The announcement of the cancellation of "West Wing" last month came on the night its bravest episode was broadcast: A nuclear power plant had a little whoopsie, some workers had to sacrifice their lives to save California from acquiring a permanent glow, and viewers got a reminder of the reason why no new nuclear plants have been built in this country since Three Mile Island, a message delivered right at the threshold of our president's promised world-wide nuclear revival.

It was a reminder of what the show could have been, but never quite was, in all the years it served as liberal fantasy wish-fulfillment. In trying to look like it was bucking the system, "West Wing" always wound up embracing the system, its comfortable failure never more apparent than when it was extolling the joys of globalization. Free trade was "West Wing's" Vietnam, the place where the show almost came to grasp its deep-rooted problem.

In an episode five or six years back, communications director Toby Ziegler was depicted braving waves of rude, ignorant anti-globalization protesters who descended on Washington and filled an auditorium to shout slogans at him, refusing to let him speak. Ultimately, however, he apparently got a few words in edgewise, off camera, as we are informed in a subsequent scene by an exultant colleague that Toby "blew the doors off the place" and the protesters "never knew what hit 'em" as he refuted their arguments, whatever they might have been, and made the case for corporate free trade lifting all boats, ending poverty, and saving the world.

Fast forward a few seasons to a 2003 revisitation of the theme, and things had changed. Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman was being congratulated for negotiating a trade agreement on behalf of a big tech company. The west wingers are crafting the message for the big press announcement -- "free trade produces better, higher paying jobs" -- but then Josh finds out that his corporate negotiating partner is going to outsource 1,700 programming jobs to India as a result of his swell trade deal, despite the promise of free trade to grow the new economy (i.e. programming jobs) here in the U.S. of A. The Republican Speaker of the House assures Josh that the "labor side agreements" he insisted on are never enforced and, chuckling, asks him to run for Congress on the Republican ticket. The administration's union allies drop by to acknowledge Josh for betraying them.

By now Josh is feeling not so hot, so President Bartlett takes him aside and confides that "Global economic forces are unstoppable just like technology itself." Yes, promises were made to the unions when they were campaigning. But now the administration can do naught but put on their grim faces and promise to do more to help working people with the transition, for the tides of history and change they are a-rising. The market is God. Whaddayagonnado?

It was a long way from Toby's triumphal protester smack-down three years prior, but, like an addict constructing a last redoubt of rationalization, the problem was acknowledged only as a means by which the juice could keep flowing to the pleasure center of the brain.

Still, with another three years of this-doesn't-seem-to-be-working under the bridge, who knows what another revisitation of the theme might bring? One fantasizes an episode unburdened of the show's usual mix of Clintonista consultants like Dee Dee Myers and Lawrence O'Donnell leavened with neocon empty suit John Podhoretz, replacing them with, say, Arundhati Roy and Naomi Klein. An episode in which Josh strays from a junket to New Delhi or Kathmandu and gets to see the losers in globalization's famous "winners and losers" construct: The rest of the world, toiling at those "better, higher paying jobs" that are neither. The scales fall from his eyes, the dots are connected, he sees that the man behind the curtain is pulling the levers to make the tide of history flow into his pocket. Back home, he bursts into Bartlett's office, bats aside the "creative destruction" economic homilies, and delivers something like "Baffler" publisher Thomas Frank's critique from "The God that Sucked:"

"The market is the reason our housing is so expensive. It is the reason our public transportation is lousy. It is the reason our cities sprawl idiotically all across the map. It is the reason our word processing programs stink and our prescription drugs cost more than anywhere else. In order that a fortunate few might enjoy a kind of prosperity unequaled in human history, the rest of us have had to abandon ourselves to a lifetime of casual employment, to unquestioning obedience within an ever-more arbitrary and despotic corporate regime, to medical care available on a maybe/maybe-not basis, to a housing market interested in catering only to the fortunate. In order for the libertarians of Orange County to enjoy the smug sleep of the true believer, the thirty millions among whom they live must join them in the dark."

Or words to that effect.

"West Wing" served as the TV equivalent of JFK's second term, when the troops were to be withdrawn from Vietnam, the Cold War and arms race terminated, nuclear stockpiles eliminated, and relations with Cuba normalized. But Kennedy was unable to complete his story arc -- going from anti-Commie hawk to the statesman who gradually came to realize that his own advisors and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were the greatest threat to the world's survival -- and "West Wing" will never make it to the final free-trade epiphany it was heading for.

It is a teaching moment and an opportunity lost, just as Toto had the corner of the curtain in his teeth and was starting to tug, right before Dorothy's wondering eyes.

Andrew Christie is an environmental activist in San Luis Obispo, California.

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