I loved the 2-hour season opener, but I did have one minor problem with it. It was an historical "oops."
***SPOILER AHEAD*****
It has to do with how Thomas gets out of his tour of duty on the front lines. By sticking his hand up while he's in the trenches and ... (well, if you saw it, you know the rest).
It's a sad fact of World War I that there were thousands of young soldiers who tried to get out of the war this way. It was an act of willful mutilation (shooting yourself in the hand or foot mostly), viewed as "cowardice" and considered worthy of a court-martial, which meant you would be put to death. (Some were merely sent to prison for life.)
If you've ever seen the French film "A Very Long Engagement," this is exactly what happens in the opening scenes. Five men are found guilty of this willful mutilation and are sentenced to death for their "cowardice." One of them does it exactly the same way Thomas does, even using a lighter as bait.
To have Thomas do this to himself---first of all, he would have been caught, because it was a common way to do it, very difficult to prove you had sustained the injury legitimately. Actually, one of the five men in "A Very Long Engagement" sustains a suspicious injury that he in fact didn't inflict upon himself, but they all presume he did, due to the nature of the wound, and he is court-martialed anyway.
It was an ugly war with ugly politics and protocol. But shooting yourself in the hand (or having it shot exactly the way Thomas did) would have resulted in him being courtmartialed and put to death for cowardice. At the very least, he would have been placed "under suspicion" for the injury. He would not have been sent home to run a convalescent center.
That's an "oops" in the plot.
"Jaws is the Citizen Kane of movies."
blocked: logan2, Diamonds3, Hamilton22
Updated On: 1/12/12 at 11:00 PM
