The Working File

You are just going to have to accept the mysticism inherent to this week’s episode, or it will drive you nuts.  Things happen that cannot be explained rationally through pure materialism.  Deal with it, or move on.  Also, if this was, by chance, the first episode of the Unit you’ve ever watched, please know that it is not representative.  It is, however, very good.

There are 2 primary and roughly equal plots. In one, Jonas and Mack parachute far off course in Chile.  Mack is gravely injured, and Jonas carries him to a nearby monastery.  The monks force Jonas to give over his weapons, and care for Mack, who is unconscious, near death, and delirious.

Back in the Unit command center, Col. Ryan’s wife Charlotte makes her first appearance since they split up.  She had previously worked against the interests of the Unit to advance both his career and hers.  He left her for it.  She advises Ryan that the monastery holds the “Spear of Destiny”  used to pierce the side of Jesus Christ on the Cross.  The people she work for want it, and they will block any extraction until Jonas can take it from the monks.

Eventually it becomes clear that the monastery is a special place: not on any maps, impossible to find except by providence, and a place where soldiers and warriors come to transform their lives.  It is also more Catholic than like any other religion, but certainly not orthodox Catholic.

Mack ends up seeing Hector during his delirium, and Hector leads him to accept his guilt, which we have never seen before, for failing to spot the sniper who killed Hector.  Mack also has to confront two killings he performed that have never sat well on his conscience.

Eventually Charlotte backs Ryan by advising her employers that Jonas has control of the Spear when he does not, although he asserts he will have it within an hour.  Jonas delivers Mack and the Spear to the Medivac helicopter, but when Jonas sees that the medical efforts are not helping Mack, he leaves and runs back to the monastery, which has vanished, just as the head abbot warned Jonas that he could never return if he left after taking the Spear.  Jonas stabs the Spear into a nearby tree as a gesture to indicate that he is returning it, and at that moment, Mack revives.  It was clear that moments earlier the medical personnel had given up and called his death.  It can only be interpreted as a miracle.

In the second story, Kim discovers Bob with his drug kit.  He explains how his addiction was imposed on him, that he has been kicking the habit successfully, but that he also needs about 2 more days before he is through, but that it will be tough because he is about to go on a mission.  Because the mission is solo, domestic, and only requires surveillance in a hotel room in Kansas City, Kim comes with him to assist and nurse him through the last stages of drug detox.

It turns out that the surveillance is of Isaac Reed and his wife.  It is the meeting Ryan told Kim about at the end of the last episode.  Bob is tasked with watching the Reed’s meet with their contact — whom Bob met earlier — and to report on their communications and activities.

During the surveillance, Bob discovers that Isaac, a smarmy weak man, believed himself to be in love with Kim, and when he asks Kim about it, she throws the  “operational sanctity”  concept back at him for the first time in their relationship.

Eventually Bob is ordered to terminate the Reeds (one of the episode’s false notes is that the import of his telephone conversation, in which asks “under whose authority,” is obvious to us but apparently lost on Kim).  Kim ends up watching Bob kill the Reed’s in an alleyway behind the hotel while she holds the Reed’s infant.  She provides a false witness cover story to the local police, able to explain that she was the couple’s nanny and leading the police to believe that they were killed in a robbery.

The execution of unarmed American citizens by a military operator on US soil is troubling, and probably illegal.  Kim has always known, of course, that her husband is an elite solder and killer, but the sight of him killing unarmed US civilians in Middle America — even a couple she saw as a threat to her and her family (Isaac did try to murder her) — upsets her.  When she questions Bob, he says he wishes she hadn’t seen it, and she replies that anormal man would say he wishes he hadn’t done it.

UPDATED: to fix numerous typos, and to make a few word changes that improve the writing but do not change any meaning.