'Army Wives': Triskaidekaphobia

I should begin the following discussion with a very important point of order, which is to say that I really, really love doing these episode recaps and commentaries every week. It's a thrill and an honor to be able to talk in depth each week about Army Wives, a show which otherwise may not get a whole lot of thorough and in-depth commentary elsewhere on the web. My goals each week are basically twofold - first, to recap the key plot points of the episode for anybody who might have missed it, and second, to provide unique insights such that if you did see the episode I can still hopefully get you to think about things in new and different ways, to ask questions that might allow a whole new layer of interest when you're watching. It's an exciting challenge for me to come up with new and unique perspectives each week, but even more important, it's a hell of a lot of fun.

That being said, I must lay out the following statement: I'd probably be a lot happier if this were the last post of the season. See, this was episode #213, the thirteenth episode of season two. Season one had thirteen episodes, so if this season were the same length, Sunday would have represented the season finale. But Army Wives doesn't have 13 episodes this year; it has 18. The season is going to run through late October. It's no secret why Lifetime would want to have Army Wives run for more episodes this year than it did last year. It's the highest-rated and most popular show on the network, the flagship program for the entire channel. But Lifetime isn't the only cable channel acting this way. Take a look at the following list of popular cable dramas that have bumped up their number of episodes for the current season:

And those are just the shows bumped up this year. There are special circumstances in a couple of cases there - Eureka's higher episode order is a direct result of last year's writers' strike, for one - but for the most part, it's just a matter of the cable networks bleeding out their popular shows for all they're worth. But quantity does not necessarily correlate with quality. The more episodes a show is asked to do, the greater the likelihood that it'll have to resort to filler episodes, with plotlines being dragged out far too long. Shorter seasons tend to be stronger seasons, because the writers on a show can do things in a tighter, more compact manner.

When the cable networks really busted out onto the scene this decade with critically adored original series, they were forced into shorter seasons by necessity: they had less money than the broadcast networks. So most broadcast dramas run for around 22 episodes, but it quickly became the norm for cable dramas to run for 13 episodes. The early seasons of The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, The Shield, Monk, Battlestar Galactica - we're talking the shows that made cable the respected place it is today, and laid the groundwork for all the other channels and shows that would follow - all ran for 13 episodes. When those shows became big critical sensations, the most popular stated reason for their success was that cable allowed greater freedom of content. And that's true. But it's also true that those shows were stronger because a more compact 13-episode season allowed for much tighter storylines, without the midseason doldrums that afflict a lot of old-guard network dramas. Right now, though, the cable channels are squandering that advantage by continually creeping upwards with the episode counts of their popular shows. (The higher episode counts also lead into the related problem of splitting seasons in half, which most of the above shows have done, a contrivance that annoys viewers to no end. But that's a whole other topic.)

Cable channels shouldn't fear the number 13. 13 is good. So is 12 for that matter, or 10. But for our purposes here, let's say that I'm an ardent triskaidekaphile, a lover of the number 13. Army Wives would undoubtedly have been stronger this season if the show only had to do 13 episodes instead of 18. Every week in the comments below we get complaints about Trevor's drug storyline seeming to take forever without a resolution, or Denise's problems seeming to have no end in sight. If the show had 13 episodes this year, as it did last year, the show wouldn't be able to dilly-dally with those storylines, and could have done them in a more compact, more potent way. Those stories could have been really powerful if they were more tightly organized, but instead they sometimes have drifted along in the background with very little movement in several episodes, and the effect has been diluted.

This week, let's start with Trevor, owner of the most prominent Plotline That Wouldn't End. But it's finally starting to come to a head. Trevor is getting worse as the death of Dalton Wilkins continues to take a toll on him. The secret pill-popping has now been joined by out-in-the-open drinking, and his glass-throwing tantrum at the end of the last episode finally convinces Roxy that she can't take the problem on alone.

Roxy finally decides to confide in somebody, Roland, about Trevor's behavior. Roland passes on the name of an addiction specialist at the hospital. Roland also lets Joan know what's up. It's definitely a departure from patient-doctor confidentiality, even if Roxy isn't technically a patient, and Roland admits that to Joan. But Trevor has been driving Joan around, and Roland knows that he can't have Trevor endangering his pregnant wife and unborn child because he's hopped up on happy pills.

Joan, in turn, tells Trevor that he's being reassigned to office duty, and he needs to get himself help or Joan will have to formally order him to do it. Trevor is smart enough to put two and two together. If Joan knows about his alleged pill problem, then Roxy told somebody. And Roxy, in turn, feels betrayed by Roland. Roland defends himself by explaining that he was only trying to help Trevor and protect his family, but Roxy isn't buying it. Roxy even tells Roland that he's no longer welcome at Betty's.

At Dalton's funeral, Trevor can't bear to be there. He eventually walks off in the middle of the ceremony, grabs the car and drives off, with Roxy unable to stop him. Roxy at least decides that if Trevor is going to be gone for a while, she can take the time to root around the house and try to find Trevor's secret stash. She does, but it's just as Trevor is coming back to the house, and Trevor angrily grabs Roxy to try to stop Roxy from dumping the pills down the sink. Trevor never hits Roxy, but it's still a frighteningly violent moment, something Trevor never before seemed like he was capable of doing. After Roxy does dump the pills down the sink, Trevor runs right back out the door, and he never returns that night.

Trevor's disappearance is something that T.J. and Finn are really in no way equipped to handle. They wonder if Trevor has gone back to Iraq, or if he has left them like their other daddies left them. Man, those poor kids. The next morning, Trevor, looking like hell, calls Roxy from the road and says that he's coming home. But it seems that Trevor has been doing a little off-roading, and managed to crash the car. Does the car accident represent Trevor bottoming out? I don't think so. I think it'll still get even worse before it gets better.

With Trevor having vanished, Roland tries to help Roxy, and Roxy again tells him off. But Roland's efforts to patch things up are stopped cold by a bigger crisis. He gets a panicked phone call from Joan, and Joan is rushed to the hospital, having suffered another series of complications. The baby has to be delivered via C-section. The baby is several weeks premature, but nurses tell Roland that the baby should be OK with some careful medical attention in the early going. Joan, on the other hand, is in trouble, with the doctors unable to immediately stop the bleeding. As the episode ends, everyone believes that Joan, the biggest fighter that anybody knows, will be all right. But she's not completely out of the woods just yet, stuck in the hospital as Roland and company desperately wait for good news.

Pamela, meanwhile, continues to be rightfully paranoid about Stalker Tim. The latest message from Tim is an envelope of candid photos of Pamela in her front yard, which Tim has placed at Pamela's door. Pamela eventually decides that if the authorities aren't going to do anything, she's going to have to take matters into her own hands. She gets a phone call from Tim and tells Tim to meet her the next day at a local park. Pamela has organized a stakeout, with witnesses watching over the area, but Tim doesn't fall for the trap. Instead, when Pamela gives up on the stakeout and goes to pick up her kids, she finds that her daughter Katie was given a rose and told to deliver it to Pamela. And so the story continues.

Frank and Denise, meanwhile, are coming to terms with their decision to separate. Frank still doesn't believe that a separation is a good idea, and he tells Denise that he just wishes they could go back to how things used to be. But Denise has now committed to this decision, and time just makes her more convinced that it's the only way to go if they have any hope of making things right. "It's a separation; it's not an end," she assures him.

Realizing that he has no real choice in the matter, Frank decides that if they are going to separate, he wants to do it as two people who still care about each other, rather than tearing each other apart to the point where they hate each other. To that end, Frank believes they need to set some ground rules, for how they'll communicate, and whether or not they'll date other people, and whether or not to wear their wedding rings. As always, Frank is all about order and discipline, needing to know exactly where everything stands.

The other, perhaps most important ground rule is that Frank and Denise agree not to tell Jeremy about everything until Jeremy is home from Iraq. Denise is thoroughly terrified about Jeremy leaving, even more so than she's ever been for Frank. It's just different for a mother. But Denise can't talk about her fear with Frank, who has no real interest in talking to her at all, leading to scenes of a whole lot of uncomfortable silence. Denise finally tries to break the silence. "I can't help myself. I'm afraid. I'm afraid I may never see him again," she sobs. Frank just grabs her shoulders in a half-embrace, and walks out the door wordlessly.

Frank's better at embracing Jeremy - that, or at least Jeremy is more on his emotional wavelength. As they send Jeremy off, Frank and Jeremy have a really sweet moment, with Frank saying how proud he is. Jeremy is extraordinarily strong as he's leaving. He's ready for this, and he has such an assured tone and face that he even reassures Denise a bit. Denise thought she was going to break down entirely, but Jeremy is so composed that he seems invincible. "I'll see you soon. Promise," he says as he departs. But when Jeremy is on the bus, Denise still needs comforting - but Frank has already vanished, literally and figuratively. Once Jeremy's gone, Frank says he needs to leave the house too. He just doesn't feel comfortable there anymore, and is going to stay elsewhere for the final few days before he himself departs for Iraq.

Army Wives never shies away from dealing with specifics about the Iraq war, but when the Holdens host a foreign dignitary, he comes from an anonymous nonspecific Latin American country - the ethereal nature of the man's country will make sense once the episode's over. The foreign official, Paolo, has known the Holdens for a long time. I don't really know whether to call Paolo a military bigwig or a political bigwig - really, he's from one of those countries where those two things are one and the same. And by extension, it means that politics in Paolo's country seem to revolve around a lot of glad-handing and under-the-table deals that benefit well-connected officials. (Not that anything like that would ever happen in the U.S. government, of course.)

Michael needs to convince Paolo to convince Paolo's president to keep an active U.S. military base in the country. Paolo eventually says he will do so - but first, he extracts a promise from Michael that the Americans at that base will continue to use a contractor owned by Paolo's family for supplies. Michael, ever the moral compass of the world, isn't really comfortable with underhanded promises, but there's nothing he can do about it. I don't at all care for this subplot. The chicanery of what goes on with military contracts to private contractors is a big, meaty issue that's worth talking about - but then having this storyline revolve around a foreign contractor rather than a domestic contractor seems like it might be a little bit of a cop-out. If Michael had to deal with a similar problem relating to some contractor that works with Fort Marshall, it could have been a juicy story, but here it seems like an afterthought.

It's an afterthought because Paolo's work relating to the military base is really not his primary purpose here. From the beginning, Paolo is a little handsy with Claudia Joy, but at first it doesn't amount to too much. Maybe it's just a cultural thing, being more physically expressive. Paolo does apologize to Claudia Joy and Michael for his actions in making Claudia Joy uncomfortable, knowing that he acted in a way that might have been OK in his country but is inappropriate here. But at the end of the episode, he takes that leash of cultural differences and runs way off with it. With Michael at work, Paolo forces himself on Claudia Joy and won't let her go. Paolo begins to rape Claudia Joy right in her own living room, and as the episode ends Claudia Joy is screaming and trying to get him off of her by wildly swinging a wine bottle at his head.

And that, suddenly, is the new crisis. With the various crises going on with Joan and Pamela and Denise and Trevor, Claudia Joy being raped or nearly raped was the last thing I would have expected. Pamela seemed like she was being threatened by a possible sexual predator, and then Claudia Joy finds herself in an even worse situation out of nowhere. I suppose the only silver lining here is that it has to guarantee that Pamela won't be sexually assaulted by her stalker, because having that happen to two different characters would just be sadistic. Army Wives has suddenly packed a ton of issues on its plate. Now we've got five more episodes to see it through.

What did you think? Hasn't Claudia Joy gone through enough this year? Does her new storyline now trump everything as the most unsettling moment of the series? Is Trevor going to get help, or do you think he'll spiral even further out of control first? Was Roland's behavior regarding Trevor's secret unethical, or the only morally correct thing he could have done? Did you ever think that Trevor could be physically dangerous to Roxy, and did you fear as it was happening that things might have turned out worse? Could Roxy ever give Trevor an ultimatum, knowing just how much her boys need Trevor around? And do you have any last-minute ideas for what you hope Joan and Roland name their daughter?

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