west wing and obamarama: it's all coming to a wonderful, political, exciting, throbbing CLIMAX

this post is about west wing. if you don't want to spoil it for yourself, don't read it.

clokes and i have been watching west wing, from the beginning, on dvd.

last night, we saw josh and donna kiss.

FINALLY.

i have been hanging off the edge of my couch, night after night, yelling at the screen "kiss her!" and saying to clokes, during odd moments, like preparing dinner, "when's josh going to kiss donna?" and "i want josh to kiss donna!"

i can get quite petulant like that.

it was so good last night, i was bouncing on the couch, squealing, and generally behaving like a real girl. and for those that know me, they would say "melba? she's not a real girl. not in a girly girly type of way."

so, i am shuddering even now as i write. legs are crossed and mind is spinning.

first there was a kiss, a kind of excited, jump up and down together congrats, we did it, things are going well in the campaign don't you think? kind of kiss. but it went on, and became a pash, complete with several camera angles circling around, and it would have kept going had not people started to go into the room.

then, another episode, a couple later, where the campaigners start slipping away from the congratulatory bottle of scotch in the hotel bar. it's the night before the election, polls open in the morning, finally,  

FINALLY, josh follows donna and they end up in bed.

of course, we don't see any sex. we just see them lying bed, supposedly asleep, after the lurve. josh opens his eyes, looks at the clock, it's after 3am, he starts to reach for her, but then doesn't. she gets up, goes to the bathroom, he jumps out of bed and follows her, hovers in the doorway oh so casually. he is so cute.

i think my out-of-proportion investment here is because if i got to choose which west winger to do it with, it would be josh.

i mean, look at him:



i love it that his hair is longer in this final season, again. it went short somewhere in the middle there, but it's back to its clown-like length, all the better to complement his maniacal grimaces over polling data and the like. i love the way he clenches his jaw. and the looks, oh the looks he gives people. there's something vulnerable about josh, despite his ragingly large intellect and capacity for understanding the masses and the mechanisms of politics, that makes me think he wouldn't know how to boil an egg. and i do. so we would be perfect together.

donna annoyed me in the early days. her rabbity face and seemingly stupid questions were irritating. as they'd stride the corridors, holding papers and doing lots of parallel talking, i found myself becoming bugged to the max by her. but now, i see, her early questions marked an inquiring and quick mind, she was learning on the job from her boss in a way that allowed her move up and away (pissing him off in the meantime). i imagine josh has never been abandoned before, even amy was still buzzing around him towards the end of their thing, it seemed he had dropped her. and then, at the end, donna has come back in, joined their campaign as media person, has her own status, her own mad skillz, which josh can appreciate, and now they can do it because their position is not a boss-assistant one any more.

COOL OR WHAT?

the last ep. we watched last night was the one where polls opened, exit poll data was coming through, polls closed, things were looking very even between the two candidates AND ALL THE STAFF WERE GETTING A ROOT. apart from arnie vinick, who was nursing some sort of hand-shake rsi. we had mrs santos "helping" her husband have a nap. we have donna asking josh if he "wanted to go for a walk, or something" during his meltdowns. we had the staffers all jumping each other, which had been going on for a while; donna knew, josh didn't. even will and kate back at the white house are doing it. strange, that for a tv series, that went for so long, it wasn't until the end that characters started hooking up. maybe it's end-of-term euphoria. i don't know, but for quite a while there, it was only the president and abbey who were getting it on.

so we are up to the election day part 2 episode, and have 6 eps to go.

the other funny thing is that somehow, we have managed to calibrate the final section of west wing with the inauguration of barack obama. this means that fiction and fact are blending into each other in a very satisfying way. i know west wing is old, but i never watched it on tv and clokes got pissed off and stopped when they started fucking around with timeslots, etc. so we have only watched it properly for the first time, from beginning to end, now. i can see myself wanting to start all over straight away. i want to see them all when they were new staffers. god, even rob lowe seems a distant memory now.

what i might do is stay up all night, watching west wing, culminating in a live cross to washington dc for the inauguration.

only problem is convincing clokes to do the same. he's back at work.