Line #10 NightmareFuel/Mash


1	[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/mashdreams.jpg]]
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3	Although ''MAS*H'' is partially a comedy, at its core it's a very dark one about a group of army medics and officers trying to [[SanitySlippage retain their sanity]] in [[UsefulNotes/TheKoreanWar an insane war]]. As such, it can get pretty damn intense at times.
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6	* Eleven seasons of SanitySlippage starts revving up with "Bananas Crackers and Nuts", as while Hawkeye’s exaggerating this time, he’s also genuinely acting out and not doing great. On the other side, Margaret sounds afraid of Sherman when he gets too close, and is set up to be attacked by him because of Trapper, Radar and a vengeful Hawkeye. She’s sobbing in Frank’s arms afterwards.
7	* The scene in [[Recap/MashS2E3RadarsReport "Radar's Report"]] where Trapper confronts and contemplates murdering the Chinese prisoner whom he holds responsible for the death of one of his patients. The scariest thing about it is the strong implication Trapper would really have gone through with it were it not for Hawkeye showing up.
8	* With no laugh track, Hawkeye’s breakdown in “For Want Of A Boot” about how much he’s degraded himself enough that he just wants a gun to kill himself is some terrifying OOCIsSeriousBusiness, and yet another scene where it feels like he’s crying out for help but gets ignored.
9	* “Rainbow Bridge” is one of the rare times where fear of rape is taken seriously, and when Margaret says it’s a tactic of the enemy, Hawkeye looks genuinely afraid before covering up with a joke. And later, while it’s okay because Frank’s tiny gun gets laughed at, he and Trapper sound terrified (with {{oh crap smile}}s) when they learn that he bought one along in the first place.
10	-->'''Trapper''': I’d like to see my wife again.
11	-->'''Hawkeye''': I’d like to see ''anyone’s'' wife again.
12	* The manner in which Colonel Wortman fanatically describes how General Kelly's death should really be seen by the public eye in [[Recap/MashS3E4IronGutsKelly "Iron Guts Kelly"]] can appear really unnerving to some. It doubles when Wortman decides to stage Kelly's suitably-dramatic death by contacting the Navy for offshore bombardment on a sector that was previously mentioned as ''having no fighting going on,'' meaning he was willing to shell and kill his own forces to fake the circumstances of Kelly's demise.
13	* Lieutenant Smith holds the entire medical unit at gunpoint throughout [[Recap/MashS3E12AFullRichDay "A Full Rich Day"]] and never lets up on his threats and intimidation until the sergeant he brought in for treatment is looked after by the doctors.
14	* In [[Recap/MashS3E13MadDogsAndServicemen "Mad Dogs and Servicemen"]], a traumatised Corporal Travis comes out of his shell to Trapper, going on to describe how he and his unit were helplessly mown down by enemy tanks.
15	--> '''Travis''': Those tanks... they just kept coming and coming. They were so big. They were so big, you know. And... they killed everyone. They killed them even after they were dead. I... I tried. I really tried. But I couldn't move. I... I... I didn't fire my rifle. I didn't throw my grenade. I... I didn't do anything. I just laid there like some coward!
16	* If you think conditions for the 4077 are tough, especially when the unit endures barrage after barrage of shellfire, then chances are you haven't seen the episode [[Recap/MashS3E19AidStation "Aid Station"]] yet.
17	* In [[Recap/MashS4E3ItHappenedOneNight "It Happened One Night"]], a patient resting in the post-op ward, Abbott, is morbidly tense, warning the doctors away from him, a clear sign he's on the edge of a breakdown. As shelling starts to hit the camp, the inevitable occurs and Abbott flies into a blind panic. By the time Margaret and Hawkeye get him to calm down, the man is in tears and whimpering, pleading for the explosions to be stopped. He continues to break down for the rest of the episode, snapping at Margaret and yelling at Klinger. Then, as another bout of shelling hits the camp, he panics again, begging miserably for the doctors to let him die before the artillery can kill him. Hawkeye and Margaret's last altercation with him leads to the chief surgeon and head nurse having to physically struggle with him and sedate him. And that's the last we see of him in the episode.
18	* As one-note parody as Frank can often be, Larry Linville called him terrifying, and he shows that in “The Novocaine Mutiny”, showing no remorse over eradicating people like Hawkeye so “Americans can conform and be made free”.
19	* That same ep shows a hilarious yet frightening glimpse into how Frank sees and remembers things, including a shot where he pushes a soldier with a bandaged head and more in a wheelchair telling him to go back to the front. Mind you again, this is in his own mind.
20	* In “The Interview”, Hawkeye’s description of what it’s like at night, realising you’re terrified because the cot is shaking. Three reasons: the situation itself sounds horrifying, it’s a scarily relatable dissociation mood, and the ongoing theme he has of his repressed life/war trauma creeping into his sleep.
21	* “The General’s Practitioner” is one that gets scarier as you get older, with everyone acting like the general is after Hawkeye for more personal reasons than having his own doctor, refuses to actually listen to Hawkeye after the last second, and Potter is trying to protect his vulnerable surgeon.
22	* The episode "Dreams" has a very ''[[Franchise/TheTwilightZone Twilight Zone]]''-y feel to it.
23	** The sole purpose of the entire episode seems to have been to invoke various forms of NightmareFuel both in universe and out. The only dream that's even remotely happy is Potter's (and even he joins the others in trying to not fall asleep again despite everyone being exhausted) and the other dreams range from implicitly tragic (such as B.J. dreaming of other men courting Peg while he is distracted by having to perform emergency surgery) to outright disturbing. The episode is frequently cited as being the most uncomfortable and/or distressing to watch ''of the entire series'' to the point where it's not uncommon to hear people say they experienced nightmares themselves after viewing it for the first time.
24	** Margaret's dream opens with her as a new bride heading to a wedding bed in the middle of a field, only for her husband to rise as if in a trance and join a parade of soldiers walking past. A few jump cuts later, her wedding bed is covered in wounded soldiers, while [[BloodSplatteredWeddingDress her wedding dress is covered in blood.]] All accompanied by the sound of a struggling heartbeat.
25	** In Charles' dream, he's a magician performing for the 4077 until a critically wounded patient is wheeled in. A visibly distressed Charles keeps performing magic tricks, seemingly unable to do anything else, as the patient makes some genuinely horrifying choking-like sounds until he finally succumbs to his wounds.
26	** Father Mulcahy dozes off while listening to a confession (that, from his perspective, DeterioratesIntoGibberish) and dreams that he's Pope. He starts to deliver a sermon next to a giant crucifix (shown only from the knees down)... only for dripping blood to splatter on his Bible from the crucifix, ''now showing the legs of a soldier''. The legs are twitching.
27	** Klinger dreams of finally returning to Toledo, only for [[NothingIsScarier the streets to be completely deserted.]] He walks along the empty streets until he passes by a shop window, where he sees [[NearDeathClairvoyance himself back at the MASH being operated on.]]
28	** Finally, Hawkeye falls asleep in the mess tent and is jolted awake by a professor of medicine asking him how to re-attach a limb. When Hawkeye doesn't know, the professor demands that he detach his own arms and hand them over (as Charles was sitting next to him when he fell asleep, he imagines him sitting next to him in his dream and has to ask him to detach the second arm). We then cut to Hawkeye, with no arms or legs, in a rowboat in a lake surrounded by detached arms and legs. Then we hear the sound of incoming choppers, and Hawkeye starts screaming.
29	** The symbolism of Charles' and Hawkeye's dreams is pretty obvious, but bears explanation. It hearkens back to a pearl of wisdom Henry dropped all the way back in the first season: The first rule of war is that young people die, and the second rule is that doctors can't change rule number one. No matter what Charles and Hawkeye do, no matter how skilled they are in surgery and medicine, no matter how long they study or how hard they work, some of the young soldiers they operate on are going to die. Some of them will die before they even make to their tables. Some of them will survive, then go back to the front where they will die. And neither of them can do anything at all to change any of this.
30	* The ghosts in "Follies of the Living - Concerns of the Dead".
31	* The scenes in "Point of View" where Private Rich is choking and struggling to breathe due to his throat injury. Since the episode is shot from his point of view, we don't actually see what the injury looks like, but the sounds alone are ''terrifying''.
32	* After Charles has been taking amphetamines for too long in "Dr. Winchester and Mr. Hyde," his health takes a downward tumble and he can only answer, "I don't know! I don't know!" when Hawkeye and B.J. ask him what's wrong and not because he's lying about taking the amphetamines, but because he seriously doesn't know what they're doing to him! It's terrifying for those who have experienced or witnessed someone suddenly thrown into the same situation regardless of the cause.
33	* The situation that Charles and Klinger wind up in in "They Call the Wind Korea," lost, stranded with a handful of injured soldiers, woefully under-equipped for their circumstances, and the strong possibility of any one or all of them dying from exposure during the night. Add the fact that Charles has to perform a few surgical procedures sans anesthesia.
34	* What happens to Dr. Steve Newsom (Edward Herrmann) in "Heal Thyself". He's showing subtle signs of his true mental state from the beginning and the disclosure that he served at the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Pusan_Perimeter Pusan perimeter]] is another clue. The real nightmare fuel is what Pierce and Hunnicutt say at the end: Newsom's fate could be theirs, at any time. And for Hawkeye it is, as seen in the series finale.
35	* "Life Time"
36	** The first portion has Hawkeye spends the first several minutes with his unwashed, unprotected hand ''inside a man's chest'' to stop some bleeding until Margaret can find the clamp they need.
37	** Something similar happens a few times when a patient flatlines only for the doctor (usually Hawkeye) to cut open the man's chest and perform an open-heart massage. And it's only the first time it comes up that it's treated as unusual, meaning that they have to do this regularly.
38	** The patient waking up in the middle of surgery and begins screaming until they administer more anesthesia.
39	* On a couple of occasions, a patient has started to wake up during surgery.
40	* In the series finale, the reveal of Hawkeye's SanitySlippage: during a bus trip where everyone had to be completely silent while the North Koreans were looking for them, a woman couldn't keep a chicken quiet and ended up killing it. Hawkeye's weeping over this seems a bit over the top...but then the camera pans down and reveals the woman was actually forced to kill her ''baby'' while tearfully looking him right in the eye, such a horrific sight that Hawkeye suffered a mental break and insisted on remembering it as a chicken.
41	* "Bless You Hawkeye" is commonly admitted by LGBT+ fans (even if it wasn’t meant that way, Hawkeye loved Billy so much that he couldn’t even bring himself to admit he hated him) and victims of abuse (Sidney’s comment about bedrooms being a battlefield, Billy laughing as he pushes baby Hawk into the water and says “you’re so clumsy, you’d be dead if it weren’t for me”) to be a rough episode to get through. What makes it worse is you can see easy setting up of it in previous episodes with Hawkeye not wanting to talk about a first love in “The Bus” and his dream in “Dreams” being helpless on a boat, and his TraumaInducedAmnesia repeats in “Goodbye Farewell And Amen”.
42	* "Welcome to Korea":
43	** In the scene where he, Radar and B.J. are replacing a flat tyre on their Jeep, Hawkeye looks up to take a second look at some passing Korean travelers they had greeted a moment ago, only to find when they have vanished from sight. OhCrap sets in when it hits Hawkeye and Radar that they may be enemy guerrillas setting up an ambush and the two start fearing for their and B.J.'s lives.
44	--->'''Hawkeye''': Uh-oh, Andy.\
45	'''Radar''': ''[looks around]'': Holy smoke.\
46	'''B.J.''': What is it?\
47	'''Hawkeye''': The Koreans all went into the woods.\
48	'''Radar''': They may be guerillas, maybe.\
49	'''Hawkeye''': [[CasualDangerDialogue Either that or they're having a gang toidy]]. ({{beat}}) We better get outta here. [[ThisIsNoTimeToPanic Let's be calm, guys.]] With undertones of frantic.
50	** They continue to replace the tyre at a quiet but hurried pace, all the while keeping low out of sight. B.J. rolls the new tyre over while Hawkeye removes the old one.
51	--->'''B.J.''': They shoot at doctors?\
52	'''Hawkeye''': Doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs. Any body. Any movement.\
53	''[gunshot rings out, striking the Jeep mere inches from Hawkeye]''\
54	'''Hawkeye''': [[BringMyBrownPants And I'm about to have one.]]\
55	''[more shots ring out]''\
56	'''B.J.''': I think I hate this!
57	** A chance meeting with a troop of soldiers on patrol and Hawkeye, B.J. and Radar friendly asking them if any are from their respective home states becomes a severe case of MoodWhiplash when they are hit from nowhere by a barrage of mortar fire, resulting in one of the bloodiest scenes of the show.
58	* "The Bus":
59	** A LaughTrack is usually prevalent throughout early ''MAS*H'' episodes.[[note]]As Alan Alda was never on board with the idea of a LaughTrack, home video releases of the early seasons either remove it entirely or allow the viewer to choose whether or not to enable it.[[/note]] The complete absence of it in this one gives off the feeling of a really creepy atmosphere whenever the moments are not comedic.
60	** Frank Burns gets hit with an electric shock while trying to repair the bus. The unsettling part is how realistically the shock's displayed.
61	** Colonel Potter's story about getting separated from his unit and lost in the Argonne Forest during UsefulNotes/WorldWarI and being captured by the enemy as a result.
62	---> '''Potter''': I was taken prisoner. They shaved my head and beat me to a pulp.
63	** Avoiding his turn at telling the others a story about his first love, Hawkeye goes out to the bus door to call out for Radar who has gone for a toilet break. [[MoodWhiplash There is no response]].
64	** Frank turns legitimately menacing when he gets a hold of a machine gun.
65	* "The Sniper"
66	** It begins with a usual day at The 4077, Hawkeye is wooing a Nurse when suddenly a shot rings out just missing him. At first he thinks it's Frank practicing his shooting only to find out that Frank has never fired it, only for then another shot to fire as they realize there's a Sniper nearby and a mad dash back to camp begins as a barrage of bullets are fired narrowly missing them as they and everyone else scramble to the Hospital.

Context NightmareFuel / Mash