Recap and Review: The Newsroom, 2x07, 'Red Team III'.

The Newsroom
Season 2, Episode 7
'Red Team III'
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

The latest episode of The Newsroom was hands down the best episode of the season. Red Team III saw the complete undoing and total trainwreck that was the Operation Genoa story. It came as no surprise to me to see that Jerry's downfall came from the basketball game in the background of the General's interview.

The start of the episode saw the team being interviewed by Rebecca Halliday (don't you just love Marcia Gay Harden?) as we finally began to understand the extent of the 'wrongful termination' suit brought against ACN by Jerry Dantana.

The flashbacks thoughout the episode walk us through the Red team meetings with the objectve of using fresh eyes to find any holes in the Genoa story. It was also supposed to be the first time Will ever heard about the story, except that's not the case when it becomes apparent he heard the story from a 'very reliable source'. You have to wonder though why Will never voiced the story to anyone before it was brought to him during the red team meeting. Also why did no one ever check to see if Will and Charlie's source where the same?

Evidence Rundown

General Stomtonovich: Confessed in an interview that U.S. troops used sarin gas on civililians during Operation Genoa. Except we all know he didn't. Jerry grew some balls to edit the footage in his favour.
Tweets: Neal used his sources to find tweets about Operation Genoa
Eric Sweeney: One of the Genoa informants. During an on air interview with Elliot, he mentions in passing that he along with three of his fellow comrades "suffered traumatic brain injuries". This proposed a HUGE problem for his reliaiity surrounding Genoa as one of the symtoms of his injury was memory loss.
Valenzuela: The dead soldier who apparently never died but did the Genoa interview to back up his good ol' friend Sweeney.The problem with his interview turns out to be the fact that Mac lead him through the interview. He never said any knew information and only recited what Mac had told him happened.
Manifest: That piece of paper Shep gave Charlie that says but doesn't say sarin was on board the plane involved in Genoa... but hey, it turns out Shep's son was an employee at ACN until he was fired and long story short had a drug realapse and died. So this manifest? Yeah, it was fake. Hold it over a light for 20 seconds and the message 'fuck you, Charlie!' emerges in invisible ink. Charlie, duuuude, you got played. I still don't know if I should laugh about it or not.

But the ending. Damn. Jane Fonda stole the whole damn show (and I completely agree, everyone should want to be Daniel Craig). To quote Jeff Daniels: “I told Aaron when he showed us the script to this episode: ‘You wrote a Jane Fonda scene to beat all Jane Fonda scenes.’” Leona Lansing has transformed from the bitch we all loved to hate in season 1 to basically the greatest human on the planet (right behind Sloan Sabbith of course).

Highlights of the Episode

Sloan Sabbith. She's the highlight in every episode. "You wouldn’t survive in jail, Don. I would. I’d thrive.”

When Mac finally caught on to the fact that Genoa was a giant scam my heart literally broke into a thousand pieces. If you didn't want to hug her when she told the team to retract the story you must have a heart of stone

When Leona Lansing takes no shit: “No, I do not accept your resignations! And Jerry Dantana is not going to get ONE FUCKING DOLLAR! I’ve got some kick ass courtroom outfits.”

Promo: 2x08, 'Election Night, Part 1'