100,000 Airplanes

"100,000 Airplanes"

"100,000 Airplanes" is the 55th episode of The West Wing.

Plot

While the White House staff works intensely on President Bartlet's crucial State of the Union speech, Bartlet suddenly demands that a passage ambitiously promising a crusade to cure cancer within 10 years be included. Sam is the point person for this speech, which is billed as the most important one of the President's career and one whose failure will end his hopes for re-election. As Sam is very reluctantly interviewed for a Vanity Fair profile by Lisa Sherborne (Traylor Howard), who was once his fiancée, he lays out the process by which a State of the Union address comes about. Sam knows that the pledge to cure cancer is noble and the kind of over-reaching government should do, but also that for political reasons it can't be included in the final speech. He takes the excising of the section with great pain, and even the rousing success of the speech amongst poll members doesn't cheer him up much. Sam takes out most of his frustrations on Lisa Sherborne, who finally tells Sam she's taking herself off the story, and then lets him know that it was he and not her who ended their engagement. Sam recognizes she's right and then reads a smart, touching section that would have made the cancer-curing pledge official. As she leaves, Sam stares at the passage on his laptop and then deletes it.

Attracted to a prominent women's rights leader, Amy Gardner, Josh tries to persuade her that her burgeoning romance with a Congressman is solely a result of political machinations. He later decides that he was wrong and Amy seems more taken with him at that point. Josh is also cheered by seeing Lisa, whom he hates and was thrilled Sam did not marry, and of course by the political salvation via the SoTU address.

Episode title

The title refers to Sam's explanation of why overreaching is good:

"In 1940 our armed forces weren't among the 12 most formidable in the world, but obviously we were going to fight a big war. And Roosevelt said the U.S. would produce 50,000 planes in the next four years. Everyone thought it was a joke and it was 'cause we produced 100,000 planes. Gave our armed forces an armada which would block out the sun."

External links

• The West Wing Episode Guide