Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen

I once had a dream in which someone explained a secret theme in the final episode of M*A*S*H, “Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen”, and when I woke it was still a good observation.

(Mild spoilers for the episode, and for M*A*S*H in general.)

I grew up watching M*A*S*H, and stumbling across it again in recent years I find that it holds up better than a lot of old TV. The laugh track now seems awkward, and the sexual harassment of the nurses is gross, but the stories and jokes still mostly work if you can get into its groove.

I accidentally stumbled into seeing the final episode again a while back, for the first time since it was originally broadcast in my early teens. It dazzled me when it was new, but I expected to be disappointed.

I was not. It is amazing, one of the the very best things I have ever seen done for broadcast television.

M*A*S*H was always transparently a drama about the Vietnam War disguised as a sitcom set in the Korean War. (They eventually made that actual show.) In the final episode M*A*S*H magically, seamlessly lifts one of those veils and turns from a half-hour sitcom into a feature-length drama. That this works at all is some of the craftiest TV ever done, and it works well.

M*A*S*H was made in the era of rigorously episodic television: at the end of the episode its story is over, but the core characters and their situation remain suspended in stasis, never changing. “Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen” recruits the entire series to treats it as just Act I, following through to closure for each of the principal characters. The cleverest of these is the story it gives to Klinger, a one-gag character in most episodes, who gets a beautiful, surprising final act.

What I only realized years after seeing “Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen” was the meaning of Hawkeye’s story. We start with him in a mental hospital. (I remember my mother half-joking that it was small wonder, since he had gone through eleven years of war.) He has had some kind of breakdown, and beloved occasional recurring character Sidney The Shrink is there trying to sort him out.

Sidney employs a style of talk therapy which only exists in plays, TV shows, and movies. He has Hawkeye talk through the Key Incident That Broke His Mind again and again, seeking an elusive hidden truth which once revealed will enable therapy to restore his santiy. Each time Hawkeye tells the story, it plays out a little differently, getting him closer to him facing the truth of what happened. In the first telling, Hawkeye is on a bus with a bunch of people passing around a bottle of whiskey, everyone having a high old time. Sidney The Shrink calls bullshit. Wait, that was not a bottle of whiskey; that was a bottle of plasma for a wounded soldier. Then again. They were not happy, they were terrified.

I won’t spoil the final truth that Hawkeye eventually remembers. It is brutal, one of the gutsiest things ever put on broadcast television.

Here's the thing I realized, decades later: Hawkeye's realization that he wasn't on the party bus, he was on the horror bus? That is M*A*S*H. War is not a sitcom. War is horror. Before bringing down the curtain, the show admitted that it had been lying all along, giving us what we could handle.

Right there in plain sight.