#it's about time i watched mash

[mylittleredgirl]

previously on mylittleredgirl: [four seasons of m*a*s*h] [six weeks of screaming about margaret houlihan]

i have now finished season five disc one and a bullet point recap is due! [yeah there's more screaming in it]

bug out was a fucking DELIGHT

god i was so worried though when klinger had to trade all his dresses i was wailing internally. what if he just wears fatigues forever!?!??? but it's all okay!!!! that tassel mod dress he has on in "the abduction of margaret houlihan" healed me ten times over. his outfits have been 🔥 this season.

such a mix of really dumb slapstick comedy and "oh god the war is Right Here" drama and little character sweetness... love it.

and the family reunion happiness at the end!!!! god bless. i left my body for like thirty-six hours.

i really really love the tone they're striking with frank this season. they've walked back the cartoon villainy of late season four, so he's once again a relatively harmless clown. i breathed a huge sigh of relief. he's soooo much more fun this way.

margaret's engagement: bonkers. delightful. she's unbearable. there is so much wrong with her. i want to study her in a jar. i will never shut up again.

with this put together with some bits later in the disc (including that cut scene crayon joke lmao), did she somehow manage to trade DOWN from frank? is that even possible??? it's either that or this new dude is actually just The Exact Same Guy, but now she'll be the fool wife at home instead of the beloved mistress.

i mean personally if i were louise burns i'd be very happy for my dumbass husband to fuck around on the other side of the world for as long as possible while i enjoy the $35,000 house and two cars without him, but for someone like margaret who is far more interested in being wined and dined than running a household, this... may not be the field promotion she thinks it is.

hawkeye rising to frank's defense and him and b.j. enabling frank's little takedown of margaret at the end felt very real. sure, in the grand scheme of things, margaret is Annoying and frank tried to have hawkeye executed last season, but bros before hos.

okay how FUNNY would it be though if the "little redheaded nurse" frank planned to seduce was baker-from-the-nurses, because she would have scratched frank's eyes out for trying and not felt bad about it

and actually, that's a plausible backstory for the extra bad blood between her and margaret, too??? oh yeah. that definitely happened.

i actively missed frank/margaret as the disc went along though. maybe the show had stretched the tension of that relationship as tight as it could go, and it's nice that they get to do new things... but they're so funny and awful together and i miss them sharing scenes!!!

i really assumed - like frank did lol - that they would continue to rabbit around together, only now she would also get to string him along with the jealousy game, but...... well, i'm glad it's still hanging out in the background of the narrative, anyway. i live in hope that they will slip and fuck and it will be soooo messy.

FUCK is it possible i shipped that for real???? god. i don't know if my family name can bear this dishonor.

out of sight, out of mind...

...has taught us the very important lesson that hawkeye is 9000x more annoying without something to do (annoying to everyone else i mean!! not to me. i will happily watch him annoy everyone.)

him asking b.j. to visit him a million times a day 🥺

i'm almost satisfied now by the "doctor-experiences-the-role-of-patient" theme that i didn't get in "hawkeye." i suppose hurt/comfort fic can take it from here.

however i'm totally satisfied by how sweet it was to see everyone taking care of him!! and how much they love him!!

lt. radar o'reilly... devastating. i mean funny and delightful but it's mean!! so glad that boy is back in stripes. however they could have at least promoted him a little for his trouble. sergeant o'reilly???

i have already said more about the nurses (post here) than ever needed to be said. and yet. i'm quite sure i could say more if pressed

the abduction of margaret houlihan

........ will i never be free of colonel flagg episodes 😞

i love the continuing evidence that she has invested time in learning korean, and i really really really love the slow expansion of our perspective to include like oh yeah. there's a village where people live full time and it's literally right here.

imagine if after the war she becomes an ob nurse...

on the one hand, how do they not make frank do gun handling training. on the other hand they probably don't because it always ends with stitches and an accident report.

i sometimes wonder if mash was like jury duty for asian actors in the 70s. you probably won't get to say anything but they call you up and you just have to go.

dear sigmund!!!!!! this is another episode where people were staring at me through the window so i'll comment a little more:

the fandom's favorite guy sidney freedman deserves that crown. what a weirdo. talk about a busman's holiday for a psychiatrist to come to the 4077 for a vacation and psychoanalyze everyone. but for fun!

i really don't have a proper sense of the geography at play here because he really does like. just come by to play cards once a week. and drives through a war zone i guess to do it? he has probably sacked out in the swamp before when the air raid situation changes but this time he just... doesn't leave.

and aaaa!! margaret took her very special episode about How To Make Friends to heart!!!! she joined the poker game!!!

she had plenty of time to work on that lesson though because the jeremy bearimy time shenanigans are in full swing here at the 4077. we went from midsummer in 'the nurses' to a bitter cold march two episodes later.

i always kind of assumed the mash weather was loosely inspired by real human weather, but no, in fact the actors just have to randomly suffer in parkas or getting sprayed in the face to look sweaty in alternating weeks regardless of the surrounding conditions.

SUFFERING for their ART

also jfc b.j.!!!! dunking frank in cold water in freezing temperatures is a serious health and safety concern my dude!!!!

i'm afraid b.j. is still not beating the little brother allegations, he has just aged up from innocent baby to fucking gremlin

(i should confess that my little brother diagnosis is guided by the fact that in my complex family and housing history i only ever lived with "brothers" younger than me, and never older ones. but the innocent baby and prank gremlin stages are real.)

i made a note here of "margaret randomly drinking gin in the swamp now!!?!??" like the poker game was one thing, people could strong-arm her into that while she feigns protest, but ma'am WHO are you and what have you done with— and then the next note is "oh good she's still insane"

potter named his horse sophie <3 also he's collecting granddaughters, i think the count is up to 3 now. or baby sherry is experiencing a temporal anomaly of her own!

the letter radar wrote to the dead guy's parents and potter reading it... fucking ended me. please let harry morgan do serious bits more often, it's outstanding and far too rare.

it's not surprising that frank's wife changing (wearing pants! doing activities!) would stress him out, and not just because he's a dick. any of them would struggle with their families growing without them, because that means they can Never Go Home to the life they left!! (e.g. trapper losing it because his girls were getting older.) but it is kind of fascinating that he loves both his wife and margaret, and even said mid-fever that he wanted them to be friends, but he also wants them to be NOTHING alike.

all in all it's understandable that sidney would check in to the no boundaries motel to have his poker buddies shake it out of him, but he could also have taken his leave somewhere with indoor heat. so he's as crazy as the rest of them. <3

also they're not his patients he's just observing them like zoo animals so forget confidentiality he's absolutely gonna write a book about them someday.

mulcahy's war: i don't know why i have been misspelling his name with an 'e' the whole time because it was literally in the end credits of almost every episode for four seasons.

oh god he's so precious i don't talk about it enough. playing poker for orphans. feeling like he doesn't do enough while potter thinks he has the hardest job. that unrelenting positive regard for everyone. always with that little grin.

that little grin in FULL PLAY as he sneaks out of the house to go off to war when dad's not looking

radar should never be sent on a mission where people are bleeding when will they LEARN

corporal cupcake deserves every medal he gets!!!!

frank's foot fetish becoming his one true medical specialty is just. i don't know what to do with this. good for him??? do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life???

speaking of unrelenting positive regard, margaret's policy of nurses never talking back to the doctors in the operating room sure has taken a hit. i realize this is about frank being an intolerable ex, but i choose to believe that the detente between margaret and her nurses has turned the O.R. into a pvp zone. the next time hawkeye tries to seduce a nurse over an open body, he's gonna get wrecked and margaret's just going to shrug pretty and look the other way.

in conclusion: season five is soooo gooooooood!!!!! can't wait for disc two!

[movietonight]

While there are things to criticise mash for and those conversations are important to have some of what I read can be explained very easily by reminding yourself

It was a TV show

On a budget

From years ago

From America

Written by a variety of human writers

Who used characters and plots to tell stories

Within a certain number of minutes

[youngpettyqueen]

I can forgive an illegal appendectomy but I draw the line at making Kellye sad

[pherre]

Everyone loves a story // About long, long ago // And what, what might’ve been MASH / What Might Have Been - Regina Spektor

[causalityparadoxes]

If Coriolanus Snow is an evil dictator then why is that old man CHEEKED UP why is there CAKE

[klingersgender]

thinking about. klinger

[hasarjunadoneanythingwrong]

trying to get over some of my irritation/disappointment w certain aspects of summer 5 by reimagining my mc as one of those overly energetic camp counselors who takes everything way too earnestly

[brittlebutch]

The 'Enjoying watch you suffer' line in Broadcast has always been hard to pin down; Tim's leg getting broken is the biggest incident in Entry #35, so it's natural to want to tie the two together, but it seems to fit so indelicately into what we know about the timeline of totheark's internal relationship that it almost causes more problems than it resolves. However, even though it's very blink and miss it, Tim does actually manage to stab Alex in the arm before he gets knocked down -- we hear Alex cry out in pain, can see blood on the blade when Jay picks it up, and then in the recovered corrupted footage from that tape that Jay posts as Entry #36 Alex says "I did what I had to... he'd just stabbed me" -- and that injury being what totheark was trying to call attention to, to me, reads a lot more clear and consistent than anything else does

[variousqueerthings]

every once in awhile hawkeye will talk way too calmly about killing himself and I am fascinated by how that interacts with the laughtrack

[courfeyrac]

bj hunnicutt looks like this

[mylittleredgirl]

m*a*s*h update: rest of season three!!

i watched "aid station" and transcended to another realm

i watched it three times and will watch it many more i am SURE

the adventure! the war up close! hardship-earned respect and affection!!!!!

"never let it be said that i didn't do the least i could do" i need that in live laugh love font on my wall

this episode reminded me a few times that oh right, hot lips is the only one of the main cast who signed up and trained for the army on purpose

(and father mulcahey i suppose?)

anyway. long story short. if they had actually shown hot lips changing that tire i would never recover

"love and marriage" - hooray for kwang getting a personality and backstory, and hawkeye and trapper trying to make amends for frank

absolutely bananas that the officers hear a fight happening outside with a shot fired and collectively ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and keep playing. henry you are in charge. someone could be dead

"big mac" - i loved the opening in the o.r.! sometimes it gets a little mean-spirited in there, but this is a light-hearted day at the office where everyone in the room gets to laugh out loud as frank walks right in the teeth of it for literally no reason

i am enjoying the ongoing bit of hawkeye or trapper saying hello to frank and him responding to an insult they haven't said

hot lips's little "frank, they'll kill you." she's not even trying to defend him. she has given up against the overwhelming tide

the casual revelation in "payday" that henry has an open question in his mind about whether or not he's radar's father is a late-breaking reveal i'm gonna think about for a while

colonel flagg. hmm. his first episode was pretty funny because of the spy vs spy thing, but spy vs self was a dud

and then! "abyssinia, henry"!!!! 😢

my gratitude to the anonymous benefactor who hooked me up with a digital copy of this episode, since the dvd cut out before the last scene. which as it turns out!!! was important.

for television in general i assume

not to reveal myself too much as an uncultured hack... but i will confess my first reaction was "well, that was unnecessary"

in my defense!! i'm watching it in 2024, when a character death happening in an off-screen coda would really seem like a showrunner slamming the door behind a departing actor to make sure they couldn't come back no matter what change.org petition the fans cooked up on twitter, you know?

BUT. placing myself back in time. where this is happening partly as a commentary on another war, i get it!! unnecessary death is the point!! it's a tragedy people will have to sit with for months while the show is on hiatus!

HE NEVER MET HIS BABYYYYY (who they clearly forgot about, or they probably would have reminded us in the episode itself just to drive that punch home)

anyway, i have really never seen such a lovingly crafted goodbye episode for a character 💕

somebody PLEASE give radar a hug!!!!!! once per episode for the rest of the show!!!!

i mean sure henry DIED which obviously sucks for him and his variable number of children, but here radar loses his surrogate dad and gets frank in exchange. i mean tell me who suffered more

anyway!!!! in conclusion, season three was so good and funny and will be a tough act to follow!

my final awards for season three 🏆 best drama: aid station; best comedy: alcoholics unanimous; one i could most do without: the general flipped at dawn.

[ssaalexblake]

wild that for the whole of chibnall’s run nobody worked out that the man apparently doesn’t find somebody forcing themselves on somebody else funny and that’s why 95% of the kissing in the show disappeared 

[saucy-mesothelioma]

You are given the chance to pick any piece of media and art (and I mean any) to be buried on the earth as the world's legacy; it can be anything, from audios to images to movies and interactive media. Think of it as the Golden Record, though with the certainty that someone somewhere will discover it again in the future and know how to use it.

What would you choose?

This question took a lot of consideration, but I think I finally have an answer. The M*A*S*H TV series collection.

Although the series does focus primarily on the Vietnam war, it's got a lot of messages that've really stuck with me through the years. It's a perfect mix of humor and tragedy and in my opinion shows so many ranges of human emotion as well as dealing with various conflicts both physically and mentally. It's a series that I feel will have some relatability to whoever would come across it and manage to watch the whole thing. And even if they don't relate to any of the stories, I'm confident that certain episodes like "Sometimes You Hear The Bullet" and "The Interview" will definitely leave an impression on them. M*A*S*H is a wonderful combination of funny, serious, and heartbreak and I think it really speaks to the idea of the human spirit in its highs and lows.

[pherre]

i love it when i listen to mashcast and they point out discrepancies i've never ever noticed

[coffeecupandcorgi]

what would the butterfly effect be if we went back in time and made hawkeye share the spotlight enough with trapper so wayne rogers didn’t leave m*a*s*h. like bad bad?? or just inconvenient?