38. Hot Lips and Empty Arms

December 15, 1973 (K-414)

Written by: Linda Bloodworth and Mary Kay Place.
Directed by: Jackie Cooper
Semi-regulars: Kellye Nakahara as Nurse Yamato, Sheila Lauritson as Nurse Watson, Odessa Cleveland as Nurse Ginger.

Plot: Time for a mail call! While Hawkeye gets some medical journals, Burns gets some stock reports and Henry gets a dirty movie, Hot Lips gets a letter from her old friend/rival Tricia Spalding that rubs in how much she (Hot Lips) doesn't have. She's fed up that her career is going nowhere and demands a transfer. Hawk 'n' Trap try to butter her up, but she's still going to leave, and is also planning to send a letter about them to General Mitchell. She starts stomping round the camp, drinking and saying blunt (drunk) farewells. She ends up just that little bit fonder of the boys when they help her recover and sober up in time for some casualties. In the end, she doesn't transfer after all and everything goes back to normal.

Glitches: Radar really must have hurried his little legs off to get the announcement of Hot Lips's departure to the PA guy by the end of the scene.
Henry's supposedly been putting Radar's name on the order forms for Tabasco Films. But if he's been doing that, why did the package come for him at the start of the episode? (Course, Radar probably knows the contents of all the mail anyway.)
Hawkeye's obviously injecting through Hot Lips's sleeve and not her arm.

Great Lines: Hawkeye on the medical journals he gets: 'Hope they're recent. Last batch, Pavlov was just buying his first dog.'
Hawkeye: 'Get up on the wrong side of the war, Major?'
Hot Lips: 'You're Government Issue, Frank. You came with my mess kit and my khaki girdle.'
Hot Lips: 'That's the most vulgar, base thing I've ever seen!' Hawkeye: 'Well, Margaret, you can't come in in the middle.'
Trapper on Swamp-brewed champagne: 'Fifteen minutes ago was a very good year.'
Burns (shocked): 'You've been drinking!' Hot Lips: 'Correction. I am drinking.'
Henry: 'You sure you won't reconsider, Major.' Hot Lips: 'No, I've thought about it; I definitely want another drink.'
Hawkeye bemoans young casualties: 'I'd give $50 to see a varicose vein.' Henry: ''k, give me the money and I'll drop my pants.'
Henry, about the casualties: 'They're not even here yet!' Drunk Hot Lips: 'Well, let's go get 'em. I'll drive.'
Hot Lips: 'Oh, go salute yourself!' What a great military insult!
Hawkeye: 'How do you talk so well with no lips?'

Continuity is for Wimps: Hot Lips's dad is, according to her, deceased. He'll get better, it seems, because when he shows up later he's moving around and talking a lot for a dead guy...
The nurse played by Kellye Nakahara was Nurse Kellye in 35. Carry on Hawkeye - not hard to remember, but here she's billed as Nurse Yamato.

Notes: Henry's wife is thirty-five years old and has $2000 worth of bridgework (Henry still owes $1500 on it).
Burns and Hot Lips co-own (or co-owned, anyway) a black-and-white stuffed dog called Bimbo.
The Tabasco Film Company of Havana, Cuba is Henry's blue movie merchant of choice.

Comments: Bimbo's so cute, isn't he? This episode builds Hot Lips up that bit more and brings into sharp relief something we suspected about her all along - that she's quite a lonely person. Normally in her scenes with Burns, it comes out how dearly she wants to be an emotional human being and not just a career officer. (She chooses a funny partner to show this too, but each to her own.) From here on she'll more often start to show her more personable side, not that her incarnation as a neurotic Army bitch leaves any time soon. After all, she's been one for getting on twenty years, we guess. On the other hand, her big self-revelation this week is how deeply that trait runs, and how deeply her other traits might be buried in there.

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