Last week on ‘The Last Ship’ was pretty entertaining, besides the lame teenager part. No big deal.
This week, will Dr. Red deliver any more monologues? Will we see any more FIVE-INCH? Will there be lots and lots of external shots of the Last Ship sailing? One can only hope!

Some good stuff goes down pre-credits. Dr. Red has a childhood flashback about being in Africa with her parents. Her mom is dying of malaria and her dad won’t let the doctors treat her because he thinks The Lord will save her. The Lord doesn’t. Red shakes it off and gets back to DISSECTING dead Patient Zero. I mean like REALLY dissecting him. She weighs his heart and then stuffs it in a Tupperware! The Away Team choppers back to the ship and XO Jayne briefs the Captain on the situation.

Uh, while you were off on the always ill-advised Away mission, something came up.

Something always does.

Right, so, uh Patient Zero is dead. He had a bad reaction to that blood transfusion and totally croaked. An unfortunate situation… or maybe not so unfortunate.

This sentiment/theme will carry through most of the rest of the episode. Well, at least through the murder mystery parts.

Dr. Red is still working up the next real cure. She wants to make it as infectious as the virus and she thinks she can do that using the gunk in Patient Zero’s dead lungs. Surely the new cure will be worth a little righteous murder, right?

Lots and lots of questioning ensues. XO Jayne interviews the immune prisoners about their weird cell phones. Even the Prez offers to help with the baddie interrogation. For some reason, the Chief Engineering Officer seems to be leading the murder mystery questioning.

Boyfriend2 and Wolf show off some of what their mommas gave them in a locker room scene. Girlfriend2 rocks in and kicks Wolf out. She has some questions for Boyfriend2 about getting down. Too bad “By the book” is another theme in this episode, and the “book” says no sex on the ship. (That book sucks.) So, no love for Boyfriend2 today.

So far all this questioning has only gotten us this far:

1. Boyfriend2, NOT laid.
2. The baddies are using some kind of totally lame hangman game to essentially low-tech text. They only have a 90-yard range so they must network… and network far.
3. Dr. Red is totally the main murder suspect and the evidence is overwhelming. She seems oblivious to what the consequences might be. One of her fellow doctors suggests that she’s screwed and if she really wanted to act on any breakthrough or anything she should do whatever she was gonna do REALLY fast. She runs off.

Back in her lab, Dr. Red cooks up something and decides that it would be a good idea to just inject herself with it. She has another African childhood flashback: Her mom died. “Use this to fight for what you believe in.” Righteous.

A short while later, Red breathes on an infected rat. After another short while, that rat appears to be cured. WHEW! Glad she got all that in lickety split!

Tex bops into the lab after Dr. Red finishes her fast science. She asks him if he thinks she murdered Patient Zero. He says aw shucks, we wouldn’t be alive right now if it weren’t for you… and yeah I TOTALLY think you did it, but that’s cool.

Sooo, so far, lots of talking, an almost sex scene and no badass monologues. How about we take care of one of those right now in the “Now it’s time for the Captain to confront Dr. Red” scene? It’s actually a decent, albeit more talky scene. They discuss right and wrong and how she was super duper bent on killing that lousy bastard. In a badass monologue, she eloquently waxes on about how she would have preferred him dying waaaay slower. Nice. Dr. Red still got her murder/monologue on.

OK, enough talking. The Last Ship has been sailing to New Orleans to go see what’s up with a survivor safe zone. Fifty or so private boats are all clustered there. The Last Ship has been listening in on them and all seems cool. Soooo…. instead of radioing anybody, they send a FAST BOAT. They bring along an Immune prisoner so he can work the very complicated text messaging hangman game. He does, and reveals that the sub is HERE!

READY ON WEAPONS!

The small fleet of private boats blows up.

BATTLE STATIONS!!

TORPEDO INBOUND – Turn hard! Get countermeasures ready!
SECOND TORPEDO!
THIRD TORPEDO!
FOUR FRAKKING TORPEDOES!

Launch countermeasures and, just for good measure, blast the FIVE-INCH a lot!!!

They do. All seems to have worked, except one torpedo reacquires the ship! BRACE FOR IMPACT!!! WERE HIT!!

Commercial break.

OK, we’re “hit,” but not really. It’s totally fine, nothing two guys with firefighting gear can’t handle. Move along.

Just then a call comes in. It’s the main baddie himself. Hello Last Ship, I just fired four torpedoes at you so I could poorly edit a video mashing together your gunshots over the private boat fleet getting blown up so it looks like your dumb asses did it. Ha HA! I shall now rule the world MUHAHAHAHA!

That guy is nuts.

We have the ultimate in contagious curing technology. Let’s go save some folks! But not you, Dr. Red. You gotta get all locked up, you know, for your murder trial. Sorry.

All in all, not a bad ep. It tries the murder mystery kinda thing, which sorta goes well. We got a few minutes of really intense action. That turned out to be mostly for naught, but hey, the FIVE-INCH came out!