(*DISPATCH*) s08e11: Life Time & s08e22: Dreams
In season 7, MASH decided to take an experimental turn with “Point of View,” which replicated a soldier’s vision through his adventures at the hospital. Season 8 boasts two more experiments, as the series mushrooms into greater and greater grandeur. It’s rare for mainstream TV shows to venture this far from their proscribed structure—audiences don’t like it—but in this case, the show was ripe for innovation. With MASH’s audience in the palm of its hand, it was free to take viewers to strange new places, so long as their favorite characters joined them.
Of the two season 8 experiments, “Life Time” seems to be the more quotidian. Its gimmick is that it purports to take place in real time, focusing on a surgery that needs to last under twenty minutes in order to be successful. An animated clock helps us keep track.
In fact, “Life Time” is quite sophisticated. It breaks the rules of TV, which almost always dictate that certain moments in a story are boring enough to be cut. Here, every second counts, in the dramatic action as well as in the delicate surgery, which also requires a mortally wounded patient to die so that his aorta can be transplanted into one with a fighting chance. It’s both amazing and unsurprising that the trick works so well (the surgery, too)—in those twenty minutes we find room for Hawkeye’s medical procedural; BJ’s drama with the dying man’s angry friend; and a good amount of levity via Winchester. In other words, the “clock” portion of this show is like a normal episode on the face (haha) of it, until we realize everything has happened without a single pause.
The series of dreams in “Dreams” is extraordinary. Overtired personnel of the 4077th falling asleep is hardly new territory, nor is an ever-deepening exploration of these people’s psychology. Anyone would agree, though, that this is the deepest yet. The seven dreams, many of them wordless, are really, heartbreakingly beautiful, and not one is the slightest bit out of character. Of course each of them has a dream that’s exactly like this. I’m loath to describe the dreams, because I couldn’t do them justice, but they are lyrical, tender, and sad. Notable too that this is the debut of Catherine Bergstrom as Peg.
“Life Time” is frequently shown in reruns; “Dreams” is not—my guess is that forty years later that episode still comes off as weird, even disturbing. (In Margaret’s and Father Mulcahy’s dreams in particular, there’s ample censor bait.) But both represent what’s undeniably a new plateau for MASH. In these two shows, the series has decided, boldly, to use its hyper-popularity for good rather than settle into the predictable. Alan Alda wrote and directed both, “Life Time” with co-writer Walter Dishell, the show’s medical consultant.