'The New Confident Maggie' Is A Video Engineer Now

Having left off the last episode with Neal fleeing the jurisdiction just ahead of an FBI raid of the ACN newsroom, we pick back up with a fast-moving plot involving almost as much civil disobedience as dick-measuring.

But does this kind of speed distract the viewer from the many incongruities of the plot? No. No, it does not. And here they are, in the order in which they happened.

A young man in his early thirties rolls into the office singing Cole Porter?

The most co-operative person in the whole office is known loudmouth blowhard Will?

I guess I can buy that Charlie would try to call the FBI's bluff by acting like he's going to start shooting and broadcasting the raid, though not that this would occur when the company's lawyer happens to be out of the room, and not that there's no one in the building, even in the middle of the night on the weekend, that can run the control room, requiring Don and Jim to do it.

And while I am a supporter of the New Maggie who knows how to do things like record a dude making a phone call on a train, I'm afraid I can't quite buy her being the only person present who knows how to run the board.

New Maggie doesn't have anything better/cooler to do than go through the exercise of highlighting an entire EPA report just to make a dumb point to stupid Jim?

I know Will is supposed to be an iconoclast, but ranting against the White House Correspondents' Dinner seems like something that EVEN HE would do in private rather than on the air, for precisely the reason that it's a contrived problem in this episode, one year post-rant.

I can believe that Jim would think working in TV news makes him superior to Hallie, who's being forced to slink back to the internet after her tasteless, retweet-greedy tweet on the ACN feed. I can't believe that EVEN JIM would never have heard of pageview bonuses. I know this episode takes place in the past, but it's in 2013, not 1995.

A company as big as ACN doesn't have a process in place to cover co-workers dating, such that this new HR guy would have to make himself Javert to Don and Sloan's two-headed Jean Valjean?

I assume it's because of Emily Mortimer's nudity clause, but if you make your your friend of many years meet you at a Korean spa to be sure she's not going to be wired, you don't just pat her down; bitch has got to Drop! That! Towel!

I don't care how nice a spa is: no one walks around it in bare feet, ever.

It makes no sense that the guy who goes on TV and doomsays this hard about how we're all going to die doesn't end the episode with a righteous suicide. (Though I guess there's still time in the season for him to do it.)

Will's meek as a kitten when the FBI's on his turf, but chooses his meeting at Main Justice to start flashing his dick around, on the theory that he's "too big to jail"? Is that what YOUR LAWYER, SITTING RIGHT BESIDE YOU, would say is a good idea?

A woman of MacKenzie's previously established sense of style (see: Louboutins in the go bag) would know that's an inappropriate acreage of boob for a woman her age.

The top secret whistleblower decides to show herself in person to someone she has zero reason to trust given that the reason she's making contact is that ACN hasn't run a story using her leaked documents? (But Clea DuVall: gurl, you look good!)

I know that this guy is a rich dick who's used to getting his way and unaccustomed to having his ideas questioned. But if his plan for ACN is to "disrupt" it (ugh) with user-generated content, then (a) why does he want to buy it, and (b) why would he LEAD with this in his very first conversation with the network's NEWS DIRECTOR?!

The Justice Department having decided to try to take down game as big as Will after all, maybe they should have thought about sending someone a bit more seasoned than this dry-mouthed nerd.