M*A*S*H 2x11, Carry On Hawkeye
The Long Goodbye, Altman (1973)
M*A*S*H, Season 3 (1974)
aaannd
M*A*S*H, Season 4 (1975)
Remember for three years in the 1970s when we were just doing this apparently
sonictoaster replied to your post “M*A*S*H - Viewguide, S4”
There’s a Rahsomon?!?!!
Tarra I love a Rashomon
MY ONLY COMPLAINT, loathe as I am to EVER look a gift Rashomon in the mouth you KNOW I’m ravenous for them always, but that is why oh GOLLY you can give me more than two versions of the incident! I would of sat there ALL DAY, everyone in that ROOM show me how you saw it!!! No. 1 Please Return To This Well prayer for the next seven seasons thank you
M*A*S*H - Viewguide, S4
Are you interested in the long-running anti-war situation tragicomedy M*A*S*H (1972-1983), but there are simply so many asterisks and so many episodes?
Well I can’t help you with the asterisks, but nor can I help myself: I started watching all 11 seasons of M*A*S*H, and bringing back for you my viewing selections, chosen for The Qualities.
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In which we lose two of the three top billed cast members and gain two new ones, a couple of the regular writers and directors also seem to cycle out, and in the ensuing slightly confused flooding of our previously steady stream, Frank is sinking like one of those water-logged stumps, someone seems intent on trying to keep Margaret from also getting dragged down by him through the approach “she’s just not around again, idk,” Radar is somehow swimming up-stream and now seems several years younger than he was when we started, and Alan Alda is piping up more and more to point out the banks and steer us into deeper waters, and if he’s also maybe altering our course just a little, let him.
Meanwhile, TIMESCALE: we learn in the opening scene that the first three seasons have timelooped for “just over a year” :) elated with this data :))
And so we enter M*A*S*H, Part Two:
M*A*S*H - Season 4
Recommended sequence
4x01-02 ‘Welcome to Korea, Parts 1 and 2’ - Acting CO Frank Burns really thought he was going to get to mold their new doctor Hunnicutt into a Mini Frank, but did not account for Hawkeye Pierce, on a desperate scramble to the airfield, to pick him up while still reeling and reckless from having just lost his best friend, and in this, one of the most riveting figures BJ has ever encountered. TOO LATE, he got his hands and damage all over him already! Anyway I helplessly detailed exactly what goes down in these if you are BJ Hunnicutt (BJ…Hunnicutt) in my increasingly disclosing notes, so stay tuned for that.
4x04 ‘It Happened One Night’ - Not to be a weirdo and skip to Colonel Potter already being here, but this one is really good. This is one of my quiet favorites of the season. And I think this works so much better as the one to follow the two-part premiere actually. Hawkeye and BJ aren’t quite in sync yet—this is accurate. Hawkeye and Margaret continue to get more in sync—this too is accurate. Lots of Klinger (LOTS of Klinger) (hirsute…), Radar being so irritated with the chaotic bumbling of the new private is so funny, and you’re still getting a good impression of our small, forthright new CO: regular Army, but you know what? Maybe…our regular Army. And that could rule actually. Oh: AND EVERYONE’S SO COOOLD. My fav-orite!
4x05 ‘The Late Captain Pierce’
BJ: “For he was a jolly good fellow…”
Hawkeye: “I was much too young to die.”
A clerical error renders Hawkeye legally dead. M*A*S*H x Catch22 for real, murder me. And, five episodes into the new season of an episodic sitcom and they were still letting Hawkeye be torn up over those he’s lost, and have this wholly new emotional register with his new friend BJ, way longer for both than I’d thought they would let him have. But y’know, Alda got to direct this one.
4x09 ‘The Kids’ - Great TV show setup: learn things about the characters by how they read bedtime stories to dislocated orphans. If you guessed, “oh yeah, and that’s gonna create the moment where Hawkeye finally lets himself start to fall in love with BJ,” you are a better guesser than I!! But man what a good choice. Alda. (Back in the chair.)
4x10 ‘Quo Vadis, Captain Chandler?’ - I just adoooore Dr. Sidney Freedman. Any scene with Sidney in it: a balm. Here he returns for the episode in which the 4077th gets a wounded soldier who says he’s Jesus Christ. Meanwhile, Radar is now twelve.
4x19 ‘Hawkeye’ - They gave the rest of the regular cast the week off and just had Hawkeye monologue with a concussion for 25 minutes, ambling around a Korean family’s farmhouse with surprisingly disconcerting candy apple red syrup creeping from his temple, live-narrating his own self-diagnosis, doing snippets of musical numbers, and just generally rambling as he tries to keep from fainting before his rescue arrives. A lot of oscillating between being about to keel over and quashing down his fear to put on a blithe front for an audience who can’t even understand him, and a beautiful cow. In short, crafted for me special! I actually made this meme to explain to a friend why I was so undone by The Fabelmans (nerd alert), but the thing is, it always worked because it was also about what it’s about:
4x21 ‘The Novocaine Mutiny’ - Frank brings Hawkeye to trial for mutiny. He could, wildly, literally hang for this, but most of all: you bet there’s a Rashomon (scream).
4x25 ‘Deluge’ - I don’t know what to call these exactly, but they tend to do a couple of them a season. Usually, not always, they’re letter writing shows, with the letter narration forming the framework instead of an overarching plot, letting them do just a sequence of scenes somewhat related. Bullet point stories. This one however the scenes are intercut not with something else from the world of M*A*S*H, but actual historic footage from the period, in easily the most artistically experimental episode they’ve done yet. It’s all jarring juxtapositions of a very long surgical run with what was on TV back at home in 1952, with a jarring editing rhythm to match, which wasn’t fully working for me and then soooo working for me. Bit of an ‘O.R.’ echo, but so much odder and dreamier, in like a David Lynch way, and I think the sensation is well worth the list.
4x26 ‘The Interview’ - Anndd then you do this one next, which follows on the previous one almost like a brief bit of serialized storytelling. It’s all black & white and everyone is just being interviewed by a TV journalist about how they are (not) getting through it. At one point I paused to write this and let out a shaky yelp at discovering I was only 9 minutes in. At another point I had to pause to create my own break where there would normally be one just to let out mooore shaky sounds at an image Father Mulcahy had just described that will be lodged in my mind for the rest of my actual, actual life. Happy Season 4 Finale!!
Season 1 • Season 2 • Season 3 • Season 4 • To be continued
MASH doctors be woken out of a dead sleep by corporals in the middle of the night and dozily hanging on to their wrists for 4-12 television seconds, and it’s something like more than I can say idk
M*A*S*H, 3x11 ‘Adam’s Rib’ / 4x05 ‘The Late Captain Pierce’
M*A*S*H, Season 3, Episode 5 - ‘O.R.’ (1974)
M*A*S*H - Season 3, misc. notes
Decided to just toss these up. Since I had started taking them. Thoughts & observations that did not readily lend themselves to my viewguide write-ups – Appendix material
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Ah they’re letting the actors ride around on the running boards of the truckbulances this season, I see. You know they were amped. ~Action Stars~
Standout character design on this show tbh, real feat of just styling and posture. Alda and Rogers are nearly the same height, similar build, and usually wearing one of two of the exact same monochrome outfits, and yet they have completely distinct silhouettes. I bet if you’ve watched this show, all I have to do is say “back of collar flipped up and hands in pockets, surgical cap cocked at an angle” and “hands loose and collar down, surgical cap square like a beanie,” and you know exactly who is who.
I am so supportive of how they kept making Gary Burghoff play the trumpet while, seemingly, forbidding him from taking any lessons or practicing.
I’ve now seen three separate Bela Legosi as Dracula impressions by three different characters in three seasons of M*A*S*H. I think we should not underestimate the cultural reset of Bela Legosi as Dracula.
memory-for-trifles replied to your post “This is just guys and a chaplain sharing a steak…”
I may never watch MASH but I already know I love glasses chaplain
It is a really important skill to hone to be able to pinpoint which one is Yours in your friends’ shows they blog about that you may–and this is key–never see. And I have good news you picked correctly!!!!! (Also my dad’s favorite.)
The thing about Father Mulcahy is that I love him so much, and starting in season 3 I started having a bit of a breakdown about him because I realized it was partly the Plautus Principle. When I was in college some theater friends and I put on a student production of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia in the drawing room of a big old house turned into college housing, and in that play there is an endearing & inconsequential tortoise called Plautus. We had like $250 so this tortoise was played by an apple-sized, yet realistic, plastic figurine I ordered from a kids science supplier. Quinn, our actor playing Septimus, doted on this miniature plastic tortoise. He would do all this business in scenes, like using my pen knife to cut tiny apple slices and pretend to feed them to him, or affectionately patting his little head before leaving the table. The audience (close and well-lit; this was a living room in afternoon light) was smitten with this. “Everyone loves Plautus,” I remarked to our director while we were cleaning up after the second show. He smiled. “Quinn loves Plautus. And we love to watch Quinn love Plautus.”
The thing about Father Mulcahy is that I love him so much, but it’s not just me, it’s not just because of me: the show loves Father Mulcahy so much. And that’s remarkable! This is a medical base sitcom about [coping with the horrors of war by] getting very drunk off homemade gin and flirting with whoever walks by while making blackly comic cracks about futility and senselessness, and Father Mulcahy is a true-blue, sweet-as-a-button chaplain, earnest and dorky and sheltered and faithful and kind, and the show is like aahh we love you, and cutting him apple slices. He’s so funny. That’s how you can really tell. The joke isn’t on him, he gets jokes, they’re all just perfectly in keeping with the kind of humor a true-blue, sweet-as-a-button chaplain would have. He’s just doing his honest best and they love him, the show loves him, our favorite rascal characters love him, and it makes me so happy to see. We love to watch them love Father Mulcahy.
This is just guys and a chaplain sharing a steak in a normal way, I don’t know what to tell you, Frank.
M*A*S*H, Season 3, Episode 18 - ‘House Arrest’
The Long Goodbye, Altman (1973)
M*A*S*H, Season 3 (1974)
aaannd
M*A*S*H, Season 4 (1975)
Remember for three years in the 1970s when we were just doing this apparently