After a
"lucky seventh" season in which the series was nominated for 10 Emmy Awards (winning the Outstanding Writing in a Comedy prize for the episode "Inga") and once again winning People's Choice Awards for Favorite Television Comedy Program and Favorite Male Television Performer (Alan Alda),
M*A*S*H underwent its final cast change when a war-weary Gary Burghoff decided to leave the show after playing Cpl. Walter "Radar" O'Reilly for almost eight years.
Legend has it that fellow cast-mate Mike Farrell (Capt. BJ Hunnicutt) attempted to talk Burghoff into staying with the 4077th a bit longer, pointing out the salient fact that none of the other actors who'd left the show had found success after
M*A*S*H. Burghoff, however, felt that playing an 18- to 19-year-old Iowa naif at the age of 36 was a bit too limiting, so he politely but firmly asked for his discharge papers from producer Burt Metcalfe and creative consultant Alan Alda.
In what I believe was the classiest way to handle the situation, Metcalfe, Alda, and Burghoff set up the beginning of Season 8 in such a way that this time the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital and the loyal Monday-night-at-8 (Eastern) viewers could properly say goodbye to the cherubic company clerk. In a two-parter titled, aptly enough, "Goodbye Radar," Uncle Ed O'Reilly dies at the farm in Iowa after Radar returns from Rest and Recreation leave in Tokyo, so he's sent home on hardship discharge.
Radar's departure was also the catalyst for one of my favorite episodes of the series, "Period of Adjustment," in which BJ gets angry and bitter when he gets a letter from his wife Peg that tells him their daughter Erin called Radar "daddy" when they met him briefly in San Francisco. He and new company clerk Klinger (Jamie Farr) get stinkin' drunk; seems the former cross-dressing corporal is having a hard time living up to Radar's legendary efficiency. It's a funny episode, to be sure, but Mike Farrell really pulled off a dramatic turn when portraying the mixed feelings he has - happy for his friend Radar, to be sure, but bitter and angry that his little girl called another man in an Army uniform "daddy."
The season had quite a few episodes dealing with the darker side of war and of the 1950's McCarthy Red Scare. For instance, "Guerrilla My Dreams" put Hawkeye (Alda) in a moral dillemma when a wounded Korean woman is brought to the 4077th for medical treatment. Hawkeye, of course, wants to save her life by treating her wounds, while Lt. Hung Lee Park (the late Mako) of the South Korean army wants to interrogate her on suspicion of being a North Korean guerrilla. As chief surgeon, of course, Hawkeye gets his way about the medical treatment, but Lt. Park manages to get custody, leading to this bitter exchange:
Lt. Hung Lee Park: You have done your duty. Now, I must do mine.
Capt. Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce: [angrily] You son of a b-tch! The episode "Are You Now, Margaret?" dealt with the insidious way in which the House Committee on Un-American Activities went out of its way to root out suspected Communists from all of American society, including the Army. Written by Thad Mumford and Dan Wilcox, it depicted the "routine fact-finding" visit by a smarmy, manipulative Congressional aide (Lawrence Pressman) who's really looking for suspected Reds on the 4077th's roster. His target, the very model of loyalty to country and Army, Maj. Margaret Houlihan.
Another favorite episode of mine is "Dreams," written and directed by Alan Alda. It's a very serious episode in which the staff of the 4077th, overwhelmed by endless waves of incoming wounded, have unsettling dreams that reflect the horrors they are exposed to in Korea when they each take short naps. In it, we get rare glimpses of Peg Hunnicutt (Catherine Bergstrom) in BJ's nightmare, and Klinger gets to briefly go to his hometown of Toledo, Ohio before his vision, too, is marred by images of the Korean War.
The eighth season also saw the long overdue promotion of Father Mulcahy to captain; in the episode "Captains Courageous" (which also has the doctors filling in as saloonkeepers after Rosie's Bar owner Rosie gets hurt in a brawl), the mild-mannered chaplain gets his captain's bars.
Considering that the show was in its eighth year, it was, and still is, amazing that the writing, acting, and directing was not degrading in quality. The characters were by now fully established as a "family," and even though David Ogden Stiers' Maj. Charles Emerson Winchester III was still his Swampmates' comedic antagonist, he wasn't the "villain" that Larry Linville's Frank Burns had been.
Charles was, obviously, the target of many a practical joke from Hawkeye and BJ, but viewers got the impression that beneath the pranks and mutual irritation, the three surgeons respected one another. Better still, Winchester was more human and caring than Burns was; in the episode "Morale Victory," the classical music lover from Boston attempts to help a wounded soldier/concert pianist (James Stephens) who loses the use of one of his hands. He doesn't break his arrogant, Boston Brahmin mold radically, but his preserverance in trying to help a man who thinks his musical career is over is nevertheless touching.
Although the three-disk set issued by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment does have the advantages of presenting the 25 episodes uncut and unaltered for syndication, lovers of extra features will, sadly, have to do without neat DVD goodies as audio commentary tracks from cast and crew. If you like canned laughter, you can watch the episodes with laugh tracks. (I, on the other hand, watch
M*A*S*H without it; I hate laugh tracks, so why have to put up with them when I don't have to?)
DVD Features:
Available Subtitles: English, Spanish
Available Audio Tracks: English (Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono), French (Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono), Spanish (Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono)
M*A*S*H Season Eight: Episode List 1. Too Many Cooks
2. Are You Now, Margaret?
3. Guerilla My Dreams
4. Good-Bye Radar: Part 1
5. Good-Bye Radar: Part 2
6. Period of Adjustment
7. Nurse Doctor
8. Private Finance
9. Mr. and Mrs. Who?
10. The Yalu Brick Road
11. Life Time
12. Dear Uncle Abdul
13. Captains Outrageous
14. Stars and Stripes
15. Yessir, That's Our Baby
16. Bottle Fatigue
17. Heal Thyself
18. Old Soldiers
19. Morale Victory
20. Lend a Hand
21. Goodbye, Cruel World
22. Dreams
23. War Co-Respondent
24. Back Pay
25. April Fools
