Ten Favorite MASH Episodes: Are You Now, Margaret? (#3)

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With everything that was going on yesterday I plum forgot to post a favorite episode of one of my all-time favorite TV programs, M*A*S*H.. I’m sorry. I’ll correct that right now with another one of my favorite episodes. #3: Are You Now, Margaret? Now we call them “witch hunts,” but back in the early days of the Cold War the fear of “communist infiltration” was very real. Of course, the one thing about plot-iticians, I mean politicians, they will take a legitimate issue and blow it up to mass hysteria (and tout themselves as the “champion against” the problem). That was Joe McCarthy in a nutshell. He had a legitimate point — there were commies in America (heck, the American Communist Party was founded 100 years ago!!) — but the way he and the government went about it was horrible. Using the old premise “an innocent person has nothing to hide,” people who refused to testify before the Un-Americans Activities Committee were automatically suspect. There was a “blacklist” in Hollywood (being a Green Hornet buff, I was surprised to find that Lloyd Gough, who played Mike Axford in the TV show, was blacklisted, although he continued acting under a pseudonym) and in other performing arts (Pete Seeger and Artie Shaw) that slowed or stopped careers. And that’s the background of this episode. A Congressional aide shows up, ostensibly on a “fact-finding mission,” looking into Margaret’s past because she dated a man in college who later was labeled a “subversive” by the committee. Of course, everyone in the unit knows that’s bunk (“If Hot Lips dated Joe Stalin the only thing she’d remember was that his mustache tickled,” Hawkeye assures the aide), but he insists on Margaret testifying. The thought of it devastates Margaret. It’ll effectively end her Army career and crush her father, who was “so proud” when she became a major. Her fellow officers step up to set a trap for the aide and help her out of the situation (leading to one of my favorite lines in the episode: the aide tells them they’ve been “duped by a communist sympathizer,” to which Charles replies, “What a coincidence! So have you!” ). I was surprised to see that a lot of younger M*A*S*H fans don’t like this episode. The premise is quite foreign to anyone born after the Berlin Wall fell, but for us older folks it’s an excellent look at a disturbing time in our history. Are You Now, Margaret? Written by Thad Mumford & Dan Wilcox Directed by Charles S. Dubin Season 8, episode 2 Poorly shot on a phone camera, but that’s the only way you can see things like this on You Tube: