"King of the Greenie Board" is an episode of JAG that first aired on September 21, 1999. Directed by Alan J Levi. Written by John Schulian.
In this episode of JAG, we see that Lt. Commander Rabb has returned to his former profession. He regains full flight status as a naval aviator, and deploys onboard the fictional carrier USS Patrick Henry. He is deployed to Kosovo to enforce the no-fly zone there.
Lieutenant Elizabeth "Skates" Hawkes (Sibel Ergener), the radio intercept officer (RIO) from the second season episode "Crossing the Line", is now Rabb's RIO. However, he can't completely escape his recent legal career, as he is also made the Wing Legal Officer, often assisting the inexperienced Carrier Judge Advocate with legal matters.
Rabb is also drawn into defending an enlisted sailor, Airman Griggs (Sean Christopher Davis), on negligence charges. Lt. Andrew "X-Man" Buxton (Lochlyn Munro) is a cocky, arrogant colleague of Rabb's, who blames Griggs when an ECM Jammer pod falls off its wing mount while Buxton is taking off. Buxton also happens to be Rabb's leader in formation.
After Buxton gets a little too aggressive and careless during a dogfight with enemy Serbian MiGs, Rabb has to come in and save him. This causes the carrier air group (CAG) commander, Captain Pike (Mark Metcalf), to make Rabb flight leader instead of Buxton.
This, and the issue with Griggs, who allegedly didn't attach the pod right, causes strong tension between Rabb and Buxton. Another problem they have to contend with, is a Serbian command and control aircraft that appears to be monitoring the no-fly zone for coalition aircraft, so that Serbian fighters can get airborne when NATO aircraft are absent and operate unimpeded.
Rabb and Skates finally come up with a plan to find and neutralize that aircraft without shooting it down. Buxton however attempts to show Rabb up by finding and killing a motor rifle unit that appears to be targeting a convoy carrying refugees.
In the meantime, Major MacKenzie was promoted to lieutenant colonel and now outranks Rabb. She is tasked with prosecuting Corporal Winrow (Christian Payne), a weapons instructor accused of being drunk while firing a prototype weapon, and starting a brushfire.
Mac puts a technical expert, Gunnery Sergeant Victor Galindez (Randy Vasquez) on the stand to corroborate that there is nothing wrong with the weapon. Galindez though, has a different opinion — one that may get him assigned to the JAG corps as an investigator.
Right before the episode ends, a Russian admiral (Adam Gregor) onboard the carrier as an observer, confronts a celebrating Buxton along with Captain Pike. It turns out that the "Serbian" motor rifle element he strafed, was a Russian peacekeeping unit that was escorting the refugees to safety. Buxton is in trouble now.
Tropes
- Aspect Ratio Switch: From season 5 onwards, JAG was filmed in a widescreen (16:9) aspect ratio.
- Coming in Hot: Rabb suffers a bird strike, loses an engine and still manages to successfully land.
- Didn't Think This Through: Buxton allows Rabb to take on fuel instead of taking on sufficient fuel himself. But he immediately proceeds to land right after Rabb does, instead of waiting for another tanker to get up and refuel. Besides the possibility of flaming out his engines during a carrier landing attempt, when he would need thrust to flare his aircraft, he never anticipated that Rabb's damaged aircraft may not have been cleared off the deck in time for his landing.
- Gargle Blaster: The "depth charge" that Corporal Winrow had a few of, the night before his mishap.
- Gilligan Cut: Roberts waxes poetic about Rabb following his dream, "freed from the courtroom, unshackled from his desk and the mountains of paperwork that plagued him." Cut to Rabb in his quarters aboard the Patrick Henry, writing a letter on a laptop with so many paper documents around him that he placed some of them on his roommate's bunk.
- Idiot Ball: Buxton ignores a warning that MiGs always fly in pairs and a common tactic was to dangle one as bait to ambush any pursuing fighter. He still aggressively blunders in, and pretty soon gets locked on. Rabb has to lock on to Buxton's ambushers to get him to back off.
- Leeroy Jenkins: Buxton is a shoot first and ask questions later kinda guy. Exactly what lands him in hot water in the last act of the episode, too.
- Loophole Abuse: According to the rules of engagement, Rabb can't shoot down the command and control aircraft. But nothing prevents him from squirting fuel onto that aircraft, fogging up their cockpit windows and clogging up their air intakes, causing their engines to flame out and seek an emergency landing.
- Older and Wiser: Rabb gains this reputation eventually among the Patrick Henry air wing, especially compared to Buxton.
- Rank Up: Mac is promoted to lieutenant colonel (O-5), replacing the gold oak leaf on her uniform with a silver oak leaf (silver is senior to gold in the military). This is equivalent to a Commander in the Navy, which means she now outranks Rabb.
- Screw the Money, I Have Rules!: Gunnery Sergeant Galindez reveals some extremely damaging information about a prototype weapon to save a corporal from a conviction, even if it meant costing him an extremely lucrative post retirement job with that weapon's maker.
- Shout-Out to Moby-Dick: Rabb's roommate wonders if Rabb is writing the sequel to Herman Melville's classic.
- To Be Continued: These words appear in white letters after Pike informs Buxton that he killed Russian peacekeepers, not Serbian war criminals.
