So now the good news: customers complained and Fox got the message. Reliable sources at Fox Home Entertainment have confirmed that "the bonus discs in Fox's all things M*A*S*H 'Martinis and Medicine' boxed set will be made available to fans in another incarnation soon." At this time Fox isn't offering any additional details, but that's encouraging news anyway, especially for those agonizing over whether to chuck their collections just to get those two extra discs.

As for M*A*S*H's final (1982-83) season, it's a big step up from the less consistently excellent ninth and tenth seasons, and it's capped with a spectacularly good, dramatically appropriate series finale. Not counting the movie-length last show, the season produced just 15 regular episodes, and perhaps because the writers were both aware that the show was coming to an end and that the remaining episodes would be fewer in number (compared to earlier seasons), there's a creative push in the home-stretch, a strong sense of wrapping things up and wanting to go out on a high note.

The Korean War rages on, with fighting intensifying just as rumors that the war may soon be over gradually reach the doctors, nurses, and support staff of the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, M*A*S*H, patching back together the wounded a short distance from the front lines. They include doctors "Hawkeye" Pierce (Alan Alda), BJ Hunnicut (Mike Farrell), Charles Emerson Winchester (David Ogden Stiers), and Col. Sherman T. Potter (Harry Morgan), also commanding officer; head nurse Maj. Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan (Loretta Swit), company clerk Max Klinger (Jamie Farr), and camp priest Father Mulcahy (William Christopher).

The acting by both the series regulars and guest stars like Soon-Tek Oh, Jeff East, John Anderson, John McLiam, etc. is frequently superb. Series veterans like Charles S. Dubin (especially) and Burt Metcalfe helmed the majority of shows, but almost half were directed by actors: Alda, Farrell, Morgan, and Farr, as well as Susan Oliver, and about one-third were written, co-written, or directed by women. One strong example of the latter is the season opener, "Hey, Look Me Over," an irresistibly sweet show highlighting unsung Nurse Kellye (Kellye Nakahara), who had been with the show almost from the start though in most episodes rarely had more than a line or two of dialogue.

Though still ostensibly a comedy, a strong sense of despair and barely-contained rage hangs over M*A*S*H's characters during this last season, and the show goes out feeling much more like a half-hour drama than a sitcom. It's to the show's credit that no matter how amusing Klinger's wild schemes or BJ's practical jokes or Hawkeye's corny one-liners, death continually lurks on the other side of the tent-flap.

This was never truer than with the final show, "Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen," which almost bravely eschews audience expectations - with the war ending and everyone getting to at long last go home viewers were perhaps expecting one big party - by instead ending M*A*S*H with one last kick in the gut. The writers carefully give each character one final, terrible reminder of the horror of war. (At the time, many viewers were concerned one character might even be killed off, a la McLean Stevenson's Henry Blake at the end of Season Three.)

Impressively, co-writer and director Alda presents Hawkeye as a man profoundly scarred in ways hinted at in some earlier episodes but never taken as far as he does here. And if Hawkeye's disquieting mental illness doesn't throw a big enough bucket of cold water on the celebration, BJ's (and by extension, the audience's) reluctance to come to terms with the fact that, with the war over, this extended family of strangers will likely never see each other again, gives the show its emotional resonance.

The finale's most memorable story thread, however, concerns the sad, lonely fate of Charles Winchester, the solitary figure who never fit in, the erudite man determined to go at it alone and by his own design detached from his surroundings. Here he lets the outside world in just a bit, and it bites back in an almost unbearably cruel fashion, leaving Charles perhaps the most scarred character of them all. (The power of Charles' story and its use of Mozart's Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, K. 581 sent untold viewers into classical music shops, looking for a recording of the piece.)

Indeed, that final show became a nationwide event likened to the Super Bowl, and in the 23 years since it first aired the medium has changed so dramatically that it's one unlikely ever to be repeated.

Video & Audio

Season 11's transfers are the best yet; one wishes they had looked this good all along. Uncut and not time-compressed, they are presented in their original full-frame format on three dual-layered discs, with eight shows on Disc One, seven on Disc Two, and the finale taking up all of Disc Three. The Dolby Digital 1.0 mono, available with or without the canned laughter, is fine. French and Spanish tracks are available, along with English and Spanish subtitles. There are no Extra Features.

Parting Thoughts

M*A*S*H was neither entirely a comedy nor entirely a drama, but it was probably both the best comedy and best continuing American drama series of the 1970s and early-1980s. Though it began life as a better-than-you'd have expected, watered-down imitation of Robert Altman's movie, it evolved in ways that could never have been anticipated and, perhaps even more so than the movie, brought its universal stories about the tragedies of war and the little triumphs of the men and women caught in it into homes everywhere.

Postscript: Though it isn't half the series M*A*S*H was, here's hoping Fox Home Entertainment will eventually release to DVD AfterMASH, the ill-fated comedy-drama starring Morgan, Farr, and Christopher.

Film historian Stuart Galbraith IV's most recent essays appear in Criterion's new three-disc Seven Samurai DVD and BCI Eclipse's The Quiet Duel.