‘Madam Secretary’ season 3, episode 8 review: The election holding pattern
In some ways, it really felt like the Presidential Election that played out over the past several months was the one that would never end, and now, we gotta say the same exact thing about the one we’re ending up seeing play out on “Madam Secretary” this season.
What we saw over the course of this episode was the results of the election more or less declared a draw. Conrad Dalton did enough to stop Sam Evans and Fred Reynolds in their tracks for long enough in order to ensure that this election would go to the House of Representatives, but it didn’t take too long before that started to become all the more complicated.
Why? Blame escalating tensions regarding both Iran and Russia, an incident that the administration absolutely did not need at this time. It was enough to make everyone start to shake in their boots a little bit about the prospect of candidates using this fracas against the Dalton administration, and that they did. Both Evans and Reynolds see this as a personal flaw, one that they can jump on as they hope they can use it to create a little more leverage in regards to getting more of Congress on their side.
While we’re suffering from a serious case of election fatigue at the moment, what we appreciate about this story is that it’s working at actually showing you the finer intricacies of a process that’s not a part of recent history. It’s almost political science fiction in a way, but given how we know that political figures act at this given point in history, there was absolutely nothing about anything that we saw in here that we’d consider to be much of a surprise.
Speaking of surprises, how about Jason McCord announcing that he was voting for Reynolds, wearing a shirt with the guy, and then speaking up about him at a rally in a public video? This caused major embarrassment to the family, and led to Henry giving him a life lesson courtesy of a visit to an impoverished community. There was a part of this that felt a tad too preachy for its own good, but we did understand where the show was coming from in wanting voters to be educated on who they are supporting — a pipe dream sure, but a fun idea in theory.
The episode ended on a very dramatic note courtesy of a Security Council meeting over some further issues involving UN reporters in Iran, but before that, there were some pretty fun moments in the episode as well. In particular, we’re talking about how Daisy reacted to her breakup, and even a nice little moment between her and Matt. There’s an extended version of her performance from the episode online, and we figured that we would include that in here just for the sake of giving you something else fun to look at. Everyone had a wild night while out, but we have a feeling that after the long day of dealing with the election, they earned it.
Grade: B. An episode that had a difficult task of trying to showcase a political event without many real-life references, but one we did still nonetheless enjoy even when it did get heavy-handed with Jason. We’re not going to take our own fatigue too much into this, mostly because we know that this is a political show and were this any other election, maybe the fictionalized version for TV would be even more compelling.