Lieutenant Hanley and squad enter a familiar-looking French town, a town we have seen many times on this series, with no citizens around in the bombed-out buildings or streets, save for one Frenchman, played by Telly Savalas, who keeps hearing voices of his wife and, in subsequent scenes, his young daughter. He appears to be reliving certain scenes with them from his past-in a clothing store, a candy store, and a church. After each vignette, the war brings him back to reality. The Americans and a squad of Germans are fighting in the streets, neither really gaining any ground in the battle. Oftentimes in this series, we get a long gun battle as we see strategies employed to win the battle, sometimes after other attempts fail. Here, we just had them firing at each other without much of anything else happening,
I guess this review is fully a spoiler, but my above paragraph truly describes almost everything in the episode. Savalas, as Jon, goes about a few of the buildings, occasionally shooting out a window and killing a German. One of the guest American soldiers sees him kill one, follows him into a building and because the delusional Frenchman thinks this American scared away his wife and daughter, he shockingly aims his rifle at the American and kills him.
There are scenes with a German officer and Hanley being held at gunpoint by Jon, as he wants them to order all of their men to leave town so his family will return. Of course, the war doesn't stop and you can guess how it ends. We learn from a man who enters in the final minutes, that this day is Jon's wedding anniversary-hence the episode's title.
There was no important capture of Germans, no military information learned-our guys never got to set up their OP in the church, as they had planned. No young soldier learned an important lesson about...well, about anything, as often happened on the series.
Aside from the vignettes with Jon and family, we had an almost unending gun battle outside the buildings for the entire episode. Sure, Savalas does a fine job at this role of a mentally disturbed man, but in contrast with the earlier reviewer of this episode, I just felt like it was one of the series' weakest shows.
We all know losing one's loved ones, or sometimes less, can cause great mental anguish, and that this does sometimes happen to soldiers or others affected by war. I know Combat has demonstrated the same point with young French people in earlier episodes. I just didn't feel like there was anything explored here that was new in this series, and was somewhat turned off by the almost-ceaseless gun battle that didn't lead to anything noteworthy. Within a couple of minutes, I figured I knew what was happening with Jon and could figure why and could also guess what would happen. And I was right, for once.
The most I could score this was a 4 out of 10.
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