The Pacific ep. 4: Gloucester/Pavuvu/Banika

I binged into episode 4 of The Pacific right after watching episode 3, which was kind of a letdown. My hope was that the action would pick back up in ep. 4 and it'd thus be way better than the dead-end love story that filled most of ep. 3. Alas it was only a little better.

In episode 4, "Gloucester/Pavuvu/Banika", the marines redeploy from Australia to their next combat mission. Time for some action driven plot, right? Eh, no. This episode is one of those "War is Hell" war stories. But instead of doing it really, really well— like Saving Private Ryan did with its intense opening act, or like this show's small-screen brother Band of Brothers did with its excellent "Bastogne" episode, the "War is Hell" theme here falls flat.

It falls flat for two reasons. First, the writers fail the Writing 101 lesson of show, don't tell. Instead of crafting a story around how brutal the environment is and how the soldiers struggled with it, they mostly tell us it was brutal and a struggle. In fact a narrator (I think it's Tom Hanks) literally tells us over stock footage. Lame.

Second, the episode's viewpoint character, Pvt. Bob Leckie, is not sympathetic. From late in ep. 3 we know he really doesn't care to be in the war. But unlike what made the darkest episodes of Band of Brothers great, Leckie isn't even motivated to tough through it by wanting to protect his fellow marines. Not only does the episode not show show action to contextualize Leckie's struggle, they just show Leckie being despondent. He's got a viral sickness, he's depressed (or "shellshocked"), and he doesn't care about anything. While I sympathize with his plight, it's hard to sympathize with him as a character. The seven deadly words ("Why do I care about these characters?") started echoing in my head.

Leckie is sent to a field hospital on the island of Banika to clear up his virus and get him back on his feet. The second half of the episode is Leckie at the hospital. He finds himself assigned to a mental ward. The doctor in charge assures him it's because the regular wards are full and he's just taking the overflow, but the story drops a few hints that maybe he was sent there on purpose to suss out whether he's really sick or just malingering. Alas it's never made clear enough.

At the hospital Leckie works on building relationships with the doctor, the orderly, and one or two of the clearly mentally ill patients. This kind of feels like episode 3's dead-end love story all over again, in that at the end of ep. 4 Leckie ships out from the hospital. The writers just wasted another 30 minutes of air time starting subplots that will never go anywhere. Also, one of the mentally ill soldiers, I believe it's Gibson, is more sympathetic in his 1 minute of screen time than Leckie is in 60 minutes. Gibson's genuinely hurting, and it's impossible not to feel for him. Leckie, by contrast, just seems like a bit of a malingerer.

Driving the Mormon Well Road, part 1

North Las Vegas Travelog #15
Desert National Wildlife Refuge - Mon, 19 Feb 2023, 1pm

After our morning scenic drive beneath Mt. Charleston (previous blog in this series) we ate a quick lunch in the northeastern corner of Las Vegas then drove back out to the Desert National Wildlife Refuge (DNWR). At the visitor's center they had a nice display about Bighorn Sheep.



The Sheep Range is the principal mountain inside the park, so would we see any bighorns? Alas, no. They're generally reclusive animals, and the high desert is a tough environment that doesn't encourage them to take extra risks. We've seen them up close in other places, though, so we'd have to satisfy ourselves with that plus the fact that they'd like be watching us from well hidden positions.

While we scoped out DNWR for today's adventures thinking we might go hiking, it turned out that the hiking was lame, so we switched to Plan B— actually Plan C, as taking that scenic drive below Mt. Charleston was already Plan B— and chose to drive the Mormon Well 4x4 road through the park.



Mormon Well Road is 41 miles of gravel and dirt road between paved endpoints. Would we make it in our rented Toyota Rav4 AWD cute-ute? The rangers at the visitor's center thought the road was in fairly good condition, but I could tell from their wording and body language that they really didn't know. I chose to trust in my skills at offroad driving that I could get through more challenges than most people and also know when to turn back if necessary.

The first many miles of the road, at least, were easy going. We started with a few miles of climbing up to Yucca Gap at elev. 4,000 ft. The road surface, as you can see in the pic above, was graded gravel.



The exposed rock in Yucca Gap features a lot of fossils. We drove down a short side trail and parked the car while Hawk went exploring on the rocks.

We're a little worried about time on this trip so we didn't stay too long. The time issue is that we've got to get back to Las Vegas for a flight this evening. To do that we need to be off this trail by 5pm. To be done at 5pm we have to... well, that depends on how long it takes to drive 41 miles. 41 miles offroad is not like driving 41 miles on pavement. Here we're doing well if we're averaging above 10mph. And that's not counting time we want for stops like this one.



Our next (brief) stop was in a Joshua Tree forest. This pic doesn't look very forest-y, does it? That's because we're in high desert, at 5,000 ft. elevation. There's not a lot of water here. These Joshua Trees— yucca brevifolia, also called Yucca Trees— are hardy, but this is the best even they can manage in this austere environment.

The adventure continues! Read about our drive through Peekaboo Canyon.