Who’s not coming home on Army Wives?

I’m sure that, unfortunately, there’s truth-to-life in how many times we’ve seen the wives on Army Wives get paid visits by teams of soldiers delivering news — Michael captured, Frank captured, Trevor injured, Joan injured, etc. Yet the frequency of those visits has left me somewhat desensitized to them on the show.

At the same time, I believe that the end of last night’s episode was the first time that we saw an actual notification team arriving at someone’s doorstep. It’s a bit of a strange “cliffhanger” for episode three, no? I wonder why the story’s being told this way.

Here’s what we know: Michael and Frank, who it was great to see together again, had a big meeting with Afghani leaders. But if there was news on one of them, there’d be news on both — even if only one had died, the others’ wife is senior enough that someone would be there with news for her as well. So I think they’re in the clear.

Chase is off on a mission and is due to retire from Delta field missions soon. We’re supposed to think it’s him — I think it should be him, because Pamela needs to move on with her life — for many reasons, one of which is that Pamela said to Roxy that she’s really worried about him. But if it was Chase, Pamela would have nothing keeping her tethered to the base. And since she’s already flirted with a spin off and flamed out once….

Trevor and Roxy are fighting, and it would be a certain kind of TV bitterness for Trevor to die before he and Roxy could make up. That being said, it’s not going to be Trevor.

Which leaves us with Jeremy. And here’s why he’s my pick, despite my thoughts last week on Chase not coming home in general: Jeremy’s death won’t affect one of our wives in a “My husband just died” sort of way, and I think Tanya’s (Erin Krakow) tale is meant to be with Denise.

Think about it … Tanya is having her bridal shower with Denise’s friends, and I don’t think she’s even meant to be stationed at Fort Marshall. All of which leads me to believe that she has neither friend nor family. If Jeremy dies, the only place she has to go is Denise’s … and she’ll become Denise’s surrogate daughter, the last person to have been close to her dead son and a pretty reasonable replacement for the child who’s now gone. It’s actually not a completely uncommon thing for a child-in-law to be adopted by their dead spouse’s parents, and I’m willing to bet that it’s happened before in the army.

The only thing is, while I’m sure that I’ll feel for Denise, I certainly won’t mourn Jeremy’s death. He was a bad kid who was never properly rehabilitated as far as the show’s concerned, and I didn’t see any redemption in his running off to the army after hitting his mother. In the same way that Amanda’s death only reached the audience as far as Claudia Joy and Michael were concerned, I think Jeremy’s a character that never meant very much to the show’s fans. At least not to this one.

But that’s all to be explored in the weeks to come. As for last night’s show I did have a few thoughts. I was proud of Claudia Joy for standing up to her boss about how he was treating her, but at the same time the singular events that we witnessed were not adequately demonstrative of a significantly larger issue. The foundation wasn’t laid on that one properly. Plus, I don’t trust Chandler (Harry Hamlin) very much, so while his personal story was touching, I’m not sure that it’s either true or that he won’t use it to manipulate Claudia Joy in the future.

Tanya dumping Jeremy was obvious from a mile away. There’s a difference between not being able to answer newlywed game questions and simply not knowing who a person is, and Jeremy and Tanya suffer from both. And his promise to her about being there to answer her questions for the rest of their lives is reason number three of mine for how I know that it’s Jeremy who’s dead … somewhere down the road we’ll hear her say “He promised to always be here!”

I’m enjoying the humor of TJ becoming a whole new person at the same time that the actor change was made, but no other part of that story is particularly enjoyable. Why didn’t the writers give Katie (Chloe J. Taylor) and Lucas (Jake Johnson) anything better to say than “He’s weird” when they were telling Pamela that they didn’t want to sleep at Roxy’s house anymore?

I’m really disappointed in the type of person that Joan is being written as, but I also think that Roland is a total sucker. Some might say he’s supportive, but I think his expectation that Joan would be at their daughter’s pre-school interview was totally correct, and it was something he should have followed through on. The fact that Sarah Elizabeth’s getting accepted basically ended Roland’s disappointment in Joan is a theme all too frequent in their relationship.

And what kind of person is she to come home with the whole perception thing regarding the Child Development Program on base? A career driven woman is not a black-or-white character; it is possible to also think about your family while you’re reaching for professional rings. So why is Joan incapable of doing that? And why should that be something that Roland’s supportive of? Does anyone else understand their relationship?

And any thoughts on who’s getting the bad news next week?

Clacked by Aryeh S.
on Mar 21, 2011 @ 16:00 EST5EDT