relationship in their positions would not work in the long run. Someone would have to keep secrets and that’s just not the place to start a relationship.

The title of the episode comes from Josh talking about how they are spending too much time on “enemies” lately. That is somewhat surprising to me. For the most part, it still seemed like they wanted to at least pretend to put their differences aside and work together for the good of the country. I can remember Senator Ted Kennedy say that although the disagreed, he knew that Republicans loved America too. Josh sees anyone who doesn’t want to embrace their agenda as an enemy. He’s already shown how combative he can be. There’s also a feeling that CJ doesn’t trust Hoynes and the feeling is mutual. It’s well founded, as we will learn later, but at this point I have to wonder what if something happened during the campaign to sow this animosity.

Enemies is a solid episode that only suffers due to how time has muted our ability to be shocked by how government operates. It develops many of the characters a bit more without hitting the viewer over the head with the character development. There are many questions raised, some of which aren’t answered, just as in real life.

Previous episode of the series: