Monday M*A*S*H Discussions offers fans the opportunity to offer their opinions on a wide variety of topics relating to M*A*S*H. Please share your thoughts and ideas in the comments section. My hope is these discussion posts will continue to elicit comments in the weeks and months after they’re initially published. Have a suggestion about something you think might be worth discussing? Let me know and maybe it will become my next Monday M*A*S*H Discussion topic.
Ferret Face suggested today’s topic: How would Trapper and Charles interact?
Trapper John and Charles Emerson Winchester
Months ago, when I asked readers to share ideas for potential Monday M*A*S*H Discussion topics, Ferret Face suggested discussing which main characters who never met would have the best interactions. I decided to split the topic into multiple topics, each with a different paring. Back in March, we discussed how Colonel Blake and Charles would interact. Today, we’re talking about Trapper and Charles.
If nothing else, Trapper and Charles could talk about living in Boston. As mentioned in “Mad Dogs and Service,” Trapper completed his internship in Boston, where he spent much of his time trying to sneak into Red Sox games at Fenway Park. Of course, the life Trapper lived in Boston was likely nothing like that of Charles and his wealthy family. In fact, Charles might very well want nothing to do with Trapper, considering him a lesser Bostonian.
Otherwise, the relationship between Trapper and Charles would probably be much like the relationship between B.J. and Charles. Roommates who sometimes pulled practical jokes on each other and occasionally respected one another.
Hit the comments with your thoughts.
Didn’t we already have this discussion? I distinctly remember expressing how Charles would pretend that Trapper came from a different Boston than Massachusettes, because there’s no way he would accept the fact that someone like Trapper came from the same city as him.
That was back in the “What if Wayne Rogers never left” discussion back in November.
This is one I’ve actually thought about a bit, mainly because of how much I love both Trapper and Charles. Despite that though, I don’t really have a lot to day, because I just don’t know. I think Trapper would poke fun at Charles accent a bit like Hawkeye did, and would tease him for the pompous attitude. I suspect that like with Frank, Trapper would be more sympathetic to him than Hawkeye was at first and I could really see them being almost friends, or at least chummy by the end…basically like how it went down with BJ and Charles.
I never really saw Trapper as being all that proud of Boston or talking about it enough that I think it would be a point of contention or commonality between him and Charles.
Really without knowing how Trapper would evolve on the show, like we had in another discussion, there’s no way to really answer this since it would have all been written by the same writers. All we have to go on is how BJ and Charles interacted.
I don’t think it would have been any better than how he interacted with BJ; if anything, it might have been a little worse, since Trapper was more like Hawkeye than BJ, personality-wise.
Even when taking into account that Charles clashed with pretty much everybody at some point, I can see his relationship with Trapper being more contentious than it was with BJ, at least in the early going. Maybe they would have developed some sort of friendship like Winchester eventually did with Hawkeye et al., but it’s so hard to say because we don’t know how the Trapper character would have evolved. If he stayed mostly the same, I don’t think he and Charles would have ever gotten along very well. But if he evolved like the rest of the characters did, I think their interaction would have mirrored the BJ/Winchester friendship.
Then again, as 007 pointed out, Trapper got along (relatively speaking) better with Frank than Hawkeye did, so who knows how this would have played out.
One of the subtle things I have noticed in Charles’ character is his fairly typical Blue Blood Anti-Catholicism, which is on display in a few episodes (comments to Mulcahy, his utter disdain for Honoria’ marrying an Italian…etc), one can pretty easily assume that a John Mcintyre, who was from the Northeast would be a Catholic. There may have been some lively debate in the Swamp and Honoria’s engagement would have been an interesting toic.
Charles and Trapper are my two most favorite characters on the show. I wish the writers had grown and developed Trapper’s character more and made him more than just Hawkeye’s sidekick. He had great potential and I found him more entertaining and interesting than BJ. He could have evolved with the show and stayed through to the end.
I also think Charles should have replaced Frank a lot sooner than he did. (But still after Potter’s arrival. Their exchange between them at the end of Charles’s first episode is one of my many favorite moments between the two.)
I think Charles and Trapper would have had the same kind of relationship that Charles had with BJ and Hawkeye. I bet they would have tried to best each other in the pranking and practical jokes department. (And joined firces in a few of them as well.)