Reading this week:

• The Democracy Advantage by Morton H. Halperin, Joseph T. Siegle, and Michael M. Weinstein
• Civil Wars by David Armitage

In my habit of defending media products that everyone else thinks is bad, and also because it is slow here and I can’t think of anything else to write about (well, I can, but does anyone really want my analysis of why the people getting vapors about Parler getting kicked off of Amazon are dumb?), I want to tell you this week that the TV show Last Resort is the greatest TV show about submarines ever made.

First off, it doesn’t seem to have a lot of competition. I could find two other shows in the general category after some quick Googling. Submarines seem to be made for movies instead. Second off, though, it’s amazing. By which I mean it is absolutely dumb. Exactly zero parts of it make any sense at all. I mean, that photo up top is presented without a hint of irony in the materials for the show. On the cover of the complete series on DVD which of course I bought, in the background there is also a submarine surrounded by explosions and a destroyer also surrounded by explosions and also F-14s coming from behind to do a fly-over. It’s fantastic.

The premise is that a US nuclear missile submarine is attacked by other US Navy ships for mysterious reasons, and the natural response of the captain is to take over a fictional French island in the Indian Ocean that is somehow very well-stocked with lots of supplies but few French people. The submarine tells everyone to stay away lest they start nuking people, which they demonstrate by nuking a patch of ocean off the Eastern seaboard which they claim in the show wouldn’t have any people in it at all, a bit of the story I took personal offense to because I have literally myself been in those very waters they hypothetically nuked. There’s also a drug kingpin on the island. It’s a whole thing. Hijinks ensue.

Submariners hate the show. At least they think they do. In their defense, everyone else hated the show as well; it was cancelled after 13 episodes. I don’t know when they figured out they were cancelled (I suspect at about the same time they dreamed up this series), but the final few episodes rush towards a conclusion with increasingly bad green-screen acting and the finale is a gigantic explosion. Honestly, not the peak of artform, I’m going to admit that. I have to keep myself from just detailing all the dumb stuff. Like the female lieutenant, who is the star of the show (Daisy Betts as Lieutenant Grace Shepard), who is a longtime friend of the captain and a qualified submariner who also somehow doesn’t know the most obvious things about submarines. Or the fact that somehow the submarine can just pull into and out of port willy-nilly without shore power or reactor startups or tugboats. Or the fact that no one ever seems to do any maintenance on the thing. These are just the things I can remember easily, I haven’t actually watched this show in like 7 years.

Back to my submariners only think they hate it comment. Like I said three paragraphs ago I bought the complete series on DVD and would make sure to bring it underway. Then, I would play it underway in the wardroom. Lemme tell ya what happens. People walk in. They’re like “what is this?” I tell them “It is Last Resort, the greatest submarine TV show ever made.” They would be like “ugh, that show is terrible,” but they would be transfixed. They would watch for about 10 minutes or so, standing up, like they just wandered in for a second, they’re about to leave, really, they just want to see how dumb it is. But after 10 minutes they sit down. Then, when the episode ends and I queue up the next one, they stay for that too. And the next. This can’t go on for too long, there are only 13 episodes, but everyone watches. You know why? Because they love it.

It is a huge mistake to take the show seriously. You have to watch it like a sci-fi show. When you watch Star Trek, it’s loosely based around the concept of a military-type ship, but no yeah Scotty fixes everything pretty much by himself, the bridge crew are naturally the ones that explore dangerous alien planets, and the warp core breaks or fixes at convenient times for the story. We get it. Same with this show. Once you’re in that mindset, it’s absolutely the greatest, which I have said many times now. The show is absolutely bonkers. They blow stuff up all the time. I think there are Russian paratroopers in only like the second episode which the bad-boy SEAL team leader manages to dispatch at the last second after the hot girl tells him he should, saving LT Shepard who was taking on the Russian paratroopers herself. The real star of the show is the COB, who is acerbic and witty and during most of the show trying to overthrow the captain while also keeping junior sailors in line, and is honestly the most accurate part of the whole production. I love him. The show has better people in it than it deserves, like Andre Braugher, who at no point lets on that he is in anything other than an absolute masterpiece.

Look, a quick review of the Wikipedia page has made me learn that despite being what I can almost certainly state is this show’s #1 fan, even I don’t recall all the crazy stuff they wrote into the script. Episode 6 includes the entire island being dosed with a hallucinogen; maybe the writers were just putting their own lived experience on the small screen. You gotta struggle past the first episode, but watch this show, and you’ll agree with me that it is the greatest submarine show that has ever existed. I’m not going to say it even deserved all the 13 episodes it got, but I think we are all better for them having existed.