130 - Article 32
Summary
Laura Richards, 24 years old, disappears. She was doing community service for a shoplifting charge at a VA hospital, where she paints and sculpts prosthetics. As they search into her life, they find she’s become involved with anti-military terrorist plans because of her relationship with her military father.
Rating
Meh. The only thing that makes it fun is that it’s a pretty convoluted storyline, and it’s interesting to see the pieces come together and what the motivations were.
Discussion
This really wasn’t that interesting of an episode, but after watching it more than once, I did enjoy the twists and turns. It’s actually a fairly complex storyline, with the pieces coming together in a patchwork.
Laura works at the VA hospital as part of court-ordered community service. She has bad feelings towards the military because of her father, but she is very good to the soldiers there. She becomes friends with one in particular, Daniel Ellerbee, who lost his leg. The two of them have a one-time affair. The incident where Ellerbee lost his leg and another soldier was killed was reported as an insurgent attack, but it was actually a case of friendly fire in the confusion after and IED went off. Ellerbee tells Linda about this. She and Ellerbee want to tell the truth, and do tell the truth to the parents of the soldier who died. They go to the CO, Lt. Cheever, and tell him that they’re going to tell the investigating officer, but the CO, who had ordered them to say it was insurgents, tries to stop them and pulls out a gun. Laura ends up shooting him with that guy after Ellerbee and Cheever struggle.
Surrounding all this part of the story is Laura’s involvement with an anti-war terrorism plot to bomb a university’s ROTC. The shoplifting that led to her doing the community service was to fund that, and then at the hospital she stumbled upon a scam an orderly was running. In exchange for her silence about his scam, she had him forge some car titles for stolen cars, which were then exchanged for bomb materials (and possibly money). However, because of her involvement with the soldiers at the VA hospital, she no longer wants to bomb the ROTC and is afraid people will die even if they do it at night. Her partner, Will, tells her she’s gone soft because of the hospital. She tells him the soldiers are proud and in pain and she’s not going to spit in their faces by bombing the ROTC.
These two concurrent events meet when Ellerbee picks her up at the warehouse where the bomb(s) was(were) being made. The intermingling of these two events/plot lines makes it an interesting story of piecing the pieces together - not interesting enough for me to give it more than two stars, but I do appreciate the complexity nonetheless.
Meanwhile, this is the final multi-episode episode about Vivian’s task force and the human trafficking thing that makes any sense, though nothing much happens in this episode other than her interviewing potential task force members and Spike (I don’t actually know the character’s name in WaT) going off on his own and it not working out. Oh, and one of the interviewees picks up on abortions having to do with it all, and that does end up playing a role in figuring things out in the next episode. After this episode, it all falls apart. I assume that if the writer’s strike hadn’t happened, this story line would have played out as planned and made sense and we wouldn’t be cursed with rogue-Jack. But the writer’s strike did happen, and it seems some retconning took place. But that’s not this episode, and so I bring this paragraph to an end.
Notes
The title of this episode, Article 32, refers to an Article 32 hearing, which is a military proceeding similar to that of a preliminary hearing or a grand jury proceeding in civilian law. An investigation is normally directed when it appears the charges are of such a serious nature that trial by general court-martial may be warranted. The commander directing an investigation under Article 32 details a commissioned officer as investigating officer, who will conduct the investigation and make a report of conclusions and recommendations. [source]
Quotes
Danny: It takes a special kind of idiot to park a stolen car in front of a known meth lab.
Laura’s Dad: What were they planning to hit?
Jack: An ROTC.
Laura’s Dad: See, that’s just not possible. I raised her to love this country.
Jack: Your daughter was trading stolen cars for explosives. Now, this is not a notion that comes to a young 24-year-old who sits around in the morning sipping coffee. Something in her past led her to this.
Martin: You heading out?
Jack: No, I got nowhere to go. Just going to hang around and enjoy the peace and quiet.
Martin: Oh, sounds like fun.