‘MAS*H’s Most Shocking Episode Aired 50 Years Ago

Ryan Berenz Yesterday, 1:45 pm

MASH, Henry Blake — TM & Copyright © 20th Century Fox Television. All Rights reserved. /Courtesy Everett Collection

On the March 18, 1975, episode of M*A*S*H, Radar (Gary Burghoff) delivered two stunning messages. The first one, at the start of the show, was that Lt. Col. Henry Blake’s (McLean Stevenson) discharge orders arrived and the affable CO of the 4077th would be heading home to Illinois by way of Tokyo-Honolulu-San Francisco.

The last one, that “Lt. Col. Henry Blake’s plane was shot down over the Sea of Japan. It spun in. There were no survivors,” remains one of TV’s most shocking, haunting moments.

The Season 3 finale, called “Abyssinia, Henry” (“Abyssinia” was old-timey slang for “I’ll be seein’ ya!”), is full of merriment and drunken revelry. After saying his goodbyes in his new “Adolphe Menjou” suit and boarding a chopper, Henry takes off. The main characters wave goodbye from the landing pad, and the shot dissolves to the operating room.

Radar enters and delivers the message. There is stunned silence, save for the sporadic clanging of surgical instruments. Hospital staff move through the O.R. Hawkeye (Alan Alda) and Trapper (Wayne Rogers) continue operating, speechless.

The war goes on, and there are lives still to be saved.

Director Larry Gelbart wanted the full impact of the shock and sadness to come through the screen, so the cast was not given the final page of the script until moments before the scene was shot, and only certain cast members were notified.

Stevenson, who was still on set and saw the scene filmed, was just as surprised as everyone else. It’s still not certain what the producers’ intentions were: Just portraying the stark tragedies of war as they’d said, or did they want to stick it to Stevenson for leaving and thereby ensuring that he could never come back?

The cast didn’t know it at the time, but “Abyssinia, Henry” was also the final episode for Rogers, who’d decided to leave the show after Season 3. The show never gave Trapper a proper sendoff, and Hawkeye’s regret that he didn’t get to say goodbye remained with him for the rest of the series.

That episode also marked a major shift in the show’s tone, and a move away from slapstick and physical comedy to more emotionally and thematically complex stories. Incoming Col. Sherman Potter (Harry Morgan) and Capt. B.J. Hunnicut (Mike Farrell) gave the show a new depth and opened avenues for more serious discussions. That trend was furthered when Maj. Charles Emerson Winchester III (David Ogden Stiers) replaced Maj. Frank Burns (Larry Linville) in Season 6 in 1977.