Not to beat a dead chicken, but part of Hawkeye’s mental breakdown is that he was panicking and yelled at the woman to “shut the chicken up!” So she did, permanently. Whether she did it because Hawkeye told her to, or because she was panicking, too, didn’t matter, because it was Hawkeye’s guilt that was getting to him.
Mysterious Stranger: I am prepared to offer you one million dollars.
Me:Cool.
MS: All you have to do is push this button, but be warned -
Me: Cool. Where is my cat? He likes pushing large red buttons.
Joke’s on your cat, then, because the button’s actually green.
The biggest problem I had with that aspect of the final episode is that it had already been done multiple times. Hawkeye is having a mental breakdown with psychosomatic symptoms again, the cause of which gets teased out until the end? Didn’t we see this premise in at least three episodes:
- Hawkeyes sees a soldier who had nearly drowned, starts compulsively sneezing and showing flu-like symptoms, because it stirred memories of a time in his childhood where he nearly drowned (Season 9: “Bless You, Hawkeye”).
- Hawkeye starts suffering mysterious and crippling back pain, it turns out because a doctor he knows back home (and whose skills Hawkeye feels are mediocre at best) is getting rich, while Hawkeye’s stuck in the army (Season 5: “Hepatitis”).
- Hawkeye begins sleepwalking and having nightmares about his childhood, triggered by the youth of the wounded soldiers he treats daily (Season 5: “Hawk’s Nightmare”).
The other subplots were more interesting, with Charles “capturing” a Chinese band, Mulcahey losing most of his hearing in a mortar attack and Klinger becoming romantically entangled with a Korean woman (played by a pre-Keiko Rosalind Chao) who is trying to find her parents. And, incidentally, the war ending.
Hawkeye’s plot was Alan Alda acting traumatized… again.
It is Red in “Button, Button” (Twilight Zone Se. 1 Ep20)