(*DISPATCH*) s10e15: The Tooth Shall Set You Free
A tour-de-force show, quietly groundbreaking, hides behind its flippant episode title. Running through the episode is Charles’s toothache, yes—but this won’t detract from what it’s really about, namely racial prejudice in the military (and everywhere). As the half-hour progresses, the TV viewer frequently stops chuckling and begins to rethink what a sitcom can accomplish. While still being a comedy show, this is a text on racism, its insidiousness and inherent violence.
I’ve buried the lede here, which is that “The Tooth” features a young Laurence Fishburne, arguably the most distinguished actor to pass through MASH’s revolving door. Coming off the success of Apocalypse Now, he has a small but integral role as Dorsey, the engineer who makes negative comments in post-op about his commander. This tips the doctors off that the racist major is not the good guy he’d have everyone believe he is.
For a while, Major Lawrence Weems (Tom Atkins) has everybody fooled: he shakes hands all around, visits his men as they recover from surgery, and asks that the healthy Dorsey be sent home to address his family concerns. But Hawk and BJ discover that the story about Dorsey’s family is a lie; meanwhile, Weems pushes for a white engineer with severe wounds to be kept in action. When a second wave of wounded arrive from his unit, all of them African-American, the doctors have seen enough.
Charles’s tooth gives him a lot of trouble, but he doesn’t want it looked at, so he downplays it. He tries a folk remedy (which doesn’t work) and confines his moos of pain to the Swamp.
The great genius of this episode comes in the third act, when Hawk, BJ, and Potter get Weems drunk to loosen his tongue, then begin talking freely about desegregation of the service. Sherm even lapses into a Missouri redneck accent for contrast, though what’s so cunning about this conversation is that any white men could say these things regardless of upbringing. Weems relaxes because he believes he’s among like-minded folks—of course, from Maine to San Francisco they did and do exist. The dialogue avoids slurs but is nevertheless ugly; the major says all was well until President Truman “burnt the toast.” Soon, he has confessed to the horrendous truth that he puts Black engineers in harm’s way on purpose, so they can be sent home.
We don’t know how Weems will get his comeuppance, though there’s something odd about this whole gabfest having happened outdoors. When he is led into the Swamp, it’s revealed: a higher-up is waiting for Weems inside. He heard everything, and he is ready to court-martial Weems unless he signs his discharge papers immediately. Quentin Rockingham, played by the late, great character actor Jason Bernard, is African-American.
And!!! He isn’t a higher-up after all. The social justice doled out, we now return you to our regularly-scheduled comedy—Rockingham is, in fact, a dentist. Nor is he spared bodily harm in Truman’s war—during the tooth extraction, we learn, Winchester bites him. With such a serious subject, “The Tooth” could absolutely have dispensed with the prank. This would have been no less laudable. But the fact that MASH went right back to its sitcom formula at the end is both heartwarming and clever. We can do it all, the gesture seems to say. Why would other sitcoms want to do any less?
