User Reviews

We begin really badly but the big scene was rather funny, even though somewhat farcical.

The crew is opening mail in their tent-not the wine cellar they moved into a few episodes earlier. Methinks this episode might have been filmed before the other ones in the wine cellar. Anyhow, Mr. Parker has received a tape recorder-which I understand was not possible at this point in time. Almost as soon as he gets it, Binghamton and Carpenter burst in, guns in hand, arresting them, it turns out, solely on the notion that the tape recorder was stolen.

This was dumb on the captain's part. If he had been listening, like usual, he would have heard Chuck talk about getting this through a correspondence school, and that he wants to be a radio show host after the war. If he wasn't listening in, bursting in without any knowledge of any illegal materials on hand make it a waste of time for the captain-who lately seems to have no pressing duties other than trying to put McHale & Co. into the brig.

As soon as Binghamton sees the letter and receipt that came with the recorder, he leaves, but warns them that he'll catch them soon. Back at his office, the Judge Advocate phones Binghamton, telling him he'll be there later to get to the bottom of all the charges Binghamton has pressed against McHale and his crew-40 of them in the last 3 months. He wants to see the evidence.

Since Binghamton has no evidence, he comes up with another scheme to frame McHale-almost a rerun of one he tried a while back in Taratupa. He plants Elroy's watch and wallet, among other things, in his wall safe, then has some sailors rig it so when the door to his office closes, the picture by his desk falls off the wall and the safe pops open. The plan is to have the 73 crew report to see the captain, be told by Carpenter that the captain has been delayed and they are to wait in his office. When Elroy closes the door, the trap is set. When they open the door more widely, an alarm will go off and Binghamton and two MPs will rush in with cameras to catch them in the act. Again, this is almost exactly what Binghamton tried in Taratupa in "The Great Necklace Caper" near the end of Season 3.

The crew shows up, Carpy shuts them in the office, the trap springs, but before anything happens the phone rings with the judge advocate general telling McHale (without asking who he was speaking to) to tell Binghamton that he'll be delayed until tomorrow and they'll get the goods on McHale then. So McHale directs his men to not touch the safe or its contents and they just leave.

Back at McHale's, Chuck tries out his tape recorder, pretending to interview men on the street about their favorite war stories. Each of McHale's men talks about some shenanigan they pulled, stealing something from Leadbottom, or going AWOL to take out a nurse in a Jeep, or whatever. McHale enters and tells them about a mission they are to go on. Chuck leaves his tape recorder under a table.

Of course it's a fake mission so Binghamton and Carpenter can search their tents hoping to find something incriminating. Carpy kicks the side of the unseen recorder and it just happens to turn on near the beginning of the recording telling about heists they pulled. They take the recorder and hide it, wanting to bring it out for the general the next day.

I know this sounds like a two-part episode, but the main scene is still coming. Before McHale can come up with a plan to figure out where the recorder is, Carpenter accidentally knocks a flower pot from the second floor onto the captain's head, rendering him unconscious. Now Quinton gets an idea-as usual, sprung from a comment one of the men makes-and the plan is to make the captain think the war is over, so he'll tell about his old war stories to famous radio host Chatty Chuck Parker.

The get Rosa, just called Mama Giovanni in this one, to pretend to have opened up a restaurant in New York City, in one of the downtown Voltafiore buildings. They dress up everyone, including Binghamton in civilian duds, and with some sounds of the city, a fake newspaper from 1950, convince Binghamton that the war ended years ago. They do get him to reveal where he hid the tape recorder, and (unseen) Christy goes and destroys the evidence.

Of course, nothing ever goes over easily. The general shows up while the ruse is still being played out. Because Binghamton behaves so bizarrely toward the general, they tell the general about him being hit with the flower pot and say he lost his memory, so they were humoring him. Binghamton figures out what really happened, but when Christy gives him the tape recorder, it sounds like gibberish. The captain has to go away for a psych evaluation and the crew is off the hook.

I tire of Binghamton trying to set up McHale. It's fine when something's been stolen for him to suspect him or his crew, but these set up schemes are not funny. This series also used a fake "War is over" plot to get Fuji out of the brig back on Taratupa. But that didn't bother me because then it was just a fake news broadcast that the war just ended. This time, it was supposed to have been years since the war ended, and they were supposed to be back in New York, so it was all different in that regard.

I much enjoyed their look at New York and, of course, Joe Flynn did a great job of playing the confused captain, trying to accept that it was really 1950 as the evidence kept coming in. The other stuff was not much good, but overall, this was still an 8 to me.