Season four, episode one of M*A*S*H is, as far as I can tell, a totally unique episode of television. Hawkeye begins it having discovered that his best friend, Trapper John, has been discharged and allowed to go home, and races to the airport to catch him and say goodbye. Meanwhile, BJ Hunnicut is a freshly drafted doctor who lands in Korea, ready to be recruited by the 4077th M*A*S*H unit. In trying to catch Trapper, Hawkeye picks up BJ and drags him along in his scheme; when Hawkeye fails, they give up and go back to the camp. This leads to an emotional arc I’ve never seen compressed into forty-five minutes and certainly never done so deliberately.
The closest point of comparison I have is to Abed and Troy on Community, where audience and character alike discover chemistry between two characters. Doing this kind of thing on purpose is nearly impossible; Deep Space Nine tried it with Julian and Miles, but I honestly always found that pretty forced. The writing for this episode is so elegant, with Hawkeye initially barely acknowledging BJ because he’s so focused on his goal of finding Trapper, shooting him some amused glances as he catches BJ’s one-liners and moral clarity and slowly warming up to him. One gets the sense of BJ quietly testing the waters and Hawkeye gradually catching what he’s doing and being pleased by it. By the end of it, they’ve gone from total strangers to best friends, and I believe every step of the way.
The season finale of Blackadder Goes Forth is very famous for its switch to serious emotion. I’ve always been struck by how that switch works; it’s not a sudden shift the way M*A*S*H can turn on a dime from funny to sad. It’s actually fairly well tied-in to the plot – Captain Blackadder is told they’re finally making a final push, and so resolves to get out of the trenches entirely through any means necessary. As his options dry up and he’s driven, inevitably, to commit to a suicidal action, it gradually sets in for all the characters that they are about to die. It’s as if the comedy bubbles away, a sad and melancholic feeling that I’ve never seen anywhere else.
What are the most unique stories you’ve seen?
