I'll Try To Fix You

Written by Aaron Sorkin
Directed by Alan Poul

Directed by At the office New Year's Eve party, MacKenzie asks Will to speak with her boyfriend Wade. He works for the government department in charge of prosecuting financial crime, and wants Will to know that its budget has been decimated. Meanwhile, Don shares his idea for setting up Jim with Maggie's roommate Lisa, but nobody except for Don is into it. Will, still reeling from seeing Mac with a boyfriend, follows Sloan's advice and starts up a conversation with a woman who turns out to be gossip columnist Nina Howard. When Will finds out what she does, he lectures her until she throws her drink in his face. The incident is reported in Page Six the next day.

Will asks the staff to pull together stories they didn't pay enough attention to in the previous year. After shooting down most of their suggestions-including Neal's obsession with Big Foot-he settles on two stories Jim and Maggie provide, one about the mistaken notion that Obama plans to take away people's guns, and the other about a false story that the President's trip to India cost 200 million dollars a day.

Will goes on a date with a friend of Sloan's, but the night takes an odd turn when he finds a loaded gun in her purse. The next evening, Will continues his "mission to civilize" with a different woman and castigates his date for watching reality television. Once again he ends up with a drink in his face and his name in the gossip column. The first woman, who jealously reads about the encounter, sells her story to the gossip magazine TMI, which then runs the feature "My Night With Will McAvoy: Sex, Drugs, and Guns." As Will's team tries to figure out how to do damage control, Charlie realizes that the leaks to the gossip pages are coming from their own house. This is Leona's way of following through on her threat to "create a context" for firing Will. Mac realizes then that Will allowed a three year non-compete clause in his contract-"a death sentence for a TV news anchor"-just so that he'd be able to fire her.

Jim tells Maggie that he and Lisa didn't really hit it off, but Don is convinced otherwise. That night he suggests Maggie call Jim about an economics story. While she does, Don dials Lisa's number, and her distinctive ring tone, Rod Stewart's "Do You Think I'm Sexy", blares in the background of Maggie's call to Jim, as the two are next to each other in bed. In a staff meeting the next day, Maggie gives Jim a tough time about lying to her, and a fed-up Jim puts Maggie on the assignment desk as a punishment.

At the desk, Maggie spots an alert come through and runs to share the news: Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords has been shot. The newsroom staff springs into action. A source tells NPR that she has died, but Jim and MacKenzie refuse to report it until they hear it from a second source. Reese storms into the studio and tells Will that if he's not current people will turn the channel. Don doesn't care, "She's a person," he says. "A doctor pronounces her dead, not the news."

The staff's instincts are proven right when Maggie speaks to the anesthesiologist preparing to perform Gifford's surgery-she's alive. In a moment of triumph, all of the day's bad blood is washed away.