Untitled

i hate dunking on later seasons of mash sometimes because i see a lot of people doing it for what i would say are the completely wrong reasons:

saying it "became the alan alda show" (derogatory) in particular feels like nonsense; hawkeye was always the main character around which the entire show revolved, and that was true even in the movie. if anything, hawkeye suffered worse in later seasons; i would not call him a mary sue like a lot of critics seem to be implying. do i disagree with some of his creative choices, like thinking inga is a nonsense episode that would have better suited bj than hawkeye? yes. do i think he commandeered the entire show? no, because the actors all liked him and gelled with him already; the critique implies he's ruling with an iron fist and forcing the show to warp around himself.

saying it "got too preachy" is also ridiculous. it was always preachy. i think maybe the preaching became more obvious when it shifted to be more drama, but there's no material difference in a teary-eyed soliloquy from mulcahy about the horrors of war versus a xenophobic ramble from frank about how america is bringing democracy to korea by blowing the country up. the only thing that changed was the tone, but the intent was always the same.

the "preachy" complaint especially rubs me the wrong way because, if anything, mash got less preachy and less focused, which brings me to my actual critique. you can't talk about a work of fiction without talking about the contemporary culture it was created in, and i think it's pretty obvious that the popular culture shifted a great deal over the course of the show's run, growing far more conservative in a massive trend that continued well into the 80s. mash lost its focus and intent over time because the culture generally lost its appetite for "stickin' it to the man" as it had once insisted upon; it outlived the zeitgeist it was forged in.

there's also the issue of the aforementioned tone shift. i think a satirical farce is a great tool for social critique (which is of course why i love catch-22 and recommend it to absolutely everybody), but the general connotation of comedy as "less serious" than straightforward drama means that mash ended up skewing far more maudlin over time... which wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't also awkwardly trying to keep one hand on the sitcom label. the fun and interesting balance of dark-comedy in the earlier seasons begins to feel like a glaring tone problem in the later seasons as the show constantly steps on its own toes.

i think mash can't get quite as heavy just because of the limits of the medium at the time— tv censorship rules meant the o.r. is barely bloody at all despite the characters' very colorful descriptions of "meatball surgery". most of the injuries, killing, and deaths are conveyed through (admittedly great) dialogue and facial acting rather than being explicitly shown. this is a big reason why it worked great as a comedy (which is a naturally dialogue-driven genre) and started to fumble the drama (as the big setpiece dramatic moments were not allowed to be shown).

to get more specific about its flaws, a big part of why i personally just don't like seasons 6 onward, broadly speaking, barring a handful of real standouts, is because of the loss of clear satirical archetypes and their replacement by characters who do not suit the original intent of the show.

upfront caveat: i like bj. i think bj is a great fit for the show. i have no idea what people are smoking when they find him handsome and charming, but i really like him as a character and find him a useful inclusion in the ensemble cast and representative of the broader setting. he's a good trapper replacement and a good foil for hawkeye, and what's more, he represents an extremely common archetype of the military narrative: a family man with a lot to look forward to, just getting his perfectly cookie-cutter suburban life started with a wife and baby and dog and picket fence, when suddenly he was drafted and placed in the midst of abject misery, forced to confront the reality of what really fuels that perfect life stateside. he is an ordinary yet overall highly privileged man who has looked behind the curtain of propaganda to see the gorey machinery of imperialism. i think the show pulled a few punches in terms of really breaking him down and rebuilding him, but overall i think the show did a good job showing his growing disillusionment with his country, his increasingly desperate clinging to his old life that he cannot truly return to, and his disturbing capacity for selfish cruelty— all of which tell a versatile and relatable story of an entitled average citizen from the so-called imperial core.

while the replacement of trapper with bj was ultimately a perfectly acceptable creative decision, the simultaneous replacement of henry blake is specifically where i think mash started losing its edge. he is bumbling, simple, emotional, unfocused, and easily overruled by whoever yells at him the loudest. he is broadly ignorant of korean culture and uncaring towards its people outside of his sex tourism. he was clearly promoted above his ability. he inflicts harm upon his subordinates and upon the korean people both by choice and by inaction, and then turns around and acts like he has absolutely no agency in any decision he ever makes— he is learned-helplessness incarnate. he ultimately believes in the importance of the status quo and is deeply uncomfortable with anything that threatens what he perceives as "normal". it should be obvious from all this that henry is a very clear-cut mockery of military leadership (and of middle-managers in general; you have probably worked at least one job where henry blake was your boss). henry supports the war machine through his cowardice, passivity, and pathetic acceptance of injustice, and for these crimes he is shamed and reduced to a laughingstock.

his replacement, potter, while an interesting character in his own right, falls far short in terms of critique; he's shown as a capable and sympathetic leader despite being "regular army". his main flaw is that he's a hardass and a stickler for rules and protocol, but these are by and large not condemned or satirized by the show so much as they are lightly teased about. the fact that even the real-world audience is far and away more fond and respectful of potter than henry and considers him an overall upgrade should be the clearest signal that he is impeding the message of the show. a character who is proudly affiliated with the army, who has made a lifelong career out of killing people, who leverages nostalgia for a romanticized military past, should not be coddled by an allegedly anti-military fiction. there's no room in a satire for a character who is "one of the nice ones". he should be mocked, humiliated, and revealed as a perpetrator of untold cruelty despite all his lecturing about dignity and responsibility. his rigid maintenance of order within the camp and "correction" of hawkeye's mistakes is inherently validating the military heirarchy and protocol thereof.and the fact that they threw in how he's part cherokee (the indigenous nation most heavily affected by the trail of tears) is especially insane and honestly a little disgusting.

the replacement of frank burns was even worse than henry's, which is why although i can enjoy plenty of season 4 and a fair amount of season 5, i draw the hard line of "more bad than good" at season 6. frank is the perfect antagonist for an anti-military show with an anarchist pacifist protagonist: frank is a mediocre man who has bullied his way up the ladder through a combination of treachery, cruelty, and sheer dumb luck. he is loud, selfish, ignorant, hypocritical, patriotic, evangelically christian, and deeply racist/sexist/homophobic. you have met somebody like frank— probably more somebodies than you can count. he upholds the system and benefits from it. even when hawkeye gets a victory over frank at the end of an episode, frank is still kept in his higher rank and not really made to suffer anything more than a momentary feeling of humiliation... which is, sadly, true to life. frank scarcely gets more than a stern talking-to and a slap on the wrist for being a heartless amoral bastard, and that alone says something.

charles, by contrast, is... well, there's no gentle way to say it. he is a useless character, structurally speaking. he is a completely nonsensical archetype that's wholly irrelevant to the alleged intent of the satire. he is a highly educated and well-connected man of entrenched inherited wealth... who got drafted and must now live in squalor in a military hospital. it's just dickensian fluff, fully detached from reality. by and large, wealthy people buy their way out of experiencing the cruelty they enable far more than they get isekai'd into it to learn a valuable lesson about friendship. a rich, esteemed, blue-blooded white man like charles should not be on the front lines, because that is not where you find these people in real life; he should be still at home, or at most at some posh japanese hotel or south-pacific resort where he can conspicuously exploit the locals, only visiting the mash for publicity stunts and pr. he is a fantasy of a character. the front line of every us military conquest is chock full of henry blakes and built on the backs of countless frank burnses, but you will not find a single charles winchester anywhere in the same zipcode as a gangrene patient. he completely obscures both the intent and the accuracy of the show just by his mere presence.

and for the last character critique: this is going to be unpopular, but i'm just not the world's biggest fan of houlihan's shift towards being such a brave and sympathetic girlboss. she is fighting tooth and nail for recognition in a way that invites sympathy, but she's doing so within a corrupt system that profits off of death and suffering. in the early seasons, this drive to ascend the ranks and win respect from her superiors was (correctly) portrayed as requiring cruelty, deceit, and the sale of her body to repulsive older men... because this is the reality of the military as a violent and sexist instutition. do i think she was treated with some sexism by writers in the early season? yes, as all female characters are. but do i think the solution is to uplift her into some neoliberal feminist icon? absolutely not, because to do so is to ignore the context of the show and treat a military hospital like it's just any other ordinary job... and it's especially dangerous to act like the us military is or ought to be a meritocracy when it simply does not deserve to exist in the first place. i don't think it's feminist praxis to rank up from victim to perpetrator. being a woman who has experienced sexism does not make it suddenly valid to be a major in the us army. through her enthusiastic association, she lends the military a degree of grace and dignity it should never be afforded. i'm glad she got her wedding interrupted by incoming casualties; she was unbelievably entitled to be waltzing around in a white gown and veil in the middle of a warzone, and i think it's sick and twisted that we were supposed to sympathize with her struggle for dignity or admire her resilience in the face of (checks notes) other people dying instead of her. witness what you have wrought, major. i hope she never washes the blood off her hands.