Date of airing: July 5, 2011 (Global)
Audience viewership information: 1.525 million viewers
This was a solid episode of television, but I was a little disappointed by something the writers delivered with Tia Carrere’s character. While her relationship with Simon was just sex and quick affection, and even though they would only be together for a couple of days and this wouldn’t be a thing for another episode, I was saddened to see that her character was used to bring “the talk” “in bed” and essentially be a plot device to get Simon’s dramatic and emotional narrative going. That part of the show was certainly firing on all cylinders during this hour, signaling the beginning of potential storylines for Simon that don’t have anything to do with how many women he invites to his private shindig on the Kandahar base. That Simon and Rebecca would be a couple at one point has been in the writers’ hands since the beginning, ever since they met in the pilot and he showed her around in his room, but that Simon may be going through some emotional trouble, incapable of getting rid of it, which is why he finds himself in the company of attractive women in every episode, is new.
And when this series already starts depicting the post-traumatic stress disorders of various characters, then COMBAT HOSPITAL is not just going to be a GREY’S ANATOMY clone set in Afghanistan during America’s longest war, but it is also a show that takes its premise seriously and gets into what the war does to the psyche of the soldiers fighting it – it is an idea that bears more fruit in a medical drama than in a simple war drama. Okay, war dramas are never simple, except you’re CBS and made THE A-TEAM set in Vietnam (I only watched a handful of episodes of the 1980s show TOUR OF DUTY, but that is how I would describe the series). Still, this episode depicted a much more interesting version of Simon – one whose encounters with women soldiers are somewhat explained, and one who doesn’t try to woo Rebecca, because maybe that would just be too much work for him. The thing is just, all this happened via Tia Carrere, and as a fan of hers, with RELIC HUNTER being high up on my to-watch list, I was hoping for her appearance to be something else. It’s certainly meaningful and important for Simon’s sake, but ... I don’t know. Maybe I see her as an actress who deserves more than just guest appearances on television? Does she even want more than that?
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| Rebecca, meet desert spider. Desert spider, meet scared Rebecca. |
I know that the entire story was written into this episode to not only bring Simon closer to the viewing audience and tease some emotional trouble, but during a few moments, the writers were hiding behind soap opera elements with Jessica, the photojournalist who came to Kandahar to do her job and shag with Simon in her off time, including lying about her family life at home, which for some reason Simon was disappointed about. I liked Jessica in only two scenes, and both of them had Rebecca in them. At times, it seemed like Jessica was a more important guest character when she was with Rebecca, and not when she was humping and hugging Simon, trying to get him to talk about whatever was eating at him. Because in the end, Jessica’s presence clearly had an effect on Rebecca, while Simon was still unclear about what is happening to him emotionally.
Meanwhile, Rebecca herself is a little too busy getting involved with
someone on the base, putting a wall between her experiences in Kandahar
and a potential relationship with Simon. Rebecca is fighting hard for
her patients, getting in trouble with her superiors in the progress
(this is the second episode in a row in which Colonel Marks very much
showed her who is the boss and what happens when she joins the people on
his bad side), she figures she needs to prove herself to everyone (that
makes Simon right when he talked about her to Jessica), and she
probably knows she will falter under the pressure when she fails. She
wants to be a rule-follower (hence her pressure to move forward with the
information she had about the friendly fire incident), but to get
things done she is also capable of not knowing the rules at all
(draining the blood bank to save Private Graham Barford), and at one
point those two elements of her character will clash and she won’t know
what’s up or down, and where she actually is. With Rebecca and Simon
starting to feel the pressure of life in Kandahar, COMBAT HOSPITAL
slowly goes down a narrative path that could turn the show into
something more serious and dark, which would be very much appreciated.
Rebecca’s unsuccessful heroic actions of trying to save Barford’s
life led to a moment of tension when the base was low on blood and in
the middle of receiving victims from a mass casualty event. That would
have been the show’s opportunity to showcase what it’s like for the
characters when patient upon patient gets rolled into the hospital and
whether COMBAT HOSPITAL was ready to be more of an ER than a GREY’S
ANATOMY. Unfortunately for the show, the mass casualty event was quickly
eaten for breakfast. Bobby quickly saw a few patients during the
intake, and there was a scene of Rebecca in the OR, proving that she
does not need to drain the blood supply to save a patient. And one
commercial block later, everything was back to normal and Will was
receiving a mechanical bull for Rebecca’s party. The mass casualty event
was over before it even began and the audience never found out if the
low blood supply caused the doctors and surgeons any problems. It also
made me wonder if COMBAT HOSPITAL was even a show ready to take on that
kind of action scenes that made ER a constant favorite among Emmy
voters.
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| Welcome to Kandahar, we hope you will survive your trip. |
Kandahar has a new hero and he is a local teenager. What has always been fascinating about Vans so far was his sort-of-friendship with Colonel Marks, and the way Marks treated the kid. Vans is always this teenager who just wants to do some cool things and make friends among the allies with automatic weapons strapped to their backs and handguns holstered on their thighs, but Marks always seems to be treating him like a kid who happens to be employed with the base right now. Marks gives him crap when Vans is around the computers, yet Marks gave him a computer. Marks gives him more crap because Vans is doing things that have nothing to do with the job he was hired for initially (being a translator), yet Marks found a way to showcase the appreciation everyone has for Vans. The thing is just, it keeps happening between Vans and Marks only, even if folks like Graham (who covers for Vans every once in a while), or Hannah Corday (who does not mind when Vans is on Marks’s computer or using the printer, and is also covering for Vans’s adventures on Marks’s computer) are also involved in Vans’s life. Is there no time for any of the other characters to be involved in Vans’s teenage adventures, especially when they are for something good, like fixing the CT scanner?
By the way, are you telling me that Vans was just watching Sergeants Ford and Mehra how they were fixing the computer, and suddenly Vans knew how to fix the scanner? If that is true, Vans is an engineering wunderkind and maybe some multi-billion dollar company should hire him immediately to build things.
