Frustrated with the carnage wrought by a trigger-happy colonel, Hawkeye resorts to extreme measures to stop him, endangering his friendship with B.J. in the process. Klinger tries putting a voodoo curse on Colonel Potter to get his Section 8.
Attention, all personnel! Col. Lacy's surgery has been declared justified by the following tropes:
- And Your Little Dog, Too!: Klinger to Radar, after Radar tells Klinger he can't threaten Col. Potter.Klinger: And you stay out of it, or the teddy bear gets it next!
- Artistic License – Military: Unless Hawkeye was able to perform the operation completely on his own, there's no way that Potter would not have found out about it. And it would have been a court-martial offense. (On the other hand, given that Potter was already drafting a report to higher echelons that bluntly stated that Lacy was not fit for command, he may well have been willing to cut Hawkeye a tiny bit of slack this once...)
- Colonel Kilgore: Lieutenant Colonel Lacy fits this trope, as he has an almost single-minded obsession with taking a certain Communist-held hill. Not for any strategic or tactical reason (and it's pretty much spelled out that taking that hill won't shorten the war by a millisecond), but because it'll satisfy his own sense of martial glory and put him in good stead for a promotion.
- Distinction Without a Difference: Even after being deliberately ordered by his commanding general to stop assaulting that hill due to the high cost in lives, Lacy says that he will still attack the hill, but under the cover of a reconnaissance probe gone bad. He says this to Hawkeye, which spurs Hawkeye's plan to cut out his appendix to keep off the lines for as long as possible.
- Do Wrong, Right: Hawkeye insists that B.J. scrub if he wants to finish the conversation, prepping himself for surgery to ensure that there's no danger of infection or other complications while he does the surgery.
- Downer Ending: Hawkeye went through with his plan to perform an unnecessary appendectomy on Lacy to keep him off the playing field, but he is utterly ashamed of himself for violating his own principles and his actions do nothing to slow the onslaught of wounded soldiers. The only happy part about this ending is that he and BJ remain friends.B.J.: You treated a symptom. The disease goes merrily on.
- The Dreaded: Just the mere sight of Lacy causes a patient to go in cardiac arrest.
- Everyone Has Standards:
- Margaret is initially attracted to Lacy, until she realizes how casually he puts the lives of his men over taking another hill in battle. She leaves him in the Mess tent in disgust.
- B.J. is disgusted by Lacy (outright calling him crazy at one point), but he refuses to go along with Hawkeye's appendectomy plan because it goes against everything he believes about being a doctor.
- When Klinger believes he actually hurt someone with voodoo he panics and desperately disposes all the voodoo gears.
- A Father to His Men: How Lacy views his relationship with the troops under him. It's actually the complete opposite.
- Friendship Moment: "Let's go, Hawk."
- Funny Background Event: When Klinger accuses the voodoo doll of laughing at him, two soldiers are visible in the background laughing at Klinger. He may have heard them and mistook it for the doll.
- Hate Sink: Lacy's men despise him for what he puts them through under the guise of honor and patriotism, going as far as refusing their military decorations from him out of spite. Hawkeye shares similar sentiments, and goes as far as removing his healthy aappendix to have him removed from his position before he can recklessly endanger more lives.
- Hollywood Voodoo: Whatever Klinger's pulling as his latest Section-8 ploy, probably ain't authentic Voodoo, as his initial incantation is "Um-dallah! Moo-goo-gai-pain!" It's Played for Laughs, as it clearly doesn't do anything and nobody takes it even vaguely seriously (except Klinger when he thinks he actually did something with it by accident).
- Honor Before Reason: One of the wounded refuses to accept a Purple Heart from Lacy, angrily telling the Colonel to keep it as a reminder of what he did to him and the other men.
- I Warned You: When arguing over performing the surgery, B.J. warns Hawkeye that this won't stop more wounded coming in and that he'll hate himself for what he's about to do. Hawkeye insists it's the right thing to do and that he'll have a clear conscience, only to later return to the tent in no mood to celebrate. The announcement of incoming wounded just makes him feel even worse. B.J. doesn't take the opportunity to gloat and instead helps him to OR.
- Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: B.J. seems to have no problem with his and Hawkeye's initial plan to simply slip Lacy a mickey so that he'll get a stomach ache and be out of action for a couple of days. But Hawkeye's suggestion that they perform actual surgery on Lacy crosses that line, in B.J.'s view. So, he absolutely refuses to participate.
- My God, What Have I Done?:
- First by Hawkeye, when he finally realizes he may well have violated his medical oath and personal principles for nothing (yes, he took Col. Lacy off the playing board for a while, but the wounded kept coming in, all the same). You can see the utterly defeated look in his motions as he gets up reluctantly to go back to the OR. This, from a man who refused to shoot at the enemy even in his own self-defense.
- Secondly by Klinger, when his fake voodoo curse apparently strikes the wrong target. He was so remorseful over what (he believed) he'd done that he immediately gave over all his Voodoo gear to Fr. Mulcahy for disposal (except for the chicken, which he decided to return to the kitchen...)
- The Neidermeyer: What Lacy's men actually think of him. One wounded soldier comes as close as CBS Standards and Practices of the time would allow to telling Lacy to shove the Purple Heart he was about to award him up his ass, while another goes into cardiac arrest at the mere sight of him.
- Real Life Writes the Plot: The argument between Hawkeye and B.J. about cutting needlessly into Col. Lacy was not in the original script as written by Tom Reeder. In the original script, both Hawk and Beej were equally ready to take out a healthy appendix, just as Hawkeye and Trapper did to Col. Flagg in the early-series episode "White Gold." Mike Farrell strenuously objected to this, considering it ghoulish to cut into a healthy patient for any reason, while Alan Alda argued whatever was necessary to get a Blood Knight off of active duty was justified in the name of saving lives. Their Real Life argument fascinated Reeder, who revised his script to include Farrell's and Alda's real-life viewpoints, and ultimately saw Hawkeye perform the surgery alone when B.J. refused to participate. The end of the episode ties in as well, as Alda and Farrell's falling out had apparently strained their friendship and the characters reconciling was indicative of the actors doing so as well.
- Voodoo Doll: Among the "voodoo" implements (including a non-descript dust and a chicken carcass) Klinger employs in his Section-8 bid, is a small doll of Col. Potter (complete with Potter's trademark campaign cover) which Klinger threatens to stick pins into if Potter doesn't approve his discharge. After being rebuffed by the colonel, he decides to start pinning the Potter puppet. However, the two plots in the episode have a mid-air collision at that exact moment: As Klinger is sticking the first pin in, the drugs slipped into Lacy's martinis by Hawkeye and B.J. begin to take effect, and Lacy bellows in pain. Klinger decides his voodoo curse was real but that he accidentally cursed the wrong Colonel and panics.
