‘The Last Ship’ 1.06 Recap: The Tropical Cooties

Remember how the first several seasons of ‘The West Wing’ never had a bad episode? Remember ‘The X-Files’, where even a slow episode had a monster, alien or dude with a tail? This week’s episode of ‘The Last Ship’ lacks all of the show’s bag of goodies. This series is full-on testing my nerve.

‘Lockdown’ is a practice in patience, and speeches. Lots and lots of patience for speeches. The plot plods along with not much more than repeated instances of perceived lack of information disseminated to the worker bees. The lower ranking crewmembers have a new infection: paranoia. “The officers don’t tell us nothing.” Then the Captain, who scowls the entire episode, and against the wise old Master Chief’s recommendation, tells the crew everything, in a speech. Well, everything he knows and mostly just about kicking the crap out of the bad dudes in the last episode. Dr. No Good starts to get into Chessmaster Bacon’s head with fears about the vaccine failing and how everybody’s gonna die. More unrest is stirred up as some underlings see Dr. Red throwing bags of dead test monkeys overboard. “The officers don’t tell us nothing.”

Then Boyfriend falls ill. “Holy crap!” exclaims anyone within view of Boyfriend. Could he have brought the virus onboard? There is a lot of hoping that nobody gets sick, and a super short scene where Captain Scowly orders the entire crew to put on their HazMat suits and then take them off again. After a few tense scenes about the possible death of the Last Ship, the crew’s ACTUAL doctor confirms that Boyfriend only has Dengue Fever. Huh, that sounds nasty. So, is Boyfriend going to be ok? Wikipedia tells me he might get a rash and some wicked muscle and bone aches, but should be back to fraternizing in a week to ten days.

All this excitement, moping, conspiracy theorizing and whining eventually leads to the most polite mutiny of all time. You see, sixteen crewmembers had their enlistment expire sometime between episodes 2 and 5. So, technically, they aren’t in the Navy anymore. These sixteen decide that they’d be better off on their own. That seems much safer than sailing around this post-apocalyptic world in the company of the only folks capable of maybe finding the cure. So they write the Master Chief a memo to request their dismissal at the earliest sighting of land, or something.

The entire crew (that will fit on the flight deck) are called to attention. Like he was using the FIVE-INCH, the captain fires all his guns with another speech. It soaks in for a few more scenes.

We check up on Boyfriend, who turns out to be totally cured. Maybe Dr. Scott should ask the ship’s doctor for help on her vaccine.

With the last speech absorbed, the captain meets up with the sixteen who want off of his boat. They were moved by said speech. They all want to re-enlist and do so on the spot. Chessmaster Bacon was in this group. The captain’s pissed again. Dr. Googly Eyes has been talking, filling up old Bacon’s heads with crazy. They’re done talking. And done playing chess. He takes back the chess board and pieces. Enjoy your solitary confinement, sucka.

And thus ends a very boring and machine gun-free episode.

Sigh. I’m all for character development, if that’s what you want to call what happened in this episode. However, is there going to be any ACTION in this ACTION show?

1 comment

  1. Definitely the worst episode of the show so far. Very preachy and ridiculous. I had a good laugh when the captain called all hands to the flight deck, yet we only saw about two dozen people show up for his speech. What happened to the rest of the crew?

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