TV Review - The Last Ship Season 4

   WARNING : THE LAST SHIP SEASON 4 SPOILERS BELOW!!!

The Last Ship still has its share of great action but has added a heaping helping of angst to this season's menu...

  One of my favorite shows is TNT’s ‘The Last Ship’ which has aired on Sunday nights in the summer for the last four years. The show explores a post-apocalyptic world through the eyes of the crew of the navy battleship USS Nathan James on an earth where 80% of the earth’s population is wiped out by a man-made virus. In the first season our intrepid heroes, led by Captain Tom Chandler, devised a cure while battling a Russian destroyer and traveling to the Artic, Guantanamo Bay, Central America, and finally Baltimore. The second season saw the crew battle a submarine and the leaders of ‘The Immunes’ who recruited people naturally immune to the virus and wanted to take over the world by spreading the virus and thwarting the Nathan James’ efforts at spreading the cure.

  Having saved the United States and established a government in St. Louis, our crew then headed to China in season three to prevent the evil President Peng from poisoning the cure to ensure Chinese dominance, obliterate rival nations, and sow distrust of the United States. Once Peng was dispatched, Chandler and crew had to save the United States yet again, this time from five territorial leaders that had taken over the government and armed forces. In the final battle aboard Air Force One we find that Chandler’s father was killed by the territory leaders in order to capture his children. With some help order is restored but Chandler murders a territory leader in cold blood. Not able to come to grips with the new world order, Chandler resigns his commission as we head into season four.

  At its best this show reminds me of the classic Star Trek television series with the crew meeting disparate groups of survivors that have evolved or devolved their society in unpredictable ways and having to come up with inventive methods to deal with man-made or natural obstacles. What I especially appreciated was that even though each season had an overarching theme each episode was fairly self-contained with definable concrete objectives and obstacles to be overcome. Much of that was lost in the third season and the took on a soap-opera tone as the group was split up at the beginning of the season with multi-episode dramas of some crew members being taken hostage for their virus free blood and the fight against the government coup. The show still had plenty of action but seemed more suited for binge watching than Sunday night appointment television because along with the action came plenty of angst on the part of the crew over humanity’s seemingly inexhaustible capacity for inhumanity.

  Season four and five were both filmed this year and this year’s season was delayed while Eric Dane (Chandler) battled some real-world depression. I think the cause of his depression may have been the first half of the current season which I found improbable to say the least. The season starts with Chandler and his children living in a Greek village where he works on a fishing boat. Meanwhile a mutated version of the virus from the first three seasons called the ‘Red Rust’ is slowly wiping out the global food supply. The good news Is that mankind has hope in a container in virus-immune palm seeds from the Global Seed Vault whose genetic code can be merged with crops to make them immune to the virus. The bad news is that the palm seeds have been stolen and are being sold to the highest bidder. But there is more good news because the crew of the Nathan James has been tasked with following the seeds from Algeria through the desert to Italy.

  Meanwhile, Chandler’s village is having their daily catch of fish extorted by a gangster type named Giorgio. Chandler and the owner of his fishing boat steak their fish back and the owner of the fishing boat is killed with the boat set ablaze. In the normal gangster/extortion genre Giorgio would kill Chandler, his children, and the entire village but instead he recruits Chandler to join his crew of gladiators that fight each other for entertainment. Chandler signs on, leaving his children in the apparently defenseless village to join Giorgio’s crew to fight in the arena against other fighters.

  While aboard Giorgio’s yacht, Chandler seduces his sister Lucia in order to steal the key to the stateroom where he discovers test results and eventually finds out that Giorgio and Co. are headed to Italy to buy the same palm seeds the Nathan James is searching for. It was a cacophony of coincidences interrupted by brief bursts of action as Capt. Chandler (who fights under the name of Hercules) demolishes Giorgio’s best fighter and the Nathan James has to make their way through the Strait of Gibraltar while overcoming a mobile missile launcher on tracks in the Rock of Gibraltar. In episode three Chandler and crew are reunited Italy and join forces to take the seeds which are left in the hands of Chandler’s right hand man Slattery who is stabbed by Lucia and drugged with a super hallucinogen strain of weed (one of the byproducts of the plant virus) but manages to make it to the top of the tallest building in the town which is a church steeple.

  In episode four Chandler and the away team search for Slattery and the seeds while the Nathan James wards off an attack by a Greek warship and uses radar trickery to buy their rescue helicopter enough time to get to the church tower and pull of a daring rescue. It was a great episode only marred by the many cutaways to Slattery’s hallucinatory flashbacks to his early meetings with Chandler and family outings with his now missing wife and children.

  Episode five was my least favorite episode of this show to date. There was no action whatsoever with the focus of the show turning to Chandler’s angst at his upcoming decision to sign back on as the commanding officer which not only means assuming command but shaving his ‘Hercules’ beard. The other subplots were Slattery’s angst at missing the great memories from his hallucinations in what surely seems to be the harbinger to an ‘addiction episode’, and in the only advancement of the plot the rescue of a fishing trawler which is commanded by a British spy who is trying to convince the other British agent on the Nathan James to steal the seeds which will be turned over to Dr. Vellek (Giorgio and Lucia’s father) in return for the first batch of disease resistant crops. The seeds are conveniently located in a refrigerated unit in the ship’s sick bay where almost anyone can steal them. I’m not sure why the seeds have to be refrigerated since they have been through the desert on a camel and Slattery’s backpack in scorching heat but at least there was more action in watching the container of seeds in the refrigerator than there was in watching Chandler shave and take his oath of office and seeing Slattery descend into addiction.

The second half of the season started with an action packed angst-less chase in a massive storm and gave me a reason to look forward to the rest of the season.

  After a muddled beginning with some great action, ‘The Last Ship’ turned into an angst-a-thon interrupted by brief bursts of action. When I had to make the choice between this show and AMC’s ‘Fear the Walking Dead’ I chose to watch ‘The Last Ship’ Monday night from the TNT web site. This is a decision that would have been inconceivable last year and is a sad indicator of how far the show has fallen in my eyes. I had high hopes for this week’s episode six and was not disappointed with an action packed episode of two rogue agents stealing the seeds while the Nathan James eluded Greek warships by sailing through a massive storm. With only four episodes left in the season our heroes have to recover the seeds, defeat the Greek Navy, and have the final showdown between Capt. Chandler and the evil Dr. Vellek (superbly played by ‘Robocop’ Peter Weller). I can’t imagine any room left in the series for character angst and I am glad of it. There is enough angst in a world decimated by plague and plant virus without having the main characters of my post-apocalyptic Sunday evening sharing their personal angst with me.