After picking up a distress call near Jamaica, Chandler and a small team stage a rescue attempt. But a surprise attack leaves Chandler and Tex stranded at sea. Slattery and the crew search desperately to find their lost at sea Captain and his comrade, hoping to do so before their enemies beat them to it.
The Last Ship made great strides this week in becoming a show generally interesting. Major progress is being made with the disease and the vaccine now that it's been revealed there's a survivor immune to it. I never believed the show would so frivolously kill off its lead character and was preparing myself for an episodic plot that would ultimately have little importance moving forward. However, the way that that story is resolved is the best story beat the show could have done with the old bait-and-switch. So now, Chandler has been captured by the Russians and the show finally has something meaningful to lose when it comes to Dr. Scott's research. It's very clearly building to a climatic battle over the last handful of episodes of the season. For the first time, I'm generally interested in seeing the show get out of the position that it's in.Perhaps the reason why I respect that final twist so much is because the show didn't feel the need to only do episodic plots. This twist will have lasting impacts as the show is finally starting to ramp up its stakes. Progress has been slow moving. But it's not a story that is nicely resolved by hour's end. It doesn't bring up a discussion about morality and life only for it to be given a simple solution by the end of the episode. It tells the story in a way that both surprises the audience and gives them a good reason of why they need to tune in next week other than seeing an action show being an action show.
And then, on the research side of things, it's fascinating that it's at this moment in time that an immunity to the disease is found. It really couldn't come at a better time as all of Rachel's trials on the monkeys have failed. She only has 2 left and then this girl just magically falls onto her lap. That's a little suspect but I'll take it because it moves the story ahead. Plus, now it gives us another story of humanity seeing this disease first-hand. The girl from the ship isn't a monkey or suffering from the disease. She's had to live alongside it and just sit idly by and watch it kill everyone around her. That's deeply traumatic and deserves to be explored further. Remembering the humanity of all of this is what The Last Ship needs to do frequently. With this latest plot twist, it honestly does.
Some more thoughts:
- "SOS" was written by Jessica Butler & Jill Blankenship and directed by Michael Katleman.
- Tex has had his moments of light-hearted annoyance. His feelings towards Dr. Scott seemed tacked on. However, he was a nice sounding board to have out at sea with the Captain. I don't think he's long for this world though.
- Didn't it seem like Slattery didn't know about that coral reef for too long? If his captain is lost at sea, wouldn't he start thinking about where the logical spot they would swim to would be and then look in that area first? But then, it would deprive us of that twist in the end.
- Didn't care for Danny's "Thousand hours of training, five minutes of chaos, then thousand hours of second guessing" speech. Been there done that.
- Flashbacks have been sparsely used and I actually think they are a device the show could have gotten away with. Using each hour to tell the human story about one of the ship's crew and what he or she is fighting for back home could have been a great way to connect to these character. Instead we get one awkwardly placed flashback that then serves very little purpose later in the episode.
