Nobody
Ever Talks About The Sea Lion Team #SEALTeam #3weekroundup #review
#recap #CBS
All pictures courtesy of CBS
Back
again in this third week of primetime fall TV with yet another review
of a brand new series. Can I just point out how strange it is that a
lot of the streaming services aren’t premiering that many new
series at this moment in time. In fact, I think that this 2017-2018
season will see the fewest new series to come to TV or streaming in
over a decade. I’d have to fact-check that but... I don’t wanna.
Today, we are looking at CBS’s new military-themed drama SEAL Team.
So, does this show manage to sneak its way into that obsessed fandom
part of your heart and head that will have you raving over how good
it is or is it in need of a stealthy take down to get it off the
airwaves? Let’s find out together.
And
if that’s not bad enough, we find out within minutes of him leaving
the doctor’s office that he is also having marital problems. No, he
is not divorced but he and his wife Alana are separated and he is
currently not living in the house. Apparently, as we learn in episode
three, the sex was always great between them but he was never quite
mentally present even when he was home from missions. For those who
don’t know, SEALs and special ops teams are different than regular
soldiers in that they don’t go on full tours overseas but they are
always on-call similar to a surgeon. They go on specialized missions
when they are absolutely needed. This made his schedule hectic. So,
we already have a very humanized character.
Next,
we have the second-in-command Ray, who is either black, Latino,
Hispanic or a mix of all three. The point is that he is a minority
character (Thank God!) who is given a very high place on the show. He
is more than just a best buddy in my opinion and has his own
storyline. He is the expectant father—well, his wife is pregnant
with their first child. A son. He is looking forward to the baby and
living a long life and all of that. He is both the jovial jokester
and the confidante on whom Hayes can lean. Together, they make a
pretty good tandem as a lead character.
We
also have Davis. She is part of the SEAL team but I haven’t seen
her actually go on field missions yet, unless I just wasn’t paying
close enough attention. Anyway, she helps a lot in strategizing how
the team can get into the places that they are seeking to go, and she
also does a lot of what seems like grunt work to me: she packs
parachutes, makes sure that all the tech on the soldiers’ suits is
working and relays communications back to the HQ and command centers.
While they haven’t dwelt on her very much, she does intrigue me.
Also, on episode three, this may just be me and my writer’s mind,
but I kind of sense that both Davis and Mandy are gay, or at least
one of them is and I think that it may be Davis. I find that also to
be very intriguing as we will finally get to see an interracial,
diverse relationship in the military.
And
finally we have the jackass of the show, Clay Spenser. What to say,
what to say. Clay is my most hated character in all of the new shows
that I’ve seen so far this new TV season. As I mentioned in my
Summer of Suck part 1 review when discussing the terrible movies of
the summer, it feels like instead of getting actual Millennial
writers into the writing room for movies, it feels like we are
getting Gen-Xers who are trying to write what they think Millennials
are actually like personally. But they seem to write-in a lot of
their frustrations with how they perceive Millennials and not how
this younger generation perceives itself. So, Clay is the epitome of
a stereotyped Millennial, even though he is a soldier. Again, I will
try to withhold my critique until later, but just know that I don’t
like this.
Anyway,
Clay is the son of a famous Navy SEAL who has long retired, and
written a book about his military exploits. This puts Clay in a
tricky position because he has the whole “he’s the son of so and
so” onus on him while he is trying to prove himself on his own
merits. But even worse, this guy is a total jerk and a jerk really
for no reason. Again, I digress before I start to criticize the show.
But I will get back to this point later.
After
we see Clay in a training exercise (oh yeah, he’s not even
officially on the SEAL team that Hayes is on and is, in fact, a newb)
the team is called out on a mission where Clay gets to “strap” or
assist in the field without actually being part of the team. They
never quite explain why he specifically gets this privilege
but the idea is that the team needs an extra man on this mission so
they get someone from the trainees.
The
mission is to take down a HVT or High-Value Target who is coming for
some kind of mafia-dons-like meeting with some other lower-level
terrorists. The orders are to capture him and take him back to the US
for sustained interrogation as he knows a lot about many different
terrorist organizations and potential attacks. Again, they want to
keep him ALIVE. Well, as they are doing drone recon, after the desert
dust clears (this is somewhere near the Sahara in Africa) they see
that the terrorist and his men came to the party stacked. They have a
white American female kidnap victim who had been snatched while on
vacation in another country. The mission objectives then change from
capturing the terrorist to rescuing the girl. At first, they believe
that they can’t do both and that they have to choose one or the
other because by rescuing the girl they will have tipped off the
terrorist of their presence and that’s no good for
terrorist-capturing business. As it so happens, Jessica Pare’s
character really wants this guy. On a previous mission, she couldn’t
save an asset who died from the orders of this big baddie.
 |
| Hayes, Ray and Clay |
They
get back and Hayes lies about it being a clean kill of the terrorist
because he doesn’t want to get the boy in trouble, but is secretly
pissed about Clay’s lack of good judgment. Jessica Pare’s
character is totally cool with this guy being dead because he
deserved it. They go back home and Hayes has to wind up in therapy
again as the therapist thinks that he really needs to work something
out inside his head.
Episode
two sees the team suit up again, but this time without Clay as a
mission strap. While Clay is left stateside to train more and flirt
with privileged white women at a local military bar, the team goes to
a foreign country to do some real work. The intelligence side of the
team gathers up some surveillance on a potential chemical weapons lab
out in the middle of the desert somewhere. Out in the war-torn
country of Syria, passing satellite and drone photos have captured a
collection of tire tracks surrounding what is supposed to be an
abandoned science lab. They believe that some terrorist group or
maybe the government (honestly, it’s hard for me to keep up with
all the Middle Eastern names and who is and isn’t on our side on
this show) is creating chemical weapons that can potentially wipe out
an entire city, nation or the entire world, and that have a very high
potency. Instead of shutting this place down or bombing it outright
(can’t do that or risk letting all of these deadly chemicals out),
the higher-ups want to gather intel on the building to make sure that
their hypotheses aren’t full of dairy-farm fertilizer.
Only
after they get to the building do they realize a few things: one the
intelligence team was right, this place is filled with illegal
chemicals, toxins, viruses and bacteria that can be weaponized and
used to kill billions. But two, and more importantly, there are
people in there that have already been affected. Mostly kids. Here I
got a little confused because these bio-chemicals were sold to us as
being so vile, so toxic that they automatically kill people within
days, sometimes hours or minutes. Yet, they set it up that these kids
were infected with these deadly toxins and were very sick, some
dying. I guess the idea was that the scientists were infecting the
children with tiny micro-doses to try to work out some sort of
antivirus or vaccine before releasing the viruses/bacteria/toxins?
I’m not sure, but I do know that Hayes sees innocent people in need
of saving.
Well,
he makes another dangerous call in the field (similar to the one that
got his friend killed) to stay in that building and guard these kids
until they could get a transport to get them all out or until the
scientists and terrorists came back. He is looking to eradicate all
the terrorists so that the kids would be safe then. He gives his team
the option to leave, including the scientist who was this week’s
strap who needed to come on the mission to test all of the various
samples left in the lab. Everyone, including the scientist, says that
they will stay if he stays. At the last minute, Hayes concocts a
genius plan to lie and say that the empty viles left behind that once
contained the viruses, bacteria and biochemicals are not sufficient
to prove the existence of these bio-agents. They, therefore, need to
take the children because they have clearly been infected with
something and would have the lasting traces of these diseases in
their blood. The day is saved and so are the children.
Episode
three sees pirates, ahoy! Ha! No, but yes, seriously. Some pirates in
the Southeast Asian sea territories have hijacked a research ship
with a bunch of doctors and scientists. What were they studying?
Unclear, but it’s a pimped-out yacht that, I assume the pirates all
thought had rich people on it. Being NAVY SEALs, the team has to
assemble to try to free the hostages held on the ship. But first they
have to find it.
Intelligence
has to figure out where the pirates would dock in these current
weather conditions, and what ports would allow them to dock with a
clearly stolen vessel. After the ship’s GPS is shut off, the
intelligence team calculates where they might dock based on tides and
illegal ports in the area. Once they have the coordinates, the ground
team then decides to do a stealthy water infiltration of the dock and
ship because parachuting on would be too dangerous. They are able to
get onto the yacht, secure the hostages and get the heck outta there
in little to no time at all, after ironing out a few bumps, chief
among those being that a lot of the pesky pirates were still
lingering on the dock when they thought they would’ve deboarded and
gone to set up deals on the black market to sell some hostages to
another terrorist group.
Meanwhile,
back stateside, Clay, who is still in training, is going through a
rough time of losing self-confidence when he is called out by his
peers as being part of the bottom five soldiers in the SEAL training
course. That white woman he was flirting with in the previous show he
completely alienates as he mopes in his beer, only to course correct
halfway through the episode and realize that the weight of the world
really isn’t on his shoulders and it is not about being the top of
the class but about getting on the team. He then goes back to the
white girl and is all, “Oh, I’m sorry and here’s some stuff
that’s charming that guys do when they apologize. Now like me
again.” And of course she does because she wanted to give him those
hot drawers since she first met him in the bar and they both had the
most cringeworthy SJW conversation ever that, apparently all Gen-Xers
believe Millennials have.
As
a side story, Hayes and his wife are pseudo-snooping because his wife
found some kind of evidence about his dead buddy that makes her
believe that the man was cheating before he died. Hayes and Ray
venture out to find more info to prove that their best bud wasn’t
cheating. A phone is discovered. Hayes’ wife says that the phone
was not the dead buddy’s main phone and that he only ever called
one number on it, which is a few cities over. Hayes and Ray track
down the house with said phone number and go to meet whoever is
there. So now we have a potential cross-episodes mystery arc
unfolding. Yay!
What’s
my grade? I give this a solid B. OK,
there is a lot about this series that I like so let’s just get to
what I don’t like which you all clearly already know and have seen,
and that is the way they wrote Clay’s character. If he is going to
be arrogant, then fine, but don’t write said arrogance as a
generational-defining motif. It makes the writers sound old and
craggy, and gives off that what-is-this-young-generation-good-for
vibe yet again. If you want your show to actually last, then you need
to be appealing to the Millennial demographic and not trying to
alienate them by satirizing them in a serious drama. Remember, we’re
dealing with soldiers here, and not just soldiers but ones that have
been in the military long enough to be allowed to train to become a
Navy SEAL special ops soldier. If he somehow got through basic
training and is still this arrogant this early, then something tells
me that maybe he does have reason to be that way.
And
also what the hell was with that flirting with the bar chick that he
did? If you really want to try to make this a real interpretation of
what Millennial men are like, then you maybe need to legitimately
talk to some and listen to them. Frankly, guys are not putting forth
that kind of effort that Clay showed at the bar anymore. From the
ones that I’ve talked to for research in books and whatnot, most of
them really don’t care about proving themselves to women anymore.
The whole “oh, you’re gonna be tough on me, you’re a tough
feminist and I see you as a fun challenge” really is not reality
for most young men, even the more traditional ones who fill the
military ranks. If they want a challenge, most guys have video games.
Bullet sponges, jarheads, squids and the like will spend all day
honing their shooting and strategizing skills on those first before
trying to go toe to toe with some women’s studies grad student.
But even more importantly, a lot of the young women will tell you virtually the same truth: that men don’t want to deal with them nearly as much as TV says they do. You might find it sad, but most of these men are not nearly as horny nor as pressed to get a piece of the almighty V as people might think they are. If this weren’t closer to the truth than the fiction that the show tries to pawn off as realisitc, then we wouldn’t have the deluge of articles, online videos and blogposts about young women not being able to find men, about how men are lazy and not getting married, about how the birth rates are dropping in almost all developed countries, or about how the marriage rate and even cohabitation rate (within the last five years) are steadily creeping down while the divorce rates are steadily creeping back up (they were highest during the baby boomers youth in the 80s when they got up to 60%; look it up on the census website).
But even more importantly, a lot of the young women will tell you virtually the same truth: that men don’t want to deal with them nearly as much as TV says they do. You might find it sad, but most of these men are not nearly as horny nor as pressed to get a piece of the almighty V as people might think they are. If this weren’t closer to the truth than the fiction that the show tries to pawn off as realisitc, then we wouldn’t have the deluge of articles, online videos and blogposts about young women not being able to find men, about how men are lazy and not getting married, about how the birth rates are dropping in almost all developed countries, or about how the marriage rate and even cohabitation rate (within the last five years) are steadily creeping down while the divorce rates are steadily creeping back up (they were highest during the baby boomers youth in the 80s when they got up to 60%; look it up on the census website).
Clay’s
entire character is flawed not in purpose but in conception. It’s
like they’ve literally taken every complaint about Gen-Yers and
stuffed it into one person, then had him interact within that same
paradigm of thought. Frankly, it was unnecessary for this show, is
not excessively identifiable as a younger character, and would be
much better if he was removed or his whole storyline toned way down.
And worst of all, his character motivations are not fully flushed
out. While I can excuse the fact that he is arrogant, there is no
reason given for his arrogance. Yes, his dad is mentioned as being
some big past hotshot SEAL who wrote a book, but never in the first
three episodes do we know if Clay embraces being his dad’s son and
living up to that legacy, or if he is a “prove myself, make my own
way” kinda guy. He’s just a jerk for no real reason. Again, if
you sit and talk to real Millennials, you will find that most of them
aren’t arrogant or entitled for no reason. In fact, most of them
seem pissed because a great majority of them did what the two
previous generations told them they NEEDED to do: go to school, get a
good education, really learn something. And while there were some
people who went to school for art degrees, nowhere near as many as
other generations think. They’re pissed because they got decent
degrees and graduated into a system that was and still is very
broken, and they have more debt (even if they worked through school)
to carry post-graduation than any other generation. And even the
military guys are pissed because half of them no longer believe in
the American Dream, PTSD rates seem to be skyrocketing and unlike
with Vietnam where the US finally decided to give up and go home, the
new wars/conflicts the US starts go nowhere, accomplish nothing and
continue forever with no end in sight. Whoa! I got waaayyy too
political there.
OK,
with that out of the way, I pretty much like everything else about
the show. And here is where the comparisons and contrasts to NBC’s
The Brave start. To me, this is the far superior show. The Brave,
while it moves fast and dwells heavily on the mission aspect of the
soldiers and the intelligence team trying to do the job, it has
little to no emotional weight. I watched three episodes of the
series. Three. That’s more than most of the paid critics and more
than most regular viewers give a show to prove itself. And in that
time, I don’t feel like I truly got to know a single character on
that show. It’s all business, which isn’t good for a show like
this because after a while it starts to make the players feel like
easily-replaced robots. If Preach or that other guy died on that show
in the fourth episode, I would hardly notice. Hell, I don’t even
think I would be that impacted if Dalton, the team leader, died on
that show.
But
on SEAL team, with the exception of Clay, I would feel bad if just
about any other major character died on episode four or five. You
totally can’t kill Hayes and you definitely can’t get rid of
Ray—they both have families and people that really care about them,
and see how I’m already bargaining for them before anything has
happened? The people on The Brave? I don’t know if they have
families, haven’t seen them kissing and hugging on anyone or
talking about basic things like kid’s choir concerts or doing
dishes or anything like that. They are as cardboard as can be.
Then
there is the structure of the show. Again, the Brave is all business,
showing little to no downtime for the team as a whole. If
intelligence back at HQ is not doing something, then that’s because
the ground team is out in the field, and vice versa. I haven’t seen
but one scene in which the team on The Brave were doing something
that looked cheerful, light, human, and that was that weird beach
scene at the end of the first episode—still can’t get over that
damn bomb. What the hell was that? Whereas on SEAL Team, you can see
that these people actually have lives outside of beating the bad
guys.
The
shows are filmed in similar ways, although the lighting and shading
on The Brave are in a dusty yellow-orangeish—you’ll know what I’m
talking about if you’ve seen it—and the SEAL team show is filmed
in that strange CBS darker softglow of blue and green. For instance,
you almost always see lights in the background when in an outside
scene. It’s kinda weird if you notice it, but you tend not to
notice it if you’re not a film student.
As
far as the missions, they are virtually the same. The difference is
that more time is spent on the technical detailed aspects of the
field missions on The Brave whereas the mission may occupy half an
hour of the full hour on SEAL Team and the rest of the show is
character development. Oh, and unlike on The Brave, SEAL TEAM has a
secondary over-arching storyline that you can follow. It has two,
actually: whether or not the dead soldier cheated on his wife, and if
Hayes and his wife will actually get back together and work things
out from their current separation or will they get a full divorce.
Even for the tough men and women of the military (but more men than
women on this particular front) who are feelings- and
emotions-averse, this is an emotional thruline that they most likely
can relate to and feel comfortable watching with their respective
spouses or families. The struggle for soldiers and people who face
death on a daily basis (as well as seeing the human atrocities that
evil commits) to open up to others or be fully present with their
families is a real issue. This show addresses it, albeit in a
slightly glossy way. But The Brave doesn’t address it at all, so
I’d go with SEAL Team any day over The Brave on that aspect.
Should
you be watching? Sure. Here’s some real truth, I try to stay as
objective as I can when reviewing this stuff. Subjectively, neither
of these shows are appointment viewing for me. I have never truly
loved military stories and, for that matter, have long abandoned a
lot of the cop shows and procedurals that flood our TV every year.
Outside of something that is uniquely creative and generally has a
sci-fi or fantastical bend to it while being a cop show (ie. Minority
Report, Second Chance, Almost Human), I tend not to delve into very
many of these shows on a weekly basis unless I am reviewing them. But
with that said, I think that for people who love cop shows, military
shows, crime-solving shows and the like, this would be a great show
for you. Now, if you are a military fanatic and you’ve seen
everything from JAG to Taken to Army Wives to whatever, then you most
likely will check out both SEAL Team and The Brave and won’t mind
spending time in both worlds. If, however, you can only choose one, I
would recommend SEAL Team as it is the better overall show. I also
hear that it has gotten a full-season order. Congrats! SEAL Team airs
at 10pm on CBS Wednesdays. Check for it on demand and on CBS All
Access, too.
What
do you think? Have you heard of SEAL Team? If not, do you think you
will check it out now? If you have heard of it, have you seen it? Did
you like it? Do you like how the missions are carried out? Do you
think that they are authentic? And what do you think about Hayes and
his wife? Do you really think they’ll divorce or are you pulling
for them to get back together? Let me know in the comments below.
Until next time, “Semper Fido-lis!”
P.S.
Good Lord this has got to be the worst sign-off I’ve ever done, and
yet I’m going through with it. I really should be embarrassed after
this long post with hella-many run-on sentences and other grammatical
errors littering what could have been a decent review of a decent
show to finally end it like this. But with that said, did anybody see
the article about the doggy bomb sniffer that didn’t get into the
program for I think the CIA or something? That dog was so cute. Yes,
it was. Yes, it was. OK, I’m stopping now. I’ll think of a better
sign-off next time.
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