Plot: It's a freezing cold night, the Americans are shelling too close, B.J's patient is going downhill, and Frank is frantically searching Hot Lip's tent for the love notes he has written her.
Great line by Potter: "Da*n colonels! Can't trust any of them!"
So where DID Margaret hide her notes?
I suspect she actually threw them away. She probably said she kept them, because it hurt her feelings that Burns tore her note up. Kinda trying to one-up him.
What always surprised me was that she ever even spoke to Frank again, let alone slept with him after he destroyed her tent. Jiminee, she was always obsessive about privacy, and to have Frank barge in and tear the place up would seem to be a pretty huge sin as far as she was concerned.
Frank must've really wheedled, groveled and whined his way back into Margeret's heart.
Margaret's handwriting must be awful small. On that tiny scrap of paper, she apparently wrote, "I'm dying to keep you warm."
Potter changed the position of his bed. In this ep, the foot of the bed is aimed at the door. Later the bed would be moved 45 degrees.
It's amazing Klinger didn't wake up the other patients when he was brought in from the cold. He was yelling loud enough to wake the dead. But so were Hawkeye and Margaret when they were trying to calm the one patient that went bezerk.
That can of beans that exploded had great aim. Only Hawkeye and Margaret were hit by beans. There doesn't seem to be beans on anything else, certainly not the white curtain in the background.
This was one of the few times (if any) that Hawkeye wears his jacket (or tunic) buttoned all the way up.
Notice that in the episode immediately prior to this, Radar was outside with his shirt off, trying to get a tan.
The main scene cut from this episode was between the Swamp and the hospital--Hawkeye stopped in the mess tent to pick up some coffee and stayed to chat a few minutes with Klinger and a newcomer who was going on his first night guard shift. Klinger commented on Hawkeye's 1943 Army surplus beans. Hawkeye said that they were going to be his midnight snack, which was silly, since it was already past midnight then, and he didn't eat them until quite some time later.
Hawkeye also mentioned in the mess tent that it was July--I couldn't tell if he were just joking, or if Korea does have such radical temperature shifts during the summer.
Blackout conditions are announced and two enlisted men are standing around a trash barrel that has a fire in it. One of them grabs a bucket and puts the fire out with the water in it. That bucket must not have been out there too long. According to the announcer, the temperature is 2 degree below zero. If the bucket of water had been outside a while, wouldn't its contents freeze?
Judging by the fact that B.J. gave Hawkeye a report on the Edwards kid, there were two doctors on the first shift - B.J. and Frank. Hawkeye seems to be the only surgeon on his shift. Does Potter ever take a shift? And if these guys are working in such shifts, how do they ever find the time to go through the antics they do throughout the series? Who replaces Pierce or Hunnicutt on their shifts when they leave camp? Or when more than one doctor goes away from camp? Shouldn't there be more doctors than the four we normally see? (I know. I keep harping on this one. But it is bothersome to me.)
For such a happily married man, Frank certainly doesn't wear his wedding ring, does he? (Look at his hand when Margaret gives him the note.) Maybe it's a deal Margaret and Frank worked out.
Potter's pretty good if he can identify Allied shells from the enemy artillery just by hearing one explosion. You'd think all boooms! would sound alike, though.
Note the clipboard at the end of Edwards' bed when B.J. decides he has to oprerate on him again. In the long shots, it's a brown wooden clipboard. In the close-ups of Margaret and Hawkeye, it's a black metal one (that looks like it could be Radar's). In the next shot, another long shot, it's back to being brown again.
That's a fast acting sedative Margaret gives Private Abbott. It works on him within a second or two of being administered.
Buffalo bagels!
Oh, and about Hawkeye's "Coldest July" comment - I assume he's joking. This episode certainly doesn't take place in July of '52. If it did, Colonel Potter shouldn't be there. He wasn't assigned to the 4077th until September of '52. If it is July, then it would have to be July, 1953. That would mean that the War was nearly over. Yet, the final ep, "Goodbye, Farewell and Amen" shows that the Korean summer is nearly the same as our summer. (Should be, too. Given that we're both on the same side of the Equator.)
Horse hockey!