Season 1, Episode 2
Date of airing: April 27, 1988 (ABC)
Nielsen ratings information: 19.7 million viewers, 15.0 rating/26 share in Households
Written by: William Broyles, Jr.
Directed by: Rod Holcomb
”In the movies, the bad guys are Nazis and dirty Commies, fangs, wear scary uniforms. But pregnant women? What's going on here?”
It's the second episode, and the show has already delivered one of the highlights, possibly of 1980s television in general. After a story about how a Viet Cong woman blew up an American soldier who was about to go home, a good friend of some of the main characters, watching said Viet Cong woman peacefully walk out of the hospital with her newborn in her hands, and McMurphy letting her, was somewhat poetic. For half of the episode, McMurphy wasn't interested in helping the woman, hoping that she would rot in a POW hospital. But during the final act, the two women got to an understanding of sorts, and McMurphy realized – possibly for the first time – that the Vietnamese were fighting to survive, and no one could blame them for that. And maybe the Vietnamese woman also came to realize that the Americans aren't all out to eradicate their country.
But let's not ask how the Viet Cong nurse actually got off the base after walking out of the hospital. An obviously wounded woman in a hospital gown, carrying a potentially crying newborn in her arms... If she gets out undetected, then enemy forces will get back in, also undetected, and the entire base is in danger of getting blown to bits from the inside (especially since the woman is Viet Cong – she could easily tell her people how to get into an American base for some terrorism). Not to mention the crap the MP officer is going to get when military officers find out that their prisoner escaped under his watch.
Ned Vaughn, who played the soldier who died during the grenade explosion, and Elizabeth Lindsay, the Viet Cong nurse, would both return to CHINA BEACH later in its run, each playing different characters in a recurring capacity, proving that both actors made enough of an impression with the producers to keep them employed with the show.
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| Hope still remains for the woman who murdered an American soldier. |
