Recap / M*A*S*H S1 E5: The Moose

After a non-stop period of fourteen hours in the operating room, Hawkeye and Trapper are going to the Swamp for a "martini breakfast" and to sleep when a U.S. sergeant and a young Korean girl roll in to the camp. At first, the meeting of the two duos is amicable until the sergeant lets a particular racist slur slip from his mouth, which arouses Hawkeye's anger. One scene later, that anger blossoms into hatred when he is told that the Korean girl, Young Hi, is actually the sergeant's "moose", or personal slave, rather than his employee. Being a man who sees things in black and white rather than the grey view the military takes, Hawkeye hatches a plot to free Young Hi from her life of slavery.

But what can Hawkeye and the others do when it turns out that Young Hi may not want to be saved?

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Attention, all personnel! "The Moose" is scheming to free the following tropes:

• Asian Speekee Engrish: Young Hi and Benny talk this way, sprinkled with military lingo and half-understood American slang. Played for Laughs, of course.
• Affably Evil: Sergeant Baker
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • This exchange when Baker first arrives:
    Baker: Sir, would you tell me where I might find Colonel Blake's office?
    Hawkeye: [pointing] You go straight down there, turn left, and you look for a broken-down, dirty old man and follow him.
    Baker: Yes, sir. He'll take me to Colonel Blake?
    Hawkeye: That is Colonel Blake.
  • At the episode's conclusion, all of Young Hi's personal development seems to go out the window when her brother returns and reminds her of her duty to the family and she leaves with him, destined to continue a life of slavery and leaving a downhearted Hawkeye and Trapper to lament how close they had come to winning. Then Young Hi returns, telling them that she had just told her brother to shove off.
• Bratty Half-Pint: Young Hi's brother, Benny, who is also the head of the family.
• Cheaters Never Prosper: Averted. Hawkeye cheating at a poker game was for a good cause.
• Distracted by the Sexy: From his secret hidden position, Radar is supposed to determine what cards Sgt. Baker is holding in the poker game in order to help Hawkeye free Young Hi, but a nurse with attractive legs walks by, grabbing his attention, and he watches her until she walks inside the shower tent.
  • Leading to a Freudian Slip when he tells Hawkeye "the trouble is in the showe... the trouble is gone."
• Discriminate and Switch: Played for heartwarming: As Spearchucker is telling Young-hi how everyone is the same, she says "not true" while touching Spearchuker's cheek. Spearchucker is baffled by this and asks why, fully expecting her to state he's black, but instead she laughs and says "you need a shave."
• Downer Ending: Seemingly played straight, but then averted when Young Hi stands up for herself.
• Faux Affably Evil: Benny
• Godzilla Threshold: The infamously unmilitary Hawkeye Pierce puts on a Class-A uniform and tries to put on a serious display of military bearing that would have been Frank Burns' wet dream had he been there to see it – including issuing direct orders and pulling rank.^note  Something which he did all of two or three times in the entire series. All in an effort to rescue Young Hi from slavery. Sadly, the sergeant he's trying to impress doesn't buy it.
• Honor Before Reason: Perhaps the greatest obstacle Hawkeye and Trapper have to contend with in trying to restore Young Hi's sense of being her own person is her consistent loyalty to whoever owns her and to the family that sold her into slavery in the first place.
• Innocently Insensitive: Sgt. Baker is not a truly evil man, but he uses the word gook to refer to East Asians and is a slave owner.
• Lost Him in a Card Game: This is how Baker loses Young Hi to Hawkeye. Played with in that Young Hi was never actually bet on in the game. Rather, Baker gave her up in exchange for Hawkeye returning his poker winnings. Still, Hawkeye later characterized the situation as him having won a person in a game of poker.
• Making Love in All the Wrong Places: Hawkeye is seen making out with a nurse in the minefield.
• No Nudity Taboo: Blink and you'll miss it, but the nurse Radar ogles drops her robe before she enters the shower tent.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Young Hi tells her arrogant brother to shove off.
• Precision F-Strike: Sgt. Baker gets fed up with Hawkeye ordering him to send Young Hi away.
  Baker: I've been in the Army a long time, and no meat-cutter with a temporary commission is gonna work me over. So save that G.I. crapola for the folks back home.
• Rightly Self-Righteous: The first appearance of Hawkeye's infamously burning sanctimony. He's not wrong, but naive, condescending and in over his head.
• Shout-Out:
  • Hawkeye briefly imitates Humphrey Bogart during the poker game.
    Hawkeye: And another hundred, sweetheart.
  • Young Hi's brother is compared to the Dead End Kids.
  • The poker cheating plot may be one to Goldfinger, as it's the exact same scheme Auric Goldfinger used to cheat at cards, right down to the hearing-aid radio.
• Slavery Is a Special Kind of Evil: So much so that Trapper is willing to punch a 12-year-old kid in the nose, and the script fully makes the audience believe he deserves it.
• White Man's Burden: Hawkeye has already been established as someone who takes every injustice personally, but Spearchucker and Ho-Jon barely have any screentime.
• Written-In Absence: Frank Burns is mentioned as being away in Tokyo.

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