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"Come on, Hawk, let's go before they run out of powdered eggnog."
Date of Review: Aug 8, 2006
The Bottom Line: Although Season Nine has fewer episodes and almost saw another cast member's desertion, it's still one of the series' best. Must-see TV indeed.
With the critical and popular success of M*A*S*H's eighth season, loyal viewers of the Emmy-winning comedy drama about the doctors, nurses, and medics of the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War could look forward to another full season of episodes.
Although everything looked fine from the audience's point of view, the series narrowly dodged the bullet of yet another cast change, this time involving Loretta Swit. Even though she had won a Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series Emmy for her outstanding performance as Maj. Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan, Swit had taken the role of Det. Christine Cagney for the pilot episode of Cagney and Lacey, which co-starred Tyne Daley. Perhaps worried that she, too, would have as bad a post-4077th career as McLean Stevenson, Wayne Rogers, Larry Linville, and Gary Burghoff, Swit asked to be released from her contract, but the producers, knowing the series had just one or two seasons left, refused, and the coveted role of Cagney went to Sharon Gless. Swit, a classy actress, kept a stiff upper lip and stayed on the M*A*S*H unit's roster as if nothing had happened.
However, production costs - including, presumably, cast salaries, went up, and the total number of episodes went down from the average of 24 per season to 20 in the 1980-81 season. Despite this, the quality of the acting, writing, and directing never diminished, and there weren't any "jump the shark" shows that insinuated any hint of creative erosion.
M*A*S*H's ninth season, watched in retrospect a quarter of a century later, seems to be preparing the Monday-night-on-CBS audience for an end to the Korean War...and the series finale. Not only are the episodes a bit more introspective than those from earlier seasons, but the cast is beginning to look a bit long in the tooth, even allowing for the premature aging that war-related stress causes in those unfortunate to be near the front lines. It's hard to ignore, for instance, the difference in the way Margaret, Hawkeye, or even Klinger appear in Season One in comparison to Season Nine.
Still, we viewers willingly suspended our disbelief and watched such outstanding episodes as:
The Best of Enemies, in which Hawkeye is halted by a North Korean soldier (Mako) who holds him at gunpoint, forcing him to treat his wounded buddy.
Letters, which has the doctors and nurses of the 4077th replying to letters sent to the unit by schoolchildren from Crabapple Cove, Maine, Hawkeye's home town.
Hawkeye: [answering a letter from a boy whose brother died in Korea] Dear Billy, don't take your love for your brother and turn it into hate. Hate causes wars and war is what killed your brother.
Father's Day, which features a visit to the 4077th from retired Army Colonel "Howitzer Al" Houlihan (Andrew Duggan), who was once on Gen. MacArthur's staff and is, of course, Margaret's stand-offish dad.
Death Takes a Holiday. It's Christamas in wartime Korea. While the rest of the staff and children from Sister Theresa's orphanage are attending a party in the mess tent, Hawkeye, BJ and Margaret are in the OR, desperately keeping a dying GI stable until after midnight, driven by BJ's determination to make sure the doomed soldier's wife and children won't remember Christmas as the day their father died.
Capt. BJ Hunnicut: Come on, Hawk, let's go before they run out of powdered eggnog.
Hawkeye: [exits The Swamp wearing glasses and a fake nose] All right, all right. Don't rush me. I barely had time to put on my face.
A War for All Seasons: Although the series was well-done and the writers tried to get the atmosphere of the show's setting right, M*A*S*H's longevity played havoc with continuity. In some of the early episodes with Henry Blake and Trapper John still on board, some episodes were set in 1952, which makes the timeline for this particular episode totally mind-bending. It begins on New Year's Eve 1950 and, in less than 30 minutes, encapsulates the year 1951 by having Father Mulcahy grow a vegetable garden, Margaret knitting a scarf which grows in size and morphs into a blanket, BJ and Hawkeye devise a kidney machine, and Charles and Klinger make a wager on which baseball team makes it to the World Series.
Hawkeye: Margaret, wasn't this potholder supposed to be a scarf?
Margaret: It hasn't been a scarf in weeks. I'm knitting a sweater for a pilot I met in Tokyo.
Hawkeye: And I'm the mannequin who came to dinner.
Depressing News: The 4077th requests 5,000 tongue depressors, and the Army sends 500,000. Outraged by the lunacy of the situation, Hawkeye decides to use them to make a "monument to Army inefficiency" in the middle of the compound.
Capt. Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce: Half a million tongue depressors. Do you know how depressing that is?
Capt. B.J. Hunnicut: Why do you always see the olive-drab side of things? The Army didn't intend to send them all here. You ever heard of a snafu?
Capt. Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce: Snafu, phooey. We wouldn't have this supply if they didn't think there would be a demand. Tongue depressors, doctors, soldiers...we're all the same.
[Picks up a depressor]
Capt. Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce: Trapper John goes. No problem, there's plenty more where he came from.
[Tosses it aside and picks up another]
Capt. Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce: B.J. Hunnicut. Same size, same shape.
[Picks up two more]
Capt. Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce: Frank Burns out, Winchester in. Only a hair's difference.
[Picks up another]
Capt. Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce: Henry Blake...
[snaps it in half]
Capt. Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce: Rest in peace, Henry. In coming, Sherman Potter.
[sighs]
Capt. Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce: My God. Hasn't this elimination tournament gone on long enough?
No Laughing Matter Can Hawkeye make it through an entire day without telling a joke? Can Charles somehow get on the good side of visiting Colonel Baldwin, the officer who had him reassigned to the 4077th after losing $400 while playing cribbage?
Although the three-disk set issued by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment does have the advantages of presenting the 20 episodes of Season Nine uncut and unaltered for syndication, DVD fans will, unfortunately, have to do without extra features 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 Nine: Episode List
1. The Best of Enemies
2. Letters
3. Cementing Relationships
4. Father's Day
5. Death Takes a Holiday
6. A War for All Seasons
7. Your Retention Please
8. Tell It to the Marines
9. Taking the Fifth
10. Operation Friendship
11. No Sweat
12. Depressing News
13. No Laughing Matter
14. Oh, How We Danced
15. Bottoms Up
16. The Red/White Blues
17. Bless You Hawkeye
18. Blood Brothers
19. The Foresight Saga
20. The Life You Save
