Episode 9 - The Trial of Leslie Knope
6 March 2012
If I wanted to be hyper critical I would point out that we know Ben and Leslie love each other. Last week hit the same emotional sweet spot hard and so this was a repetitious conclusion.
I don't particularly want to be hyper critical though. I enjoyed this a lot. While this wasn't as funny as Spin City's "Dick Clark's Rockin' Make-Out Party '99" (317) it mined the same ethics hearing formula to great effect. I particularly enjoyed Leslie's antics as her own defence attorney particularly when she drew the room's attention to an email entitled "yay." She explains "That's Y A and eighteen Ys and forty four exclamation points."
Ignoring his silly crying and exercising I thought Chris' character was written well too. He was genuinely unhappy about seeing Ben and Leslie being investigated but is also such a professional that he carried out his work to the best of his abilities. The call back to the engineer that they bribed during L'il Sebastian's funeral (316) was great attention to detail. It was the perfect well planned plot point that allowed Leslie to continue to look squeaky clean but also forced Ben to sacrifice his job to save her.
The writers were very clever to use Ethel Beavers and her transcripts so that Ben and Leslie's love for one another could be expressed in a different, comedic way, to avoid just repeating last week's love-in. I will be interested to see what happens to Ben now that he, presumably, looks for work in the private sector.
The real downside of this episode is that no mention was made of Leslie's campaign for office. It wasn't mentioned during the model UN fiasco either and it seems like the writers are picking and choosing too much. With their reputation for misinformation and character assassination it feels like Pawnee's media should be all over this story.
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