Date of airing: August 16, 2011 (Global)
Audience viewership information: 1.375 million viewers
Never let yourself be told by someone like me who says that a certain TV show you want to watch is bad. Go watch it yourself and form your own opinion, and maybe you will come out having found your new favorite TV drama. COMBAT HOSPITAL was eviscerated by the TV critics back in the day and after that, the show wasn’t given any attention. Maybe it’s because of its “GREY’S ANATOMY in Afghanistan” tagline, maybe because this wasn’t even a US-produced show. COMBAT HOSPITAL came and went and can now be considered one of the forgotten ones. And then it turns out it’s a great TV drama, even if it sometimes uses stereotypical storytelling, especially when it comes to the character arcs.
This episode was quite the interesting journey. Again, the writers have proven that COMBAT HOSPITAL is anything but a show with expected storylines and twists and that they wanted to tackle the stories with some of the realism the producers have learned about while researching the show on site. I loved how the writers interchanged between medical drama, character drama, and detainee drama during this hour, and I loved that the writers chose to bring Vans to the spotlight for an episode, showcasing his ability to be a character and Hamza Jeetooa’s talents as an actor when he is given the right material to work with. It made me believe that the writers would have eventually given each character a spotlight episode at some point, and if COMBAT HOSPITAL had been given a second season, the chances would have been good for character arcs to resemble the way the second season of THIRD WATCH approached character drama. I have to say, it would have worked incredibly well for a show like this one that wasn’t particularly interested in getting too deep into the medical aspect of its genre.
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| This is an eyesore of a screenshot. |
Okay, to be honest, the episode wasn’t much of a success story-wise, but how the stories affected the characters was great. Vans was suddenly torn between his past and the present, and his colleagues and friends couldn’t do anything to help him and ease his mind, while he was trying to figure out if the childhood he so fondly remembered had all been a lie. It was realistic and it was dramatic, and seeing Vans in the detention unit, all alone with his thoughts, broke my heart just a little. We knew he is innocent, and we knew that his current situation would form a new opinion about the war and the coalition for him, potentially creating an ongoing strained relationship between him, his bosses on the base, and the people he works with. And while it was a bit of a cliched story that Vans was a potential Taliban suspect, it served up great drama, with everyone having something to say about how Colonel Marks was treating Vans and that he didn’t deserve to be detained because “he’s Vans.”
The Taliban angle of the story notwithstanding, it was beautifully handled because it was always told from Vans’s point of view. Seeing his heart being broken into pieces when he realized that his friends either died or have lied to him was just the icing on a beautiful cake of emotional drama. Even I got a tad bit choked during the final scene when Vans couldn’t hold those tears back. Although in hindsight, this episode would have been better if the writers had included Vans’s character development. After all, he is still a kid himself, and witnessing the fall of his childhood should be traumatic for every teenager. Just one scene in which he cries into the arms of the Colonel wasn’t enough for me.
Meanwhile, the MP could have handled the situation a little better, especially since that one guy, Warrant Officer Marcus Xinico, behaved like a military villain, out to capture all Taliban soldiers even if some of them turned out to be Afghan soldiers. Xinico behaved a little too aggressively for my taste, as if he was out to not only catch the next terrorist, but also the latest medal for catching the next terrorist and stopping an attack. I not only do not like these kinds of people, but in this episode, Xinico was written like a true antagonist, even though he shouldn’t have been one. The story was all about Vans, Kamaal, and Salman, and not a pushy MP Warrant Officer on the lookout for his next big catch.
Will’s continued efforts to build a connection with the Afghan kid was a surprising story. Not only did I not expect this story to actually have a continuation, but I liked how Will tried to be everything for the kid and maybe realized that he was too much of a father figure for him and he liked that feeling. It gave Will a few nice moments, as a character who was more than just the head nurse of the hospital, and I appreciated it when he was a little shell-shocked after Graham told him the kid’s uncle had already come to pick him up. I thought at first that Will was about to scratch Graham’s eyes out until he realized that would have been a stupid move and that he actually liked the kid a lot. Hopefully, this wasn’t Will’s only story this season. It looked good on him and COMBAT HOSPITAL needed to be a much stronger ensemble drama to have had the chance to push beyond its boundaries of being a medical drama set in Afghanistan.
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| Vans is getting treated like any other local in this country now. |
In the meantime, I couldn’t do anything with General Hunnable and his problems of automatically crying his eyes out. It delivered the necessary comedy elements of the episode (since Vans’ story had all the emotional drama that could have affected the viewers), but I usually don’t like it when perfect drama is sometimes being interrupted by something ridiculously funny. What I liked about the story though was that the doctors could do a procedure with anything they can find, proving that not even this base in Afghanistan had all they needed to execute a medical procedure. MacGyver would have built a bomb out of a paper clip, but Simon decided it was good enough to stab a General’s eye with it to unblock a tear duct. It’s nice that COMBAT HOSPITAL can be hilarious, but when it interrupts the best parts of an episode, then it’s a little in the way.
