2004
The base is about to be inspected by the head of Logistics Command. SFC Gabriel Shukrun orders his incompetent privates Hanukah and Shulman to quickly replenish base stocks, in order to pass the inspection. There's only one problem - one of the missing items is a nuclear warhead! Confounded by the problem, the privates decide to remove the water-boiler from the roof of the common showers, paint it as a nuclear warhead, and put it in place of the missing warhead. The inspection goes without a hitch, but things later complicate when Abbed, the base's Bedouin neighbor, steals the water-boiler, thinking it's really a nuclear warhead.
Following a ridiculously illegal act that he himself had perpetrated, SFC Gabriel Shukrun applies timeless army logic and decides to punish all base personnel instead, revoking their weekend leave. The guys now prepare for visits by family members coming to spend Saturday with them. Shulman's mother informs her son that his father has run off with another man. Hanukah's father is reunited with old army comrade Shukrun (the base SFC), but while reminiscing, Hanuka's tactlessness reveals that his father had back-stabbed Shukrun by lying about a winning lottery ticket they bought together, many years ago. Levinstein's parents arrive to ask her to donate a toe to her "perfect" twin sister so she can have a modeling career. Adiso the Ethiopian soldier awaits his parents patiently - in the best of Ethiopian tradition they are coming on foot, through the desert, all the way from a distant city!
David Tapuach, a building contractor and full-time crook, comes to M.K.22 to promote the construction of a high-tech perimeter fence with a multitude of anti-terrorist countermeasures. To build this fence, he brings along a group of Thai "foreign workers" (illegal immigrants). Despite Tapuach's claims that these workers don't need any shelter for the night, SFC Shukrun insists that they reside in the base, and puts them up in Hanukah and Shulman's room. Hanukah believes the Thais are planning to eat him, and decides to sleep outside. Shulman later goes looking for Hanukah in the desert, and instead stumbles upon a scantly-clad Ukrainian woman who was being dragged through the desert from Egypt to be sold in Israel. As he falls in love with this woman, everyone on the base claim that she is just a Russian prostitute (including the lady herself). In the meanwhile, the Thai workers really ARE eating soldiers on the base! Also in this episode, Tapuach is eager to turn the nearby empty desert into a huge town + shopping mall, and tries to convince the owner of these lands, Abbed the Bedouin Shepherd, to join in on the venture. When Abbed refuses, Tapuach conspires to arrange an accident for him. A godfather-style exchange of hostilities ensues.
The IDF receives a budget cut of 2 billion dollars. The Chief of Staff, failing to get the cooperation of his subordinate generals, decides on a whim to cancel a top-secret IDF hi-tech project, which had just completed construction of the world's first time machine - a project which incidentally costs exactly 2 billion dollars a year. The prototype time machine is mothballed and sent to M.K.22 for storage. Given strict orders not to open the crate, Hanukah and Shulman can't resist their primal snooping instinct, and open the box. Caught by SFC Shukrun, they are sentenced to 7 days in the brig. Absurdly whining that they "wouldn't survive" 7 days in the brig, the guys decide to travel back in time and stop themselves from opening the crate. Unfortunately, their past-counterparts are just as stupid as they, which leads to a whole mess-of-a-loop in the space-time continuum, ending up with dozens of Hanukahs and Shulmans arguing with each other about who to blame for opening the box, and hence who should face the sentence in the brig. While they're busy arguing with their own past selves, Abbed the Bedouin Shepherd steals the time machine, planning to use it to mess with the past of the Jewish People - but instead he keeps perpetuate the very events in Jewish History which he was trying to prevent.
SFC Shukrun is, once again, skipped for promotion. To earn the favor of his superiors, he decides to endorse a mass blood-donation at M.K.22, and promises 2 days' vacation for each donation made. Not surprisingly, our guys donate large amounts of blood. However, in the finest Israeli tradition, Adiso's blood is thrown away, due to him being Ethiopian. This raises a great public outcry, prompting the Chief of Staff himself to visit M.K.22. The Chief of Staff runs a parody gag on the movie "Memento" - he can't remember who he is, and has to read tattoos off his own body to remind himself that he is the Chief of Staff (and to recite cliché army exclamations). During his stay, the Chief of Staff switches clothes with Private Shlomi Hanukah. Abbed the Bedouin Shepherd receives orders from his terrorist operator to kidnap the Chief of Staff, but due to the clothes-exchange, he kidnaps Hanukah instead. Realizing that Hanukah has been kidnapped, Shulman exploits the CoC's bad memory, gaining his ultimate trust by giving the Chief a photograph of himself with the caption "Believe everything he says". Shulman is quickly promoted to Major General, and appointed Spokesman for the IDF. He also has SFC Shukrun thrown into the army prison, where he shares a cell with Mordechai Va'anunu (the man who divulged secrets about Israel's nuclear capabilities to foreign press). Meanwhile, as Abbed is interrogating Hanukah (still thinking he's the CoC), he manages to get Hanukah to confess about his deepest personal feelings.
The Israeli Air Force is forced to begin accepting disabled people for pilot training. Levinstein, the paraplegic girl, decides to participate in the try-outs. Everyone at the base is excited - Levinstein's finally going away for good! SFC Gabriel Shukrun shoots a howling wolf, which is later found by private Shulman, who brings him to the base. The wolf, recognizing Shukrun as the man who shot him, bites Shukrun and infects him with Lycanthropy. Abbed the Bedouin Shepherd watches a commercial for Intelligent Robotic Sheep on the Al-Jazeera Shopping Channel, and orders one for his nefarious terrorist plans. This robo-sheep excels in training, but is alienated by the other sheep in the herd. Meanwhile, Shukrun runs rampant around the base as he changes into a werewolf under the light of the full moon. The mechanical robo-sheep and the wheel-chair bound Levinstein meet one another and become good friends, but with a were-wolf prowling around the base, things are bound to go downhill. With a story so far-fetched, it might as well rain frogs!
Enraged by the upcoming Gay Parade in Tel-Aviv, a convention of ultra-orthodox rabbis (in the style of an "Elders of Zion" meeting), decide to use nuclear weapons to destroy the parade and "put an end to the homosexual scourge". To acquire a nuclear weapon, they deploy a robo-rabbi with hypnotic capabilities, which would ultimately take complete control over M.K.22 and its nuclear missile silos. Hanukah and Shulman, along with private Baber and officer Motti (who are incidentally a homosexual couple), return to the base after it had been taken over, to discover that everything has changed - everyone is wearing skullcaps, people talk in Yiddish, and horse-drawn carts roll along the little streets of the base, in the best tradition of a little Jewish village in 19th century Europe. The guys barricade themselves inside the missile launch control room in order to escape the hypnotizing robo-rabbi, but Private Baber decides to go for help. He manages to bring aid in the form of a truck-float from the Gay Parade, but the rabbis are not about to give up - they unleash a menace far greater than the hypnotizing robo-rabbi: the huge, menacing, terrible, and meticulously CGI-rendered MECHA-RABBI!
This episode begins with a nuclear attack on Neve Shalom, an integrated Jewish-Arab village, and with the trial of Hanukah and Shulman, the principle suspects in the incident. A flashback returns us to the beginning of the story, of the events leading up to the nuclear explosion. It starts with Hanukah and Shulman accused for leaving the missile silo door unlocked (and with the A/C on!), and sentenced to one week of guard-duty in the West Bank. They try various ways to get an exemption through rigged medical evaluations, but quickly find there's no one to talk to. Meanwhile, Abbed the Bedouin Shepherd and his suicide sheep dig a tunnel under the base, and into the missile control room. He attempts to fire one of the nuclear missiles, but rats chewing on the wires cause the electricity to short out and the firing sequence to fail. As Abbed makes his disappointed escape, our bumbling privates decide to resort to stealing exemption notes from the base doctor's office, as part of their endeavor to avoid guard duty in the West Bank. Unfortunately, the base doctor is a drug addict and had been stealing all kinds of chemicals from the medical storage, and the military police decides to spring a trap just as the guys are trying to sneak into the infirmary. Due to the doctor's quick thinking, he goes free, and instead Shulman and Hanukah are the ones charged with stealing, and sentenced to a month in the brig on top of their previous guard-duty sentence, and again their unrelenting egos force them to seek a way to avoid this too.
Sat, Jun 12, 2004
In the beginning of the last episode of the series, the men of M.K.22 are having some "quality time", watching an old Israeli movie which is commonly remembered only because of a single, steamy sex-scene. Also, for this specific screening of the movie, the principle actress has arrived at M.K.22. When SFC Shukrun realizes that the movie he's showing to the troops contains the aforementioned scene, he promptly stops the projection and sends everyone off. Later that night, Hanukah and Shulman catch SFC Shukrun having sex with the actress, mimicking the scene they had seen in the movie earlier. When they blunder the cover-up story he tries to feed to them, they are sentenced to guard the gate of the base. As they do, they decide never to put themselves on the line anymore. Just then, a plane crashes right outside the base. Our boys don't even get up from their butts, sticking to their newfound philosophy, while Levinstein rides her wheelchair back and forth from the crash-site to the base, shuttling wounded away from the fire. When the media finally arrives, suddenly the boys take credit for the entire rescue operation, and are ceremoniously invited to be interviewed in one of Israel's most popular TV guest-shows. Things go awry, however, when one of the show's other guests, Palestinian movie director Makhram Khouri, suddenly announces that he is wearing a bomb and that he is holding them all hostage until all Palestinian demands are met. As various Israeli security forces battle it out for the privilege to go in and rescue them, it's up to our incompetent, blundering privates to save the day.