History Fridge / MASH

*** These two also apply to the above - Frank and Charles are doctors who are in the military, rather than military men who are doctors, like Col. Potter.

*** On that note, they typically call Winchester "Charles" as both a rejection of military protocol and as a way of acknowledging that they view him as an equal. Ironically, Winchester likely takes that as an ''insult'', since his Blue Blood makes him think he's superior to them. Still, he never objects to this (but don't call him "Charlie" or "Chuck").

* [[TearJerker "Lieutenant Colonel Henry Blake's plane was shot down over the Sea of Japan."]] Did officers get priority transport, or should Henry have been going home on a boat? And wouldn't the troop ships unload in Korea itself, rather than Japan?
** At the beginning of the episode Radar says his itinerary is "Tokyo, San Francisco, and then home." This could refer to transfers he's making, or it could be a subtle reference to the Army's policy of rotating surgeons to safer posts like Tokyo before sending them home - ironically to prevent a "Henry Blake's plane" situation.

* Why did Klinger and Soon Lee manage to get married after only a day or two of being engaged, when "[[Recap/MashS2E7LIPLocalIndigenousPersonnel L.I.P. (Local Indigenous Personnel)]]" suggested it would take months? Simple: they didn't have Klinger's scrounging and Potter's connections to speed things up.

* Why did Klinger and Soon Lee manage to get married after only a day or two of being engaged, when "[[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Recap/MashS2E7LIPLocalIndigenousPersonnel L.I.P. (Local Indigenous Personnel)]]" suggested it would take months? Simple: they didn't have Klinger's scrounging and Potter's connections to speed things up.

* The staff frequently drinking alcohol or coffee instead of the local water or powdered milk makes sense with what they're dealing with - [[MustHaveCaffeine long hours in OR]] [[INeedAFreakingDrink after which they need to forget what they just saw]] but also would be very helpful in staving off waterborne diseases like dysentery, as it's mentioned more than once that it's common in their area.

* Why did Trapper and BJ get discharged before Hawkeye? The MASH universe maintains the points system used in World War II (in RealLife this system was discontinued long before the Korean War). Under that system, married men received extra points from the get-go (and men with children got even more) so as to allow them to return to their families sooner while still fulfilling their draft obligations. Also, BJ was shown to have gotten at least one medal during his time at the 4077. Awards were often worth discharge points, especially one as prestigious as the one that BJ got.
** Although note that BJ was not ACTUALLY discharged. His orders were a mistake, and he was stopped before he got very far.

* When BJ strays, he nearly writes his wife and confesses until Hawkeye talks him into simply acknowledging his mistake and not letting it harm his wife. Why does Hawkeye get so vehement in the process? Because Hawkeye has seen the damage that hurting your significant other can cause, as we find out that his long-term girlfriend (whom he acknowledged as the only woman he ever really loved) left him because he [[MarriedToTheJob was so involved with his work]].

* In "Major Topper", Charles keeps topping whatever stories Hawkeye or BJ tell with better ones, culminating in him claiming to have had a date with Audrey Hepburn. They call bullshit, and he produces a photograph of him with the famous starlet, the implication being that all his stories are true. It's the one before that that gets to me. They run out of morphine, and get the patients through the night with placebos (sugar pill "painkillers" plus (actual) sleeping pills and a lot of ice packs) -- Potter's idea. Hawkeye is saying how it was the most amazing thing he'd ever seen, and Charles dismisses that, recounting a story in which he witnessed an operation done without anesthesia, the patient having been put under via hypnosis. Flag on the play; Charles was the one loudly and repeatedly insisting that placebos wouldn't work, that they couldn't possibly work, and then when they do? "Oh, that's nothing, I've seen better." Bullshit. But it actually works for the joke that way. He spins these cock and bull stories, Hawkeye and BJ don't really buy it, but they let it go. Then when they've finally had enough and call him out, that happens to be the one he was telling the truth about, and he has photographic evidence.

** It was BJ and Hawkeye that were making the rape joke:

* Whenever Hawkeye replaces Frank's gun with a toy or a gun shaped lighter, he immediately pulls the trigger when unholstering it, thinking it is a real gun. We all know Frank [[ArtisticLicenseGunSafety failed gun safety]] and RuleOfFunny notwithstanding, he's pointing it at someone '''every''' time. In ''Five O'Clock Charlie'', when he 'arrests' Henry and Pierce for sabotaging his [=AA=] gun, he points the toy popgun at Trapper and pulls the trigger, [[RuleOfFunny if only done for the 'bang' flag to pop out]]. When he builds a small sandbag bunker in the Swamp and is woken up in the middle of the night, he points the lighter in Hawkeye and [=BJ=]'s direction. Again, this was done so the lighter would light, but still. In either time, had he had a real gun and done that, he would have [[IJustShotMarvinInTheFace shot Pierce in the face]]

* In "The Joker is Wild," a big deal is made at the end of how Hawkeye was the only one who got pranked, as the whole staff was in on it. Except the bet was that BJ could prank everyone on the staff, not just Hawkeye. BJ didn't actually prank any of them because they were in on it and faked the entire thing. By their own admission, no actual pranks took place, not even the others allowing themselves to be pranked. So ''why'' does everyone say Hawkeye lost the bet?
** BJ, when leveling the proposal on the rest of the staff, never actually names ''himself'' as the person pulling the prank. The perpetrator is an unnamed "someone" who might theoretically prank the entire staff. Well, if the rest of the staff is part of this theoretical "someone" (which is also used to indicate an ambiguous number, not just identity), who else is there to prank but Hawkeye? BJ never fesses up to the pranks that the rest of the staff pull on themselves. Even his taunting of Hawkeye after Klinger supposedly falls for it isn't an admission; when he holds up a finger, he isn't telling Hawkeye he's the last to be pranked. He's telling Hawkeye that there's only one member of the staff ''being'' pranked! Had Hawkeye not fallen apart, the ''rest'' of the staff would have lost.

* In "Death Takes a Holiday", Hawkeye, BJ, and Margaret try to keep a soldier alive past midnight (his wounds are fatal, it's only a question of ''when'' he dies) so his family won't have to remember Christmas as the day he died. In the end, they fail, and Hawkeye moves the hands on the clock and they falsify the record. They could have just said, "Hey, let's leave him and go to the Christmas party and check him after midnight. When we find him dead, who's to say what time he died?"

* In "Mulcahy's War," we meet Corporal Cupcake, a war dog. He's sent home after his stay at the 4077, and Radar gets a chuckle from the idea of Cupcake soon outranking him. But what Radar doesn't realize is that up until after the Vietnamese War, war dogs weren't retired; they were euthanized. In fact, once a war dog deployed, it never came home.

-->'''Margaret''': I think she's his cousin.
-->'''Potter''': Huh, close family.

--> '''Frank''': I understand okay. Death...or worse.
--> '''Hawkeye''' (to B.J.): Besides my life, Frank wants my virginity.
--> '''B.J.''': We all do.
--> '''Hawkeye''': If only I'd known.

*** It seemed out of character for Charles to not look at the label first, given the extremely high standards to which he holds himself.[[note]]Consider the realistic way he assesses his work in "Major Ego", where he pish-toshed the fact his patient had no pulse -- "That's impossible, this is a routine operation!" -- before starting resuscitation.[[/note]] Sure, in meatball surgery there might not be time and you'd have to trust that the nurse or tech was giving you the right thing, but this was post-op. If he couldn't see, he'd take the bottle over to the light. His reaction to having screwed up was also more Frank-like. Since this was an early Charles episode, maybe they weren't sure of his character, so they had him do a Frank-like thing.

*** It seemed out of character for Charles to not look at the label first, given the extremely high standards to which he holds himself. Sure, in meatball surgery there might not be time and you'd have to trust that the nurse or tech was giving you the right thing, but this was post-op. If he couldn't see, he'd take the bottle over to the light. His reaction to having screwed up was also more Frank-like. Since this was an early Charles episode, maybe they weren't sure of his character, so they had him do a Frank-like thing.

* In "Major Topper", Charles keeps topping whatever stories Hawkeye or BJ tell with better ones, culminating in him claiming to have had a date with Audrey Hepburn. They call bullshit, and he produces a photograph of him with the famous starlet, the implication being that all his stories are true. It's the one before that that gets to me. They run out of morphine, and get the patients through the night with placebos -- Potter's idea. Hawkeye is saying how it was the most amazing thing he'd ever seen, and Charles dismisses that, recounting a story in which he witnessed an operation done without anesthesia, the patient having been put under via hypnosis. Flag on the play; Charles was the one loudly and repeatedly insisting that placebos wouldn't work, that they couldn't possibly work, and then when they do? "Oh, that's nothing, I've seen better." Bullshit. But it actually works for the joke that way. He spins these cock and bull stories, Hawkeye and BJ don't really buy it, but they let it go. Then when they've finally had enough and call him out, that happens to be the one he was telling the truth about, and he has photographic evidence.