Thoughts on Last Resort

Who are you loyal to? What are you loyal to?

These two questions drive the new television drama Last Resort, and each episode finds away to make you rethink your answers to those questions. Created by Shawn Ryan (The Shield, The Unit) and Karl Gajdusek, the show centers around the crew of the USS Colorado, a US navy Submarine captained by Marcus Chaplin (Andre Braugher) who is ably supported by XO Sam Kendal (Scott Speedman), Lt. Grace Shepard (Daisy Betts) and COB Joseph Prosser (Robert Patrick). After defying suspect orders to fire their devastating ordinance on Pakistan, they are re-branded traitors and enemy combatants of the United States. Instead of surrendering, the Captain then decides to go rogue and steal the sub until they can clear their names. The Colorado takes refuge on an island (with a convenient NATO radar station), shaking up the lives of the community already living there and begins their righteous quest for redemption and deliverance.

Last Resort has all the makings for a tense and meaty hour of television. A serial like this, you know none of the major characters are going to die or have anything similar happen to them at the end of the episode. So how does it stay afloat? By keeping them around to make more morally-questionable decisions, the stuff we viewers love seeing being played out, but dread actually encountering in real life. And it all boils down to where each of their loyalties lay.

Faced with suspicious orders, Captain Marcus Chaplin must decide whether to follow his superiors or his conscience. The good officer would say "Yes, sir!" without question or hesitation, staying true to his stature as an officer of United States Navy. Which, he almost did, as they came so far as to insert the firing keys for the sub's nuclear weapons. But the good man will pause and take a breath, and think. He will weigh his actions against something deeper than the chain-of-command. Captain Chaplin acted against the wishes of command and in doing so, he set off a chain of events all falling under the umbrella of those two questions posed at the beginning of this article. He put himself and his crew on a path where every choice must now be weighed against those two questions, because failing to do so after that first, seminal act would be hypocritical.What Marcus Chaplin proved is that every decision matters. And if you can convince yourself, and rationalize and believe in what you are doing, you can do almost anything.

What does this say about his loyalty? Can you call a man who disobeys direct orders in the face of the moral questions those orders raise, disloyal? In the show, the COB is of the mind that the Captain and all his supporters are traitors and must answer for their crimes. Sentiments, echoed by Chaplin himself. But not until he gets the truth. It is here that we see that for him, the truth comes before everything else. A hard thing to live by, as evidenced by the fact that the conspirators hold his dead son's body in a morgue, denying the boy of the burial a soldier deserves. The father must grit his teeth as the noble man gets justice.

For the rest of the crew, how do they remain loyal to their commanding officer, when he himself has rebuked his superiors? What gives him the right to expect of them, something he himself has thrown away? Their allegiance is borrowed at best. Some, such as Kendal and Shepard, are faced with the fact that they may never see their loved ones again by following their Chaplin. But because, if nothing else, they believe in their captain's zeal and beliefs, they stand by him and try to maintain order in an impossible situation. Others, such as the COB and his men, just want to go home and wanting nothing of one man's quest to find the truth. Recently, after one of their own tried to force the Captain to surrender by threatening to destroy the boat from within, Chaplin was able to use this instance to win some of the crew back over reminding them that their loyalties are not to their nation, but to its constitution. "How long can he maintain control?" is a question whose answer will surely be a turning point in this series.

For as long as the show continues to make it hard for Captain Chaplin to stick to one course of action and to continue following his beliefs while balancing the beliefs of his men, Last Resort should provide for a lot of exciting television, week to week. When it comes down to it, when a good man is tested, will he bend or will he break? Or will he maybe compromise, and find a way to do both?

Last Resort airs Thursday nights on ABC.