"The Four Percent Solution" is an episode of JAG that first aired on December 17, 2004. Directed by Dennis Smith. Written by Dana Coen.
Lt. Colonel MacKenzie crashes her car into a tree. While convalescing, she remembers her conversation with Navy shrink Lt. Commander McCool (Barbara Eve Harris) two months earlier.
This episode fills in some details from "Hail and Farewell" (Part I and Pt. II). For one, Mac went to Hawaii to identify Agent Webb's body, but Mrs. Webb (Claudette Nevins) had already done it
McCool gets a phone call from family. McCool's daughter has some kind of event at 7:30 p.m. (later McCool explains it's a piano recital but her husband is taping it). After getting past some deflections, McCool gets Mac to open up about her inability to have a child.
According to Commander Purcell (Kim Miyori), a doctor who also has an office at Bethesda, and whom Mac saw just before dropping by McCool's office, Mac's chance of getting pregnant is less than five percent.
Mac tells McCool about a recent time she went to Rabb's apartment, but he was with Prof. Alicia Montes (Maria Del Mar) as they were about to have dinner (Montes had previously appeared in 'Retrial'; it was her first appearance, but the fact of her relationship with Rabb had already started was only hinted at with dialogue in that episode).
At the end, Commander Rabb shows up at Mac's hospital room to stay with her, even though it's Christmas Eve and it's his custom to go to the Wall and touch his father's name.
This episode contains examples of the following tropes:
- Christmas Episode: The accident happens on Christmas. At the end of the episode, there are holiday greetings from several real life Marine units fighting in Iraq (the episode first aired on December 17, 2004, as the long war in Iraq was just beginning, and the war in Afghanistan faded from public consciousness).
- Continuity Nod to 'Take It Like a Man': Mac tells McCool that Webb was drinking around the time of her confrontation with Sadik Fahd.
- Due to the Dead, but the injured take priority: Rabb Jr. normally goes to the Vietnam Memorial on Christmas to commemorate his father, who was shot down over Vietnam on Christmas 1969.
- The Shrink: Lt. Commander McCool, a psychiatrist at the Bethesda Naval Hospital.
- Title Drop, averted: No one says "the four percent solution" in dialogue or "four percent solution." Even saying "four percent" is mostly avoided.
