I have a bad feeling about the army general.
I'm pretty sure we are meant to; the question is whether it is a mislead or not.
And along similar lines...what about Senora Tavo? Anyone else get the sense that her frequent Madonna-like (in the old reverent sense, not the modern singer sense
)appearances at Tavo's side foreshadow some deep and shocking reveals about her role in all this, that Grand Leader Tavo is in fact some sort of puppet of hers?
Especially in the context of this week's episode, in which Granderson's lover turns out to be a True Believer agent? Why should any Gringos be inspired by Tavo? But perhaps there are deeper forces at work, and the whole EUGC is just a mask for something more radical? Something that might not even be centered in South America?
Not that I have any plausible suspects. One reason the series is ending with this season is that it has pretty much boxed the compass; we've had seasons centered on the Atlantic world (that is USA plus Europe), East Asia, the Med, North Africa and Middle East...checking South America off leaves only Central Asia and the greater Australia area out...in fact the China season had an Aussie character, so that's sort of covered too. The Russian Admiral in the first season pretty much covers central Asia too.
Of course every season also has an element of domestic US subversion going on as well, remembering Peter Weller's character last season was a Yankee, even that one did.
Anyway, watch Senora Tavo! She'll turn out to be crucial somehow.
An Iowa??????? Talk about jumping the shark!!!!
An Iowa? WTF did they get one of those?
Yes, I was going to ask anyone with USN service under their belts following this...if bridge crew uses the term "Iowa Class," are they using a terminology which describes foreign designed and built ships of roughly comparable capability and size by equivalence to the nearest American type? I doubt this very much! They might say Iowa-equivalent or "comparable to an Iowa," but I think if a foreign class existed it would have its own name--they didn't describe Russian or Greek ships, or British subs, in American equivalent terms, they identified these by classes specific to the foreign navy and it seemed every officer and many an enlisted swabby was expected to have presumably hundreds of such foreign types on the tips of their tongues. If Navy crew share the same enthusiasm I do for say airplane types it would not be hard for them to master such encyclopedic knowledge and I dare say the ones who don't have a nerdy enthusiasm for the topic just out of sheer geekiness have a similar keen interest instilled by situational awareness. These are the ships that might be blowing you to bits or trapping you in a sinking hull in Davy Jones's Locker, so yeah, the crews know these ship types the way most people know car models or football teams.
So--assuming the show is striving for a bit of technical accuracy--in my ignorance I have always felt it strove for and managed to portray the look and feel of life on a real Navy ship, veterans feel free to poke fun at the idea for my embarrassment but also amusement--if someone else in the world had made a WWII era battleship comparable design, it would have some NATO reporting code or simply be known by whatever class its makers called it.
How strong then is my inference that when they say Iowa class, they mean Iowa class--one of the ships we whipped up in WWII to be the last word in super-battleships, made in an American shipyard?
Now a lot of Third World navies and even First World have acquired old US products, but offhand I am not aware of us ever raffling off a
battleship. Not even say to the Shah of Iran or any other such darling of Cold War policy. For one thing the whole class is deemed obsolete in modern warfare; mavericks may say otherwise and I guess the author of the book this series spins off of was one of those battlewagon bugs. Certainly it wasn't really obsolete even at the end of WWII; admirals would put their flags on these rather than say a carrier--carriers have "glass jaws;" if the enemy can get through the gauntlet of defenses surrounding one it doesn't take a lot of battle damage to take it out of commission as operational and a heavy strike stands a good chance of blowing it up and sending it straight down, due to all the aviation fuel and munitions stored aboard; also Americans went for light weight design for speed and maximum air group striking power, versus the British philosophy of armoring theirs better since they anticipated operations in range of peer power land based air power. The American philosophy was to strike firstest with the mostest so there would be no enemies in striking range to strike back. And partial damage to a deck is enough to block any planes from landing, so until deck damage is fixed, which can take weeks, the carrier might be floating with all its munitions and fuel and most planes, but it can't really fight. Which is why carriers fight in pairs within a task force. Battlewagons on the other hand are built to take massive firepower punishment and keep floating, so while as a primary striking unit the battleship is no longer the most powerful, it remains durable and hard to sink. The Bikini A-Bomb tests were commissioned by the USN, which wanted to prove their ships were not obsolete in the face of A-bomb strikes by proving they could take the punishment, due to all the armor added onto the conventional classes against piecemeal air strikes, which the admirals reasoned meant they could take a lot of blast overpressure. (Turned out they largely could, but the radioactive water washed over the desks by the shallow water Baker shot drenched them in enough fallout to kill hypothetical damage control teams, so the ships would sink anyway due to no one being able to fix them up. The Navy did not even bother with the deep water Charlie shot, which was cancelled).
So far from being totally obsolete, a battleship has its place in a global war, or in a "peace keeping police action" such as in Lebanon. Not a place that has been taken to justify making modern versions of the class, but enough that what few battlewagons we have left are treasured as assets (or dismissed and scrapped, not sold off to reward loyal client states.
I infer no Iowas have ever been put up as a gift or sales opportunity, no matter how much certain US clients might love to have one. Also they are expensive to operate.
Now since as far as I know the Iowa herself was the last of her class to be kept out of mothballs (or rather, taken out of mothballs after being in them some decades and I don't think we ever deployed more than two or three since, and might have even given up on the experiment and re-mothballed the few we had left, it would be pretty ASB for one to have been roaming the sea lanes when its crew got Red Plague and bought it, leaving the ship adrift. A cruiser, even an advanced missile cruiser, I would believe. But a freaking WWII battleship? What is it doing outside of storage or as a museum?
And yet...how else does Tavo have even one? The only plausible way to get it (unless someone is ready to hand with a net posting about some hulls I am unaware of having been sold off despite my presumption that no, the USA would never sell one since it is an attribute of a first class Navy and we want no rivals or even loyal clients to have one) would be if one or more were put back in service by GW Bush and left there by Obama. Then just as I said last week, it goes AWOL due to the plague, and someone with a motorboat climbed aboard and salvaged it.
Again you'd think even so, with the transaction unknown to the Navy at the time, some satellite in the past decade or so since the Red Plague would have noticed it in port somewhere presumably in South America.
Does everyone at least agree that this is an American made Iowa, accept no substitutions?
Did I in fact call it when I said a good portion of the USN fleet has been salvaged and appropriated by lots of other nations?
They still should not have been blindsided!
Now, did Commander Granderson buy the farm? Looks like it.
It looks almost incontrovertibly like it. I kept hoping the genius ensign's second call was to the admiral in charge and put in motion a SWAT team to her home so that next week we see the cops pouring in just one minute after the spy girl vacates the premises, and they manage to revive her. But no, he was trying to reach her on her landline instead. That was a nasty wound and her eyes are shown open and unblinking. She sure looks like a goner to me and I am quite angry at how many beloved characters this show kills off. Especially eating them up like candy this season. I really loved the blonde engineer and the doctor, and they are blown away first episode. Now this.
We can still hold out hope, but she is clearly not breathing and liable to be brain dead, or anyway badly damaged; saving her functionally seems out the window.
Anyone think the show will kill off absolutely everyone before it ends the season, and the last frame will be Chandler dying in the act of finally resolving the current threat?
