Dear Dad

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"Dear Dad" was episode twelve of the first season of the TV series M*A*S*H. It originally aired on December 17, 1972 and was repeated on May 20, 1973.

[edit] Plot

Hawkeye writes home to his father during the Christmas season, relating a number of amusing and personal anecdotes including Radar's effort to mail home a jeep piece-by-piece, the monthly morality lecture, Trapper's local medical philanthropy, and the ongoing non-secret relationship between Frank and Hot Lips. Hawkeye dresses to play Santa Claus for the local children, but is required to go to the front line via helicopter to treat an emergency, which he does in-costume.

[edit] Trivia and Continuity Notes

• Trapper quotes a football score during a surgery session - "The Bears beat the Packers 21-10". There was no such scoreline between the Bears and the Packers during the Korean War; the Bears did beat the Packers 28-14 in their second meeting of the [1950 season] on October 14.

• Klinger appears in this episode in regular (male) uniform except for a pink choker ribbon, which he refuses to remove on the grounds that it is a good-luck memento from his mother. This contradicts Klinger's established character (dress-wearing would-be Section 8 Discharge) as seen in the earlier screened episode Chief Surgeon Who? Six episodes later, Klinger is re-established as a transvestite in Dear Dad ... Again.

• This is the first of numerous episodes which use a character's letter home as a linking technique for otherwise unrelated short comedy sketches. These letter-home episodes often have a major internal story arc along with the many side stories. During the first three seasons, only Hawkeye is used as the focal character for this type of episode, but from Season 4 every major character (except Major Houlihan) was given at least one such episode; in some cases (B.J., Winchester and Potter) the letter-home episodes were also important as a technique for highlighting the recently-new character.