r/mash

I just finished watching S5E13: Exorcism, and it’s been really on my mind how much i appreciate the example Father Mulcahy set for my young self when watching with my dad.

I grew up in a church that taught intolerance to all other religions, even different churches. Yet, my dad never seemed to mind Mulcahy’s example of curiosity and tolerance throughout the show.

I was always intrigued by Mulcahy’s attitude toward the priestess performing the exorcism. He seemed to almost celebrate her existence and her actions, and i find that to be such a unique attitude from someone of the cloth. To be fair, i did not grow up Catholic, but i never got the impression that Catholics are very tolerant of other beliefs, similar to what i grew up in.

My point is that i appreciate how MASH allowed me a window to see beyond the only thing i knew. I have moved on from that religion, and i have an appreciation for people’s beliefs even if i don’t believe in such beliefs myself. I find that one’s beliefs like this are a way to find peace within oneself and with the world around us, and i think that’s important for people to find. As long as the belief isn’t harming anyone, i can appreciate it.

I imagine there are plenty of others here with a similar experience. I’d love to hear more.

Found detective potter.

My wife and I have watched and rewatched MASH countless times. We started developing this theory when we wanted to try to justify the glaring continuity issues throughout the show, and this is what we’ve come up with. We are not the only ones to have this idea. I mentioned it in a comment months ago and was informed that there are multiple versions of this fan theory, so I don’t want to make it sound like my wife and I are the originators of this theory. We decided against looking into the other versions of this theory until we have completed our “version” of it, so there are likely many more out there that are better fleshed out than ours, but this is the nuts and bolts of it…

One of the most frustrating parts of being a MASH fan and binge watching it has to be the almost deliberate lack of continuity in it. In reality, the lack of continuity is a result of having an 11 year show depicting a 3 year war, as well as the typical issues that arise with casting and maintaining a coherent story line over a decade.

Another one of my favorite shows is Hogans Heroes, which suffers from similar continuity issues. However, someone has gone to amazing lengths to create an episode guide in chronological order for HH that stands up fairly well to basic scrutiny. No matter how hard you try, it’s just not possible to do the same thing with MASH. So this is how we’ve justified it in our “head cannon.”

One of the underlying themes throughout all 11 seasons is how Hawkeye almost always come out smelling like a rose despite some fairly reprehensible character traits. He also comes off as a professional comedian, not just with his jokes but with his timing, delivery, etc. But there are a handful of episodes where he seems human and, dare I say, flawed.

The episodes that really led us to explore this were the interview episodes with Clete Roberts and Goodbye, Farewell, Amen. He doesn’t come off as a comedian in those episodes. He comes off as someone suffering from severe PTSD who is unsuccessfully using humor to cope with the horrors of war. And it’s not just a single line or scene. His interviews with Roberts and his time with Sydney in GFA are not funny. They are painful to watch. And specifically in GFA, he doesn’t seem like the main character of a sitcom. He seems like the subject of a documentary or a training video for counselors.

So we started wondering, what if those episodes aren’t the exceptions? What if they were displaying the “real” Benjamin Franklin Pierce? And if that was the case, how do we justify his portrayal in the rest of the series?

That’s how we came up with the theory. And tbh, it explains away many if not most of the errors, goofs, and lack of continuity prevalent throughout the series. Our viewpoint is that the series is Hawkeye’s retelling of his time in Korea, told through the lens of someone who has narcissistic and borderline personality disorders as well as PTSD.

The stories don’t have to make sense; the timelines don’t have to add up. They are all retelling of individual events or episodes from his time in Korea, not meant to be taken as gospel truth or investigated deeply for how they line up to other stories he has told. There’s an episode of King of the Hill where Peggy calls out Cotton for his WWII exploits against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan being literally impossible given the timelines. He shrugs it off and realizes he was wrong, but not because he was lying. His stories were how he coped with the war, and they became his memories. Our theory is Hawkeye does the same.

There are a few episodes that seem to offer a peak behind the curtain to the “real” Hawkeye, but idk if I’d go so far as to say they completely fit the theory. Bananas, Crackers, and Nuts, Hawkeye, and Dr. Pierce and Mr. Hyde fit this mold. If you’re watching it like most people do, these episodes seem to highlight his eccentricities and suggest that maybe he went a little too far from time to time. Watching it using our theory, they appear to be an actual glimpse into his “real” character.

One thing that gives some backbone to our theory is that we rarely ever see any scenes/storylines without Hawkeye in them that couldn’t have been retold by him with second hand information from BJ or Klinger. Whether it’s escapes with Winchester or jeep trips with Margaret or fishing trips with BJ, all of the stories that don’t feature Hawkeye could have been relayed to him for him to retell.

I get that there’s no way the series itself was written from this frame of reference. But the more I dive into it, the more it seems to hold up. I’d love to hear other people’s opinions and evidence either for or against the theory. It’s definitely not perfect, but it holds up pretty well, at least for me. And it gives us another to keep watching the show.

After they pick up BJ and sneak Radar into the O-club with BJ's insignia, the colonel confronts them and Hawkeye riffs an excuse with "corporal captain" experimental rank. BJ responds (like he did with "Rudyard Kipling" and "Auto Club" earlier), "Coleman Hawkins, right?" I assumed that was a reference to Hawkeye's improvising a story, much like a jazz musician (Coleman Hawkins was a jazz saxophonist). Any thoughts?

Originally introduced in the film, he was a major secondary character in early episodes. Whatever happened to him?

https://preview.redd.it/jhqbqhlyi7bh1.png?width=703&format=png&auto=webp&s=974d1541664e0220b0b6a33b90ad51679762e16e

I’ve posted on here multiple times before about how my wife and I will choose a particular character or theme to follow each time we rewatch the series. It’s how I learned to really appreciate Larry Linville’s acting ability, realized just how interchangeable the nurses and their names were, and how we came to be convinced that the entire series minus a handful of specific episodes are Hawkeye’s narcissistic retelling of his time in Korea.

This time through, we’re doing deep dives (or at least shallow dives) on any of the historical or pop culture figures referenced in the show that we aren’t already familiar with. It’s actually a lot more time intensive than our other rewatches, but it’s been a lot of fun so far to see what cultural references that we missed out on.

A lot of the times, it’s simply looking up an actor or actress on Wikipedia or IMDb to see what they look like and what they starred in. Other times it lines up perfectly with the characterization of the MASH staff members, like Frank and Margaret referencing Father Coughlin or Reverend Davidson. I had never heard of either of them outside of MASH, and honestly thought that they were just throwaway lines until we looked them up and saw how well they matched Frank and Hot Lips’ uber religious personas in the early years.

But none of them have shocked me quite like Aimee McPherson. For reference, in Welcome to Korea, Frank and Margaret have this conversation right before Frank asks her if it would be ok to forge MacArthur’s signature and a personal message to him:
—Margaret, whatever happened to good
old meat-and-potatoes Christianity?
—Whatever happened
to Aimee McPherson?
—Poor soul went up in her plane
and was never heard from again.
—Frank, that was Amelia Earhart.
—Oh, yeah.

I’ve heard those lines dozens of times but never thought more about them since the joke was that Frank mistook someone with a similar name for the world famous Earhart. But McPherson’s story is absolutely wild. She was a pioneer in using mass media to broadcast an evangelical Christian message. And like many of the televangelists that would follow in her footsteps, she was caught up in an affair.

Only instead of weeping and asking forgiveness, she faked an elaborate kidnapping plot to cover up her affair. The scandals didn’t stop there, as she would eventually be found dead from an (accidental?) overdose of barbiturates. It’s truly a wild story, and well worth the time it takes to read her Wikipedia page.

If nothing else, it’s yet another reminder that you’ll never get to a point where you’ve watched MASH too many times

I just rewatched S10E22, "That Darn Kid," and I've had a new thought.

Charles really wants the vase that BJ wants because he thinks it's valuable. He realizes he has no cash until payday.

Am I the only one who thinks that Charles is the type of man to put some cash away for an emergency? Maybe $20 every payday or a bunch at once, but I definitely feel like he'd save some "for a rainy day" and hide it in the mattress or in his footlocker.

I do realize it wouldn't have been funny lol. Just a thought I had.

What are your thoughts?

I can still remember seeing this episode for the very first time as a teenager over 20 years ago, and it left quite an impact on me for Margaret's (in)famous "lousy cup of coffee" scene. It was one of the first times we ever really saw Margaret have any sort of an emotional breakdown (that wasn't played for laughs because she was drunk, or having some sort of a rift with Frank), and showed us her vulnerable side that was, at that point in the series, an incredibly rare sight. I can even remember what my initial reaction was after seeing that scene for the very first time: "Wow! Margaret has feelings?!" That, for me, made this a particularly stand-out episode of M*A*S*H that I thought was one of its best offerings.

At first.

After I repeat viewings of the episode over the years, that opinion has gradually shifted to the point that I now really don't even like this episode at all, and feel it's one of the weaker ones. Not at all because of Margaret whatsoever, but because I feel like this episode suffers from the same sort of problem that made another episode like "Edwina" a decidely weak installment as well, and that's the main cast of characters are more-or-less reduced to supporting characters, while the guest characters (almost all of whom we've never seen before, and never even see again) are the ones who carry the story. It makes the episode feel less like an actual episode of the show, and more like an entry from an anthology series. Like Edwina Ferguson, it's difficult to swallow that the writers expected us to really invest in the foibles of characters we've never met before, know nothing about, and then never see again without setting up that they could at least be minor recurring characters. One of the nurses (Gaynor) is even implied to have been at the 4077th for so long that she's become numb and desensitized to all of the casualities she's seen die in the hospital (including one who apparently had been flirting with her for a while). If she really had been at the 4077th for a while, and we saw over the course of multiple episodes the emotional toll all of these deaths took on her, maybe it would make her plot thread would have a better connection with us as an audience, but for a one-shot character, it seems too much to expect of us.

At least other similar episodes like "George" were executed a little better: George's homosexuality drove the plot of the episode, but he himself wasn't shoved into the spotlight and expected to carry the weight of the story himself - instead, we see how the revelation of his homosexuality affects the 4077th personnel, from Frank writing a formal complaint to have George dishonorably discharged (while Margaret backs him up), to Hawkeye and Trapper trying to stop him from ruining a good soldier's life, to even Henry not giving a rat's ass either way because of course he doesn't want to get involved. Even in "The Nurses," there is tension between said nurses and Margaret always breathing down their necks, but again, it's these random, expendable nurses who carry the show, while Margaret just pops in to yell at them and order them around, then we see her have her big emotional breakdown because of how they treat her. Not very effective.

Of course, that's just my opinion anyway.

M*A*S*H isn't the only show this has ever happened to of course. I remember THE ODD COUPLE doing something similar once with an episode about a couple of droopy kids who couldn't make up their minds whether or not they wanted to get married - we never see this couple before, we never see them again, but apparently Felix was asked to be best man at the wedding and he ruined it, so he and Oscar had to try to get the couple back together. Just the same, Felix and Oscar are reduced to supporting roles, while we're supposed to invest in this awkward love story between this young couple we know nothing about.