I Watch TV: SEAL Team

 

SEAL Team

Season six of the military drama. The last season ended in the middle of an ambush when Bravo team were deployed to Mali to track down an ISIS commander. Clay, whose introduction to the team was part of the start of the show, loses a leg as a result. His story, of trying to recover and find a new life and meaning and learning to rely on people’s help while also adjusting to his new role as a father, is one of the two main ones. This then links into Ray’s plans; he’s planning to retire when his twenty years are up in a few months and he’s setting up a veteran’s help centre.

As there are only ten episodes this season there’s just one other main story; a US naval vessel is attacked and twenty sailors killed. Bravo team are sent out to Syria to try and find who was behind it. Along the way they bring in Omar, from a disbanded team (Echo). He thinks they don’t trust him after Jason pulls out a couple of times, and this is true, but not in the way he thinks it is. It’s not Omar “outside the wire,” in combat that he doubts. It’s Jason’s Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), which he’s dealing with and the team is covering for.

Anyway they link up with a Kurdish female militia, earn their trust then lose it again when they’re pulled out. Davis, now intelligence officer for the whole group and having other priorities, is trying to juggle what happened with Mali, finding who is behind the attack on the ship, and also meetings in the Pentagon where the use of special forces and the damage to the special forces operators is being discussed.

The show, of course, is mostly interested in how the ongoing war effects the Americans who fight it abroad, and sometimes their allies. But no, in fact that’s not quite true; it is very interested in that, and the whole season is framed around that. What it really is interested in is endurance, and courage, and daring. How Jason turns the ambush around in the first episode. An airborne helicopter “interdiction” in Jordan. An injured, troubled man leaving his home in the middle of the night to help another even more troubled. And facing down those in authority over you who make decisions that shouldn’t have to be made.

Kicking in doors and blowing things up.

Watch This: Good drama and good action
Don’t Watch This: Occasionally a villain is a character but mostly they’re indistinct foreign shapes downrange