Desert Son, October 7, 1995

As Reviewed by Rosepetal

As Reviewed by Shirley

Harm and Meg are sent to investigate a training maneuver mishap.  Lt. Jay Williams tranposes coordinates which causes a deadly bomb to go off injuring several men and killing one.  He tries to lay the blame on his friend who called the numbers in for him because Jay was too drunk from his previous night out.  The tape that had recorded the wrong numbers turns out to be recorded over.  Meg takes it to Ollie who would be the only one to be able to get the correct information out of the tape.  Harm thinks that Ollie is Megs boyfriend but it turns out he is an old friend of her fathers.  Jay finally admits what he did but he also shoots his friend and tries to escape.  Harm takes after him and they both end up in a free fire zone and a explosion occurs and Jay dies in the explosion.  Jay's father is a retired General and his dead brother is a war hero. 

Harm at the end of the episode tells the retired General that Jay was truly sorry for what he had done.  Meg didn't believe that he really said that but Harm will be writing it up that way in the report.

By Shirley

I didn't much care for this episode. I found the tone of the story a bit too sanctimonious for easy digestion - too much of the marines in their family gene pool. It was quite obvious that Jay was a rotter, and all his angst stemmed from his deep envy of his brother who was the epitome of everything good and wonderful but who unfortunately was killed.

The writing was uneven in the extreme. There was too much of the formula stuff: hero Dad, hero elder brother, dirty rotten lying younger brother. As for the fight between Harm and the Captain - well, we will excuse it since they haven't totally gotten Harm's character down pat yet and NBC wanted 'action'. It really had no bearing on the case at all, and was a miserable red herring.

My husband really liked the shot near the end of Meg's six. His opinion was that the director wanted us to admire her rear, and that was just what he was doing.

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