'Army Wives': This was never the way I planned, not my intention ...

Hey, look, it’s a new episode of Army Wives. So much for the promo that aired at the end of last week's episode that suggested the show was taking a mini-vacation. Take it as a sign: you should never watch the promos for the upcoming episodes. The Lifetime promo people are crazy spoilertastic, and previews of future episodes should be avoided at all costs. If by chance you missed the episode because you went off the promos ... well, what are you doing here? Go watch the episode online. Yes, you'll get your recap of everything that transpired below, but it's nowhere near as fun that way. I promise this post won't go anywhere, and it'll be waiting for you when you get back.

Now, if you do happen to watch the Army Wives promos, you know that the show is frequently marketed as being from the producers of Grey's Anatomy. I've honestly never really been a Grey's fan. Scrubs is my hospital show of choice. In the first season of Scrubs, a statistic was stated that's relevant to all hospital shows: one out of every three patients who enters a hospital will die there. So, knowing that the end of the last episode sent Getti, Joan, and Joan's unborn baby to the hospital, the odds are stacked in a bad way.

But Joan's fine, and her baby too. Joan has suffered a "minor tear in the placenta," which sounds awful but is apparently manageable. The baby will be fine, so long as Joan gets some rest. Joan is confined to bed, per doctor's orders. Joan isn't much of the bed rest type, as you might imagine. She's awfully itchy to be working, and a bed is like a prison to her. She keeps trying to get up and move around, earning a scolding from Roland. "The whole purpose of bed rest is to do it in bed," he observes.

Elsewhere in the hospital, Denise gets an update on Getti. Getti's unconscious, lying in a coma. Denise is blaming herself for Getti's accident, but Claudia Joy tells her to put an end to that line of thinking at once. Denise also mentions that Frank is on his way home, and Claudia Joy suggests that maybe that'll allow Denise to take her mind off Getti and refocus. "Maybe when Frank gets here, everything will get clearer. Everything might fall right back into place," she notes. Denise isn't nearly so optimistic.

When Frank does show up, he's downright cheerful. He isn't coming home with guns blazing, trying to order his family to shape up and get back to normal. Instead, Frank's only arsenal is a bunch of smiles and compliments. He's telling Denise how beautiful she is, and telling Jeremy how proud he is of his son. But the happiness is short-lived.

Frank isn't happy that Denise was at the hospital rather than at home to greet him, but he can live with that. Frank isn't thrilled when he sees Denise's biker outfit for the first time, but he can deal with that too. And it can't be too healthy for Frank's self-esteem when he and Denise go to bed and she is decidedly unenthusiastic about having sex with him, but this is Frank's first time with a woman in months and Frank's going to be OK no matter what Denise is doing. But the combination of all these little things finally reaches a tipping point.

"You seem so different, it's like I'm not even talking to my wife anymore," Frank finally says. Denise says that yes, she's different. She's back working now, and that's it. But Frank knows there's more to it than that. "It's more than that, Denise, and you know it," he says. Denise doesn't say anything about Getti, but Frank eventually pieces things together himself. Frank heads to the hospital, and he catches Denise talking to Getti's unconscious body. Denise is holding Getti's band as she talks to him, and Frank catches her, right when Denise ends up kissing the hand. Frank walks away defeated rather than confronting Denise, with the repercussions saved for another day. Getti, though, isn't going to be lucky enough to have another day. His heart gives out later on. Getti, Joan, and Joan's baby: one out of three. Denise wasn't there when it happened; she'll have to learn the news and deal with it in the next episode.

The post drug problem introduced in the last episode isn't over. Roland breaks up a fight outside the school in which a bag of ecstasy pills drops to the ground. Michael believes that soldiers are supplying high school students with drugs. Not quite. Michael asks Emmalin if she's encountered any drugs, or people talking about drugs, at school. Emmalin says no way. She would never, and she doesn't hang out with anybody who would.

But as our commenters astutely pinpointed last week, it sure doesn't look like it's a coincidence that Emmalin's new boyfriend Quinn showed up at the same time that a drug culture came to the forefront. Quinn is constantly in contact with a whole bunch of strangers, and he goes through the checkpoint on and off campus a lot.

Joan, having accepted her bed rest order but not about to give up working entirely, is trying to develop a plan to counter the drug problem from home. She drafts a plan, and has her new manservant Trevor deliver it to Evan. But Evan doesn't have any interest in the report when he gets it, as he tosses it aside without bothering to read it. Evan's in the hot seat now, and he's going to do things his way.

The next day, soldiers do a raid of the school. They open up and search every locker to find and arrest students in possession of drugs. It's Evan's plan, all the way. Joan hears about it and is livid. She realizes she doesn't have much recourse here, though. Evan is firmly situated in her seat. Joan tells herself that she needs to try to let it go, but she'll end up getting a little friendly intervention on her behalf.

Later on, Quinn gets stopped at the checkpoint. There's no Emmalin with him this time. Emmalin comes home to find her parents waiting for her. "This does not look good," Emmalin notes. Michael and Claudia Joy confirm to Emmalin that Quinn was indeed the big drug supplier to the post, having been caught with a whole bunch of drugs stashed in the back of his car. "I had a feeling," Emmalin admits. Actually, she's the one who tipped off the guards to search Quinn's car. Emmalin saw Quinn seeming to make deals with fellow students, and always trying to be extra-friendly to the guards, and she knew to be suspicious. "How did you pick up on all of that?" Michael asks. She says she learned from him. Well, that's a silver lining, I suppose.

Trevor decides to go above his pay grade, and bring Michael and Evan to Joan's house so that Joan can voice her objections to the way the drug problem was targeted. Unfortunately, Michael is fully behind the effort that Evan undertook. The drug sweep seems to have worked, after all, with the source of the drugs now having been apprehended. Joan says that she completely disagrees with the tactics that were taken. The sweep of the school was way over the top, and will only serve to engender distrust among the community. Joan says that she had her own plan for combating the problem, a plan which was apparently ignored. Michael only learns about Joan's plan now, and is going to once again have to reprimand Evan for ignoring the chain of command. As Michael and Evan leave, Joan has a final message for Trevor. "That was completely inappropriate," she says of the ambush where Trevor went above her head to bring in Michael and Evan. "Don't pull anything like that again." But she says it with a smile.

OK, now let's analyze the whole drug storyline now that it's mostly over. This wasn't the show's strongest plotline, with a number of problems emerging. Let's start here at the end. It's maybe a little convenient from a storytelling perspective that Michael agrees with Evan's plan. If the Michael-Joan dynamic has shown us anything, it's that if there's a good cop-bad cop operation in play, Michael's the nice guy and Joan's the strict one, all the time. For Joan to be the one advocating a softer position and Michael approving of an end-justifies-the-means plan doesn't necessarily seem like it fits with the characters we know.

As far as Emmalin and Quinn, I don't necessarily like the whole angle of having Emmalin's boyfriend turn out to be a drug dealer. It's enough for Emmalin to have her first boyfriend; having the guy turn out to be a drug dealer just seems cruel. Quinn was ultimately a pretty loathsome character, and pretty one-dimensional, which is a problem in the wake of the similarly one-dimensional war profiteering couple Steve and Carla, our last criminals a few weeks back. Army Wives isn't some villain-of-the-week cop show, and having one-dimensional criminals in the past few episodes is not a trend that should be continued.

That being said, it's understandable that the series would want to do something outside-the-box when it comes to a boyfriend for Emmalin. The problem that the show faces with Emmalin is that her most obvious boyfriend possibilities are future soldiers, but if that happens it'll just feel like a rehash of territory we already went through with Amanda and Jeremy. You don't want to just be repeating the same ideas, so Emmalin needs something different. I don't think the Quinn storyline ultimately succeeded, but it was at least different, and the writers shouldn't be deterred from trying to think differently with whatever comes next for Emmalin.

But the biggest problem with the drug storyline is that the show failed to really demonstrate ways in which this was a unique story to an Army post. That's the point of the series, that we're getting a look into a culture and a community that's different from the rest of America. But in the last episode, when the drug problem was first mentioned, Claudia Joy chalked it up to just a normal thing, that the post is no different from what kids see anywhere else. Drugs themselves aren't exclusive to a post, of course, but you'd think there would be unique features to this particular drug problem that set it apart from any suburban high school. Are drugs really no different on an Army post versus anywhere else, or are drugs in fact statistically more prominent on Army bases and among potentially rebellious Army brats? I'm wondering what might have been in Joan's never-read report; maybe there would have been something there worth looking into about how this situation should have been uniquely handled.

In any event, the drug storyline is over ... except that it's not, because now we're going to be moving onto Trevor's other drug storyline. Roxy confronts him about an empty bottle, and Trevor gives the old 'oops, I dropped some pills in the sink' excuse for why his supply is exhausted. Trevor is once again told by a doctor that he's not ready to go back to active combat and needs to continue his rehab, and Trevor's starting to lose his patience a little bit. There's your other reason why the Quinn plotline probably wasn't a great idea - Trevor's storyline seems far more authentic to the lives of soldiers, and I'd be interested in pursuing it, but now I'm just fatigued from talking about drugs and no longer interested much at all in a new drug addiction plotline.

Elsewhere, Roxy is still studying for her GED, and she's nervous about passing a test. She wants everybody to be proud of her - Trevor, Roland, herself. She's putting a lot of pressure on herself, perhaps even more so than when she was opening up the bar. And she ends up totally bombing the test. "I failed in school, and I failed at this. How many times do I have to take a test to convince myself that I just got shortchanged in the brains department?" she wonders. Roxy says she's dropping out. And then she flips out at Trevor when Trevor tries to convince her not to give up. But Roland provides Roxy with a reason not to quit. Roxy's not dumb. She's just dyslexic. How Roland would know that simply from one bubble-sheet test is beyond me, but Roland's a doctor, so I defer to him. Roland says he isn't giving up on Roxy, that she can take future tests orally until she passes. Roxy voices her appreciation. "Outside of Trevor, nobody has ever believed in me this much," she thanks him. Mind you, Roxy is standing in Betty's while she's saying this. Roxy, are you forgetting somebody?

With Roxy focusing on the bar and on her GED studies, Pamela needs a new buddy to spend some time with, and Brenda, the reporter who did the newspaper story on her, fills that role. Brenda tells us that her own husband Charlie has been deployed for the last four months, and she's going crazy. "It can get a little lonely," Pamela notes. It's especially lonely in bed, Brenda admits. Brenda starts talking about alternatives, of the electronic and manual varieties.

Ah, but Brenda has yet another alternative as well. "I don't cheat on my husband, if that's what you're asking," Pamela says up top. (Well, most of the time.) "Some husbands think it's OK for their wives to deal with their loneliness in other ways," Brenda continues. It's not really cheating, Brenda notes, if it ain't with another guy. "I vowed never to be with another man. But there's a really great alternative," she explains. She leans in and kisses Pamela. Pamela is totally, totally freaked out.

Pamela kissed a girl, and she didn't like it. Not one bit. She just got totally icked out by the whole thing. She relates the tale to Roxy the next day. "Shut up! On the mouth!? Full-on!?" Roxy peppers her with questions. "Apparently the boys don't consider that cheating," Pamela notes. Pamela is relatively speechless, which is a shocker. She just says it was weird, exceptionally weird. But, hey: it was excellent fodder for the Lifetime promo editors. Salaciousness is like a drug to those people.

• How does the Denise-Frank saga play out from here?

• Is Joan in the clear health-wise, or do you think she'll overextend herself and once again put the baby at risk as she tries to ward off Evan's encroachment on her job?

• Does anyone actually know, whether from statistics or experience, if there is a greater likelihood of drug use on an Army post versus in the rest of society?

• Are you interested in Trevor's pill-popping addiction, or are you just tired of the drug thing at this point?

• Pamela's brief encounter with lesbianism: hot, or just weird?

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