Unite or Die

I am taking 3 points off this episode entirely on the sheer absurdity, constitutional impossibility of John Adams casting the deciding vote on ratification of the Jay Treaty. Not only did this not happen it cannot happen. Per plain text in the constitution a treaty is ratified iff 2/3rds of the Senate votes to do so. Therefore, in the event that a treaty receives 50% of the votes in the senate it is dead and the vice president tie breaking vote is irrelevant. Screenwriters are taught to keep characters active-especially main characters-and I am sure that is why this idiocy exists. John Adams has to date cast the most number of tie-breaking votes as VP-Harris might be giving him run for his money soon!-so the option was open to give Adams something to do in that way but most of these votes are trivial in comparison to the Jay treaty. The Jay Treaty is really important for set-up of the next episode in terms of story as well but a more creative approach should have been taken to reconcile these competing interests. Vice Presidents do not do a lot. Adams was famously frustrated by this. Perhaps we should have focused on that.

This episode manages to contain much of the worst content in the series. The characters make dumb decision after dumb decision, behave more uncivilly and viciously with one another than could possibly be warranted under the circumstances, and continuity is nearly forgotten about: for Christ's sake, Washington repeats the same bit of monologue twice in the same conversation, word for word! What on earth was going on in the editing room that they couldn't have possibly fixed it?!

It's rather boring too - perhaps it's a stylistic choice, reflecting how much these years sucked for John Adams, but I think that it's just uninspired, the same as the title which is a ripoff of the series' 1st episode.