WORST episode of "MASH?"

[Archae]

I have two contenders:

The one where at the end they painted rocks and a jeep gold, to trick Frank into not transferring.

When Radar got wounded.

[Orrex]

1. I don't like the placebo episode

Because it almost singlehandedly created the pop-medical myth that the mind can overcome just about anything.

[Richard Steele]

2. The "Final Episode". Not a laugh in sight.

Alan Alda finally sucked his head so far up his butt
that he went from "sarcasm" to "black humor" to
"just fucking SCRIPTED PANDERING".

He JUMPED THE SHARK with that maudlin bullshit.

If he had ever actually BEEN THERE, I might give him a pass...
but he never was any closer to it than a California resort
equipped with surplus tents and Jeeps.

[AngryOldDem]

9. Word.

That was about the most disappointing series finale -- not a good end to a long run.

The show just got to be too preachy to be watchable. It seemed the more Alan Alda and Mike Farrell grew a social conscience, the quality of the show went way down.

[joeybee12]

14. It was like a totally different show...n/t

[OmahaBlueDog]

3. The show pretty much loses me after BJ grows a mustache

I won't say the last episode was the worst, but it was really anti-climactic. I had a hard time buying the passionate Hawkeye-Hot Lips kiss at the end, and I thought the notion that she would leave the army wasn't plausible.

[Alexander]

4. The one where Hawkeye sleepwalks because of a repressed memory...

turns out some childhood friend pushed him into a lake or something as a kid, so he wails and makes a big deal about it as an adult.

Terrible episode. Dr. Sidney Freedman is in it too, psychoanalyzing him, and I never liked his character on that show.

[Recovered Repug]

5. The one where Hawkeye has a jeep accident.

30 minutes of Alan Alda talking nonstop, no thanks.

[leeroysphitz]

6. I think it's that episode where Hawk Eye observes some tragic consequence of war and gets depressed

[woo me with science]

8. LOL! nt

[Richardo]

13. !!

:rofl:

[Dr Morbius]

7. The last two seasons were all pretty bad IMHO. (nt)

[VMI Dem]

10. The one with the chicken that turned out to be a baby.

Depressing.

[LeftinOH]

11. When watching the episodes now, the canned laughter is unbearable-

I can't stand watching M*A*S*H re-runs for that reason alone. Oddly, I never noticed it during the original run.

[fishwax]

17. I agree it's horrible -- at least on the DVD versions you can turn the laugh track off

It's so much better without the laugh track.

[Bucky]

12. When Hawkeye & Hotlips hooked up. They'd pretty much run out of idea at that point.

The more serious it got, the worse it got. Alan Alda just doesn't have the range as an actor to pull off the massive trauma the scripts kept calling on him to display.

[LynneSin]

15. That's when MASH 'Jumped the Shark' - after that it started going downhill

Sure there were some good episodes but the MASH was gone.

[hedgehog]

16. It's not so much a particular episode but the canned laugh track -

(I agree, I never noticed it during the original run and actually thought it had been added in syndication!)

and

the loss of historical accuracy that ran step in step with the rise of feminism. Story lines and jokes that were acceptable the first years were totally unacceptable at the end. What happened is that characters supposedly living in 1953 were behaving as if they lived in 1983. As a primary source documenting the change in attitudes it's fascinating. As a comedy/drama set during the Korean War it's jarring. It's like seeing Lincoln write the Gettysburg Address with a ballpoint pen. The hair styles also drifted from 1953 to 1983.

[Gidney N Cloyd]

18. Almost any episode with Winchester.