The bad news: half of the Navy SEALs were unceremoniously killed off tonight, and Chad was not one of them. And he’s now officially sleeping wi-oh god who cares
The good news: the other surviving SEAL is The Shield vet David Rees Snell, who has already shown more personality than Chad and seems to actually know what is going on with their whole storyline. So maybe that plot will be more interesting or at least more eventful going forward.
I’m not wild about the opening flashforward/“X hours earlier…” structural gimmick, for reasons that “Another Fine Navy Day” illustrated. Namely that there wasn’t a compelling reason why this story couldn’t have be told in a straightforward chronological fashion, except that they it made for a more striking cold open. There’s some creepy imagery of a bunch of bodies laying around the creek, but it’s not really portending anything, as the situation is explained promptly and there are very few surprises following the opening. The crew was dosed, with a drug that makes them act crazy or hallucinate or pass out depending on their importance to the plot, has no long term effects, and was introduced by a new villain, who is taken out by episode’s end.
This could have been a strong episode, as it omitted the weakest links, in the mainland storylines and bartender romance subplot, but the problem is that it does it to so little effect in the main story. We spend a bunch of time watching Marcus and Sam hallucinate really on-the-nose manifestations of the biggest thing we already know about them. Sam feels guilty and scared that he will never see his wife again. Marcus is sad that his son died. Pretty sure we had that down in the second episode.
Even so, this could be be forgivable if the thriller aspects were working really humming. Instead we get a very by-the-numbers submarine scenario where they are running out of air, until at the very last minute…they’re not. There might be some great tension next week revolving around who stole Marcus’s fire key, but in this episode it just sort of peters out as a resolution. And on Sam’s end, again, there’s just not enough twists and turns to make the shallow character stuff less troubling. He is told what’s going on right away, runs into a newcomer that we know is responsible right away, he puts it together almost as quickly as we do, fights him, shoots him, and goes about his day. Oh, and he makes out with the French chick, so yeah, all of you Sam/uh, shit, hang on, I know this…fuck it, The French Chick shippers finally got your fix.
Come on, Last Resort, I know you can do better than this. Give us some movement on the SEAL front, give us more Karnes, give us more Cortez, give us a lot more COB (really, focus on people with hard “C” sounds in their name and we’ll be okay), I can’t believe I’m saying this, but give us some Christine/Kylie conspiracy investigation. If you’re going to only going with the two main characters, you at least need to dig deeper.