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Recap / M*A*S*H S5 E20: The General's Practitioner

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Hawkeye is headhunted to be a personal physician for General Korshack, but despite the life of privilege it offers, he's not thrilled by the concept. Meanwhile, a GI returning to the US asks Radar to look after his Korean girlfriend...and their child.


Attention all personnel! General Korshack would like to recruit the following tropes:

  • Abandoned War Child: Lee Chin nearly becomes one of these.
  • Big Ol' Unibrow: Korshack's description of Donald Penobscot includes one of these.
  • Cigar Chomper: General Korshack, whose smoking and drinking are seriously endangering his health.
  • Conscience Makes You Go Back: Mulligan was on the plane to go back to the States when he decided he couldn't walk away from his girlfriend and child.
  • Deadpan Snarker: Besides Hawkeye, Klinger gets in on it at Radar, who's trying to snitch food from the kitchen for Lee Chin and stuff it into his pockets.
    Klinger: [not looking over] Hey Radar? There's a new invention that just came out. It's called a bag!
  • Disappeared Dad: Mulligan narrowly averts this, and only after briefly leaving his girlfriend and son behind in Korea.
  • Foreshadowing: The assistant and Potter talk about how Hawkeye takes death personally, and how someone could crack up with that attitude.
  • Give the Baby a Father: A rare example of the biological father putting this trope into motion by recruiting Radar to take his place.
  • Idiot Ball: Korshack holds onto it firmly. Besides his abominable health, he decides that the best way to get his personal physician is to go to a MASH unit only a few miles from the front lines and heist a surgeon who's been doing trauma surgery.
  • Informed Deformity: Donald Penobscott is described as having "no neck, one eyebrow" (over both eyes) - a far cry from how he would look in either of his appearances.
  • Joisey: Discussed.
    Klinger: Those Commies think they can run the world. Let's see 'em try to run Newark. In two weeks, they'd end up in the trunk of a Buick.
  • The Men First: How Hawkeye finally convinces Korshack to back off. If he's got to be in Korea, he might as well be doing his real job while he's there: saving lives, not playing nanny to a general who'll be dead from a stroke in six months.
  • Military Maverick: Potter repeatedly points out to everyone who will listen that not only is Hawkeye not GI, "he isn't even housebroken." It doesn't slow down General Korshack or Colonel Bidwell much.
  • Parental Substitute: Radar starts to enjoy this role before Mulligan has second thoughts and comes back for his family.
  • Pun-Based Title: For "the general practitioner", another term for a family doctor.
  • Screw the Money, I Have Rules!: As tempting as the thought of spending the rest of the war away from the front as an overpaid, underworked personal physician is, Hawkeye would rather do what he was trained for.
  • The Tease: Hawkeye does his usual thing of teasing high ranking officers that they want to have sex with him.
    Korshack: Do you know what I'm offering you, Captain?
    Hawkeye: Sure. The moon, the stars, your high school Letterman sweater.
  • Too Dumb to Live: As Hawkeye describes it, Korshack drinks, smokes, and is twenty pounds overweight, with a stroke no more than six months in his future, but thinks having Hawkeye as his personal physician will save him, especially since he doesn't intend to change his lifestyle at all. Hawkeye even calls him out early by saying the only reason he wants a personal physician to begin with is because another general already has one.
  • War Is Hell: Invoked and discussed in-universe.
    Frank: Well, everybody knows war is Hell.
    B.J.: Remember, you heard it here last.
    Hawkeye: War isn't Hell. War is war and Hell is Hell, and of the two, war is a lot worse.
    Father Mulcahy: How do you figure that, Hawkeye?
    Hawkeye: Easy, father. Tell me: who goes to Hell?
    Father Mulcahy: Sinners, I believe.
    Hawkeye: Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. But war is chock full of them. Little kids, cripples, old ladies... in fact, except for a few of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.


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