Plot: A grateful Greek commander arranges an Easter feast for his men and the 4077th personnel. Radar sends the main course home.
Plot B: A soldier shoots himself in the foot, and accidently confesses to Frank Burns.

I pointed out in "The Longjohn Flap" that Radar had no qualms about eating an entire leg of lamb (with mint jelly). I said that apparently he didn't mind lamb if it had already been prepared, but in this episode he listens, aghast, as Trapper rhapsodizes about his neighbor grilling a lamb every Easter. This lamb presumably would have been bought already butchered.

Radar is not a vegetarian. He eats practically anything, in as large a quantity as he can get.

Yes, I know, I know, the point was that this was a LIVE lamb, and yet...Radar was a farm boy, after all. Was he always sent in to town when butchering time was at hand, as he did when the cat had kittens? There are a lot of jokes about the naivete of farming folk, but they usually have a clearer knowlege of the realities of life and death than others do.

True. As I pointed out in 'The Longjohn Flap' (season one), Radar could hardly have helped getting up close and personal with his family's menu. Naiive he is...but not to have realized what became of all those piglets and calves is stu pid, which he definitely is not.

The only (fairly lame) explanation I can come up with is that this is a lamb, not a full grown sheep, and lambs are traditionally the cutest of little domestic critters; also the O'Reilly farm seems to be small and may not have housed sheep at all, thus Radar is unfamiliar with how adorable they really are.

And having said all that, I must admit that I laughed harder and longer at the 'Spam lamb' than almost any other scene in the series.

For a different look at farmer's attitudes, I refer to the comic strip "For Better or For Worse" when the family visits farming in-laws. During one visit, Elly is awakened in order to spend the night watching a sow have pigs. As they walk out of the barn at dawn, she is rhapsodizing about the miracle of birth and life, etc, when her brother-in-law says, "Don't go waxing poetic on me--we're having bacon for breakfast."

Another time, Elly's sister-in-law asked her to find a roast: "We put a cow in the freezer last fall...just look for any packages marked 'Daisy'."
(This is akin to MY brother-in-law picking up a deer that had been struck by a car, which he put out of its misery. He labled the packages "Roadkill.")

Comparatively speaking, Radar's attitude seems rather ludicrous.

I get the impression that the creators fixated on Radar's love of animals, rather than thinking it through. They emphasized one trait without considering its full ramifications.

I don't have any problems with Radars love of animals:

- We don't know if there were any animals butchered on the O'reilly farm - maybe it was only a dairy farm? Or mainly wheat?

- His love of animals is consistent, that is, they show it on and off (like his menagerie), but they don't contradict it directly.

- Among the thousands of people who grow up on farms there may very well be an exception who is naive and sensible like radar and doesn't want to kill animals.

- When he barters for the leg, its not recognizable any more. Many people, esp. children (and radar has a sometimes child-like innonence, which makes him esp. charming), eat normal meat, but are aghast at eating sth. that looks like the animal.

- I've heard of farmers who have "pets" and animals for food, that they give names to the former, but never to the latter, and make a definite distinction between, say, a cow that will be slaughtered, or a horse, which is beloved and a friend. That's inconstint logically, but human, because its very hard for some people to butcher an animal you know. I mean, e.g. the movie "babe": hardly anyone who saw it would want to eat this special piglet, but a steak on your plate is sth. different. Humans aren't logical.

- radar mentions that he had 16 cats on the farm, so possible the kittens weren't drowned. And maybe he was sent away whenever a cow was slaughtered.

In order to take the vegetables out of the Mess Tent, Radar claims to be a vegetarian. Frank Burns accepts that explanation. He should know better. He's seen Radar eat chicken and other forms of meat before.

I see Radar's feeding his raccoon vegetables. But aren't raccoons omnivorous? Don't they require meat in their diet, too?

I'm just curious, when did Radar learn how to give shots? I mean, it's not like you can just jab a needle into someone and get results. You have to know how and where to to administer the shot. As far as I know, O'Reilly does not have that kind of training.

This is one of the eps where Henry says, "Abyssinia," my sig line for these boards.

Trapper takes Private Chapman to the Mess Tent so he can join in the Easter celebration. He tells Chapman that if he's old enough to fight, he's old enough to dance. May be, but he isn't physically capable of it. He's on crutches. Private Chapman can get drunk, however...

I wonder how the Greeks reacted to the news that Radar freed the lamb? Was Radar in any way made responsible for the theft (and it really was a theft) of the lamb?

The last tag for this ep has been cut for syndication. It shows the survivors of the Easter celebration on Monday morning. Radar is dancing around a Mess Tent pole. (Hey! He's a pole dancer!) Trapper is strumming his little guitar and whistling. Hawkeye and Frank are swaying with some of the Greeks. Frank falls to the floor. And Henry passes out into the Spam Lamb, which no one ate. The shot of Henry waking up to pass out survives a a part of the Colonel Blake tribute montage in the episode, "Abyssinia, Henry".

Abyssinia!

A couple of more comments on this ep -

My favorite scene in this ep is when Henry learns the lamb is missing. He storms into his office where Hawkeye and Trapper are waiting for him. Blake grabs a glass. He turns to grab a bottle of scotch. Meanwhile Hawkeye has started to fill Henry's glass with the gin he and Trapper were drinking. Simultaneously, Henry begins to pour the scotch into the glass. Henry is completely oblivious to what's going on. Hawkeye, on the other hand, is very much aware of going on. His reaction is priceless. It's too bad Henry never took a drink. It'd been great to see his reaction to the mixture.

Frank sure was dead set against the Easter celebration, wasn't he? Yet, despite condemning the feast as morally degenerate, not only did Ferret Face attend the celebration, he was there the following morning. I believe he even got drunk.

Abyssinia!

Another interesting question is, how did a raccoon get to Korea? They're not domesticated and they're certainly not native to the country.

Rob aka Mediancat