THE CRACKPOTS AND THESE WOMEN

"'The Crackpots and These Women'" is the 5th episode of ''The West Wing''.

Contents

Plot

Animals on highways

Trivia

References

External links

Plot

The staff participates in "Big Block of Cheese Day", inspired in part by the Cheshire Mammoth Cheese imitation given to President Andrew Jackson, when they allow meetings with fringe special interest groups that normally cannot get attention from the White House. Josh is troubled by a special "nuclear attack" card he receives, the West Wing staff prepare for an important press conference, and President Bartlet invites the staff to join him and his daughter Zoey for chilli.
White House Press Secretary C.J. Cregg meets with a group that would like to build a highway for wolves and Sam Seaborn meets with a citizen concerned about UFOs, played by Sam Lloyd.

Animals on highways

According to the Continuity Guide fansite, while no one proposes building an actual highway for wild animals, there have been efforts to construct wildlife crossings and wildlife corridors to allow animals to cross highways without becoming roadkill.

Trivia

★ Josh receives his security card almost a year after being in government.

★ NBA basketball player Juwan Howard appears as "Mr. Grant". In the opening scene, a 3-on-3 basketball game is being played in which the team of Toby, Josh, and Charlie are throughly dominating a team with Bartlet and two others. At game point, Bartlet announces that Grant will be a substitution on his team. This leads to Toby and Josh calling Bartlet a terrible cheater, referring to when he enlisted the services of tennis star Steffi Graf to win a mixed doubles match against Toby and C.J., with Graf supposedly a member of a German delegation. In this scenario, Grant is a newly hired member of the president's counsel on physical fitness, but we learn after Grant mentions that he played some basketball with "some friends of mine at Duke," that Toby shouts, "this guy was in the Final Four!" It is later revealed that Bartlet's team rallies to win the game because of Grant. Howard was a member of the famed "Fab Five" team at the University of Michigan with Chris Webber, and the team appeared in two Final Fours.

★ The reference to 'better angels' in the teaser scene and later in this episode is a reference to Abraham Lincoln's First Inaugural address in 1861: "The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

References

#The West Wing Unofficial Continuity Guide — Was there really a Big Block of Cheese in the Jackson White House?

External links

★ The West Wing Episode Guide