A quick review of tonight’s “Last Resort” coming up just as soon as I peg you for an exotic fruit man…
“Another Fine Navy Day” was two-thirds of the way to being one of the stronger episodes so far, but ultimately it tried to do one thing too many.
As both a tense Problem of the Week outing where Marcus tried to keep the crew alive in a lousy circumstance, and as an expansion of the mythology about Pakistan, the SEALs, etc., I thought the episode worked quite well. (My only real complaint on that end was Sam letting Serrat walk away, in a circumstance when he could have easily gotten justice for the murder of Red – and the other people hurt and killed as part of this new scheme – and even blamed it on this new force.)
But the hallucinations didn’t really work at all, telling us the same info we already knew – that Sam feels guilty about being away from Christine, and that Marcus is grieving his son – over and over and over again, in often clumsy ways. (The Christine scenes in particular.) Andre Braugher just about made the bedtime story scene work, but the rest of it felt like the show straining to draw a tighter connection between the island and the mainland, and provide a non-flashback excuse for Sam and Christine to interact in person. (And it also advanced Sophie’s interest in Sam, which hasn’t been one of the more compelling subplots.)
As with “Last Resort” as a whole, I admire the ambition of an episode like this, yet feel that in both the macro and the micro, the show might be better off simplifying for a while and focusing on what it does well.
What did everybody else think?