Season Six, so far (M*A*S*H)

Jul 13, 2004 14:10

My mom finally sent season six of M*A*S*H to me on Friday; miraculously, it showed up here already yesterday. :)

Anyway, I must say that already I like Winchester as a character much better than Frank Burns. The character of Burns became so flat that it became hard to endure most storylines that had too much to do with him anymore. With Winchester, though, at least in the episodes that I've seen, the character does have its redeeming qualities, so to speak, and David Ogden Stiers is so convincing in his role that sometimes I end up wondering if things were really so bad, why didn't he just leave the show! :)

I haven't quite finished half the season (I'm trying to pace myself!), so I can't say definitively about the whole season, but I do like seeing Fr. Mulcahy in most of the episodes. In some ways, I feel like this is kind of what Season 5 should have been for him, had Bill Christopher not been sick with hepatitis a good deal of Season 5.

However, there was one or two places where I was really impressed with Fr. Mulcahy already. One of them was in the episode "The Winchester Tapes", where he has a short conversation with Maj. Winchester. Another is in "War of Nerves" with Sidney Freedman. :) I'll probably end up babbling about this in a separate post, as I don't have the DVDs here to quote the conversations, and I don't have them memorised yet.

It's also interesting how the chemistry between the characters goes, because Winchester coming along seems to have "tripped up" Hawkeye quite a bit. All of a sudden, he's making more mistakes, and we're seeing more of the fallible side to him. Also, as this is season six, and already the series was about twice the length of the Korean War (*ahem* police action), we see just about everybody breaking down under the stresses and the hardships of the place. Although a comedy of sorts, Alan Alda made it requisite from the beginning that there be at least one OR scene in each episode, so as not to lose the gravity of the situation. I'm sure this helped the program immensely, because, if nothing else, it would have been terribly disrespectful of the people who were wounded and killed over in Korea back then if the show had been done as a "pure" comedy. This season, though, seems to be turning even further away from a lot of the "comedy" aspects. (Then again, I watch all the episodes the "Brit" way, that is, without the horrid laugh track.)

It's interesting, because I come up with these "insights" when I see a "new" season, but if I watch episodes individually, I don't.
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