West Wing: The Next Generation

You know how Star Trek: The Next Generation would do those issue-based episodes, where they'd build up a really tricky and meaty moral question, and then something would happen in the last five minutes which would deflate the situation completely?

The West Wing did it last night. Last week's season opener was top, being an exciting political thriller in the Tom Clancy mould. This week, tensions were high, bombs and bullets were starting to fly, war was imminent. Someone was going to have to make a difficult (i.e. interesting) decision.
Then, in literally the last five minutes, the reason for all the ultimatums (ultimatia?) and threats just went away, and no difficult (i.e. interesting) decisions needed to be made, in one of the floppiest, laziest examples of scripting I have ever seen in a quality show. Shoddy.

Smallville did better, serving up an interesting and exciting season opener. I have only one reservation, and that's that the ending was wrong. [SPOILERS] I agree that Pa Kent should have gone up to Metropolis to bring Clark down, but he should have done it the Dark Knight Returns way. He should have gone up there with Kryptonite in hand, and smacked the boy around a bit. Instead, he goes to Clark's secret cave and Jor-El gives him superpowers so that he and Clark can have a superhero slugfest.[END SPOILERS] Disapppointing ending, but a good episode.

Haven't seen Angel yet. We got Meg's sister to tape it for us, because Meg wanted to watch The West Wing. What an excellent decision that was.