“I have a message. Lieutenant Colonel Henry Blake’s plane was shot down over the Sea of Japan. It spun in. There were no survivors.”
Corporal Radar O’Reilly, looking like he has taken a physical blow, nearly stumbles into the operating room of the M*A*S*H* 4077 and delivered those words, ignoring both a demand that he mask up from Trapper John and a typically irreverent joke from Hawkeye Pierce. It was easily one of the most devastating moments in television history, following what many would have seen as the perfect ending — an emotional, powerful farewell between McLean Stevenson’s Henry Blake, the beloved if occasionally overwhelmed commanding officer of the 4077, and his reliable, prescient assistant, Radar.
The scene came about because Stevenson had made a career decision to move on from the wildly successful M*A*S*H* to pursue greater glory that would never really come, a trend that would gain its ultimate embodiment in Shelley Long’s departure from Cheers about a decade later. Stevenson had already made the decision to leave, so he could be written out of the script, but it was also the last episode for Wayne Rogers’ Trapper John McIntyre, whose scripted departure would come in the opening episode of the next season with him off screen.
There were always rumors that the final scene was done without the actors knowing what was going on except for Gary Burghoff’s Radar. In fact, while the original episode script did not include that last scene, a page was distributed right before shooting, allowing the actors to play the scene raw but not completely unscripted. Burghoff, who I believe was the lone holdover from the tonally different eponymous movie (itself adapted from Richard Hooker’s novel), carries the moment.
In a way the ending to the episode was pretty much tonally perfect for a show that was always a barely-hidden anti-war (and sometimes anti-military, though not anti-serviceman/woman) show and that served as an allegory for the Vietnam War, an amazing aspect of a program that was nearly always in the top 10 in the Nielson ratings at a time when that really mattered, and whose legendary final episode was the most watched finale in history, and the most watched single television program of aany type ever for almost three decades.
A gut-punch moment like the conclusion of “Abyssinia, Henry” needs a few elements to pull it off. Generally speaking the show has to be good. The character who is killed off, in this case, needs to be popular, and Stevenson’s portrayal of Henry Blake certainly qualifies — his occasional haplessness was part of a larger character arc that showed him dealing on the ground in ways that may have violated protocol and ignored chains of command but that earned him respect from a group of people, including the irreverant and decidedly not GI Hawkeye and Trapper, who were there to do the meatball surgery and effectively provide the ongoing '“war is hell, but absurdly so” narrative that the show struck. Still a traditional sitcom by most measures, M*A*S*H* nonetheless anticipated the idea of the dramedy inasmuch as tonally the show oftentimes was grim, sad, tragic, and even angry. After Stevenson’s departure Alan Alda’s Hawkeye increasingly becomes the soul and emotional compass for the show, but prior to that Henry Blake was every bit as important as Hawkeye in establishing the 4077’s true north.
These thoughts all came about when I happened to catch the episode this morning, because I have also been rewatching The Wire, about which I will gush in a future post. The Wire, with its own ethical and moral compass, albeit one in a decidedly different melieu, has a few of its own gut-punch moments with even fewer of those punches held back. The most obvious of these — and I’m sorry, but you don’t get much in the way of spoiler alarts for a show whose last episode aired before Barack Obama was elected president — is the death of Wallace, played by Michael B. Jordan in his breakout role. Wallace, shot by his putative friends, operates in a world where the moral compass that he displays, or at least his ambiguity about “the life,” leads to his tragic fate.
“Why it gotta be like this?” That line may as well be the tagline for the show. In a way, it might as well be the tagline of both shows.