It’d be nice to be able to say it’s hard to identify what’s wrong with this episode, but it isn’t. Hawkeye’s letter home is an empty frame to justify the episode. Real transitional scenes could bring it all together–more on the Frank and Hot Lips fight, more on the doctor who isn’t, more on Radar’s high school diploma by mail. It’s a hodge-podge of material tied together by Hawkeye’s aloof letter home.
There are a handful of good scenes–Hawkeye in the mess tent naked and Frank getting drunk are both great setups the episode never carries through on. The scene with Radar and Henry over the high school diploma could have easily been utterly poignant and is instead a joke gone wrong.
Not knowing how the writing process worked–was the episode conceived as a “Dear Dad” episode or did they just fill in the blanks (which I suspect)–makes it hard to discuss the episode… though it’s clear both Hot Lips and Trapper are sorely underutilized and Henry and Radar are very directly cheated out of a great scene together. Only Frank gets the really good scene, but even it’s too short.
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1 Marionette // Mar 30, 2008 at 11:30 am
It does rather feel like leftovers made up from a bunch of ideas they couldn’t stretch to fill episodes of their own.
There are some nice scenes, but a lot of it doesn’t go anywhere; like we get Frank’s getting drunk after a row with Hot Lips, but we don’t actually see the row, and we never see them reconciled. Radar’s high school diploma is a single scene that has no bearing on the rest of the story. And why would Hawkeye be writing about it, even if he knew about it?
I liked the fake doctor part best, and would have liked to have seen that more developed, but I think it might have collapsed under the weight of its own absurdity. Like how could someone who couldn’t be bothered to study be as good a surgeon as Hawkeye? How did he get there in the first place, what did Radar find in his file that gave the game away, and why was he going around pretending to be different people anyway?
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