This week’s episode was not a favorite of mine. I think this was partially because there was no real tension in the story for me and partially because I had it figured out about 3 minutes in.
The episode was all about the mission. The mission felt very realistic in it’s simplicity, but does that make for a satisfying 40-some-odd minutes of television?
As the parents protest that the SEALs have the wrong house, Sonny, of all people, works their 8 year-old son for information.
The boy, like his parents, wants to make sure his big sister gets the medical help she needs. So he gives them the well-hidden (in a drain) phone. (I’m guessing their search parameters will change in the future.)
The show has slowly expanded its focus on our central SEALs. In doing so, they have made Sonny a favorite of mine. Watching him deal with that 8 year-old boy just made me smile.
From some of his comments over the course of the season, I expected him to be a kid whisperer. But he’s not. He was, at some points, painfully awkward and at others on the same page with the kid. Ultimately, he got the information they needed.
It was a little unclear to me whether the guy who gave her the phone was the same age as Aisha or a grown man who worked at the Mosque. Her mother definitely thought they were just friends. Aisha said he was her teacher.
I love hard action, but I’ve watched so much TV in my life that 90% of the time I can see which direction a story is going. Because of this, character is really important in my television viewing. It was the character stories that left me with mixed feelings about the ending of this episode.
On the one hand, having the girl be an innocent bystander left Clay, the shooter, very upset. He struggled to maintain operational focus in the wake of having possibly killed an unarmed child.
It might have made for a very interesting story for Clay, new to this particular pressure cooker, to deal with this perceived mistake when he returns home.
It also could have given us some insight on whether Jason will continue to talk to his wife when he returns home. When Jason mentioned that he was disturbed by the shooting because the victim reminded him of his own teenaged daughter, my first thought was whether he would talk to his wife about those feelings.
By making Aisha the person they were hunting, it’s possible that that both of those character story questions become moot. That revelation took Aisha from unarmed innocent bystander to combatant, and that’s something far easier to compartmentalize.
On the other hand, the soldier struggles to deal with killing an innocent in combat story is not a new one, and the direction the show decided to take spared us a, possibly, clichéd story. I really can’t say which direction would have been the best for me as an audience member.
That’s not to say that the episode ignored character stories completely.
Ellis isn’t worried about at all and I can understand why. To paraphrase my best friend ‘People who are worried about being bad people never are.’
The episode ended with a fairly powerful shot of the family as Jason and the team exits. It was an eloquent study of what the family lost.
This episode was my favorite of the season but it wasn’t a bad episode at all.
What do you think? Did the conclusion work for you? Did such a simple straight forward mission work for you?
