The show opens with Casey reminding viewers to set their alarms tomorrow if they want to catch "Desmond Corey's assault on Mount Everest." He says the first live footage will be coming back from Corey's team at 2 a.m. Eastern, and he hopes viewers will join Dan and Casey live at that time for what he's sure will be a very exciting event. Yeah, I would have this marked in my day planner too: "Watch umpteenth person climb Everest." Do these dingbats know it's been done before, hundreds of times? They go to commercial.

In the control room, Jeremy is laying out Everest's vital stats. "29,000 feet," he says. "Do you know how tall that is?" And Will says -- wait for it, this is great -- "It's 29,000 feet." No, seriously. That is the funniest line ever delivered on a television show. Ever. Chris says it's actually 29,029 feet, and I was premature in saying Will's line was the funniest of all time, because Dana comes up with, "It's those last ten yards that'll kill ya," raising the bar in terms of general hilarity. Jeremy then expresses the size in terms of metres (8,848), but when Natalie tells him it sounds more impressive expressed in feet, he goes back to Imperial. Then Natalie and Dana share another one of their weird "isn't he great?" smiles, like, what kind of weird criteria do these women have for an ideal boyfriend? Jeremy's looking for something than he can use as an example -- you know, a certain number of these laid end-to-end to give a sense of the size of the mountain. Elliot suggests 29,000 rulers, which I thought was pretty damn funny (I'm not being sarcastic this time). Jeremy complains that they're not getting into the spirit of it, but maybe it's because the rest of the gang knows it's been done many times before. Dana then threatens Jeremy with violence and he says, "I'm just saying it's a big mountain." Dana says, "And I hear ya!" and then...that's it. The opening scene is over. It ends with "And I hear ya"? The music was even different. It didn't punctuate the punchline (not that "And I hear ya!" is much of a punchline) with that little bam bam! thing; there was just this little organ flourish that left me with a vague sense of unease. And at the risk of alienating SN fans for whom this is potentially their Favourite Scene Ever, I'd just like to suggest that maybe Sorkin could have done a second or third draft to make it, you know, good.