"I'm fed up with body counts, I'm fed up with kill ratios, and I'm fed up with looking at boys with men's faces who are getting wasted before they even learn how to shave." - Stephen Caffrey as Lt. Myron Goldman
Tour of Duty: The Complete Second Season DVD Review
By Jonathan Boudreaux
The Vietnam era military drama Tour of Duty began its second season on CBS in January 1989. As the new season opens, it is 1968 and the platoon headed by the brash, young Lt. Myron Goldman (Stephen Caffrey) and older, more experienced Sgt. Zeke Anderson (Terence Knox) has been relocated from Firebase Ladybird to Tan Son Nhut, a base outside of Saigon. The privates under their command include scam artist Marcus Taylor (Miguel A. Nunez, Jr.); his best friend, Marvin Johnson (Stan Foster); farm boy Danny Percell (Tony Becker); and streetwise New Yorker Alberto Ruiz (Ramon Franco). Since we last saw them, Goldman has become disillusioned with the effectiveness of the military, Ruiz has become obsessed with death, and the men have heard rumors of a Vietcong strike during a planned ceasefire to honor Tet, the Vietnamese lunar New Year.
Often when the ratings for a series are not high enough to be considered a hit but not quite low enough for the show to be cancelled, it is retooled in an attempt to attract new viewers. That appears to be the case with the second season of Tour of Duty. Each episode of the series' first season opened with a title card detailing facts and statistics about the Vietnam War. Those bits of trivia are nowhere to be seen in the second season, just one of the many changes - large and small - in this new season.
The biggest change is the introduction of several female characters to what had previously been a testosterone-heavy series. Kim Delaney (CSI: Miami and NYPD Blue) joins the cast as Alex Devlin, an ambitious wire service reporter who is covering the war from Tan Son Nhut. At first, she clashes with Goldman over her reporting techniques, but she quickly becomes a love interest for the lieutenant. Anderson gets a girlfriend of his own after meeting Dr. Jennifer Seymour (Betsy Brantley), the head of the base's psychiatric ward. Both characters were obviously meant to add a little romance to the series in an attempt to draw a larger female audience.
The series also adds a couple of new male characters in its second season. Lt. John McKay (Dan Gauthier) is a cocky helicopter pilot whose hotshot attitude and model-handsome looks seem designed to remind viewers of Top Gun-era Tom Cruise. McKay competes with Goldman for Alex's attention. Also new to the cast is Richard Brestoff as Major Darling, the base leader whose officious style often leads to clashes with Goldman and Anderson.
With the men relocated from Ladybird to Tan Sun Nhut, the series shifts its focus from field combat to life on base and in Saigon. (In a slightly more subtle change, it also appears that the tropical lushness of the first season's Hawaiian locales have been replaced with those of mountainous, scrub-heavy California.) This might be disappoint those action fans that prefer their series to be packed with fighting. One positive aspect, however, is that the combat scenes are now concise and cohesive, unlike the sloppy, confusing battles in the first season. The special effects are noticeably less sophisticated - the mortar fire looks like fireworks left over from a neighborhood 4th of July celebration - but overall the combat scenes are more exciting.
Several of these episodes are standouts. "Terms of Enlistment" deals with the issue of gays in the military in a surprisingly progressive way for a series filmed in 1989. "Sleeping Dogs" features a casually brutal performance by Michael Madsen (Thelma and Louise) as a combat vet who has become unhinged by the war. In "Popular Forces," a particularly emotional subplot finds Anderson comforting Dr. Seymour after she is forced to kill a VC operative. "Sins of the Father" begins with several tawdry scenes involving a serial killer targeting prostitutes. These scenes are so goofily hard-boiled that they could have been lifted straight from an episode of Charlie's Angels (writer/executive producer Rick Husky also worked on that '70s camp classic), but ultimately "Sins." becomes a worthy exploration of race relations. Tour of Duty isn't exactly subtle and nuanced, but even when it is mundane it manages to be entertaining.
Cosby kid Malcolm Jamal-Warner appears as an inexperienced new soldier in "Volunteer," and Angela Bassett guests as an investigator in "Volunteer" and "Hard Stripe."
The copy on the back of Tour of Duty: The Complete Second Season indicates that the release "features a new music soundtrack including popular songs from the Vietnam era." This is slightly misleading. The implication is that whenever the producers of the DVD could not secure the rights to a period song, another period song has been substituted. This is not the case. All songs have been replaced by generic instrumental tracks instead. The result is often jarring. In "Saigon (Part 1)," the characters comment on the Martha & the Vandellas song that is apparently playing on a nearby radio. Instead of "Heat Wave" (or whatever song originally appeared on the soundtrack), we hear a jazzy rock tune. McKay uses the speakers on his helicopter to "psych Charlie out" because "rock and roll is here to stay," but he only seems to play guitar rock instrumentals, even when chastising someone for "interrupting the Temps." Sometimes the replacement songs are vaguely reminiscent of popular tunes, like the Muzak-y rendition of "Soul Man" in "Non-Essential Personnel," but these versions can hardly be called "popular songs from the Vietnam era."
Chances are that if the songs had not been swapped out of these episodes, Tour of Duty would never have been released on DVD. When faced with that possibility, fans of the series will probably be happy to have the series even in its altered form. Still, it is difficult not to notice the negative effect that removing the original songs has on the series. The new music covers a variety of genres, including country, blues, and rock. Overall, however, all of the new music sounds the same: innocuous and personality-free. The music also lacks period flavor. Certain songs can instantly transport us to an earlier era, a characteristic that movies and TV shows often exploit, especially when - as is the case with Tour of Duty - small budgets and a restrictive setting do not allow for other period details. With its music excised, the series is far less effective at creating the atmosphere of the late 1960s.
The sixteen episodes that make up Tour of Duty's second season are divided onto four discs. The DVDs are housed in a foldout digipak. The inside of the digipak is solid black, while the DVDs are Army green and include publicity stills of individual cast members. The outside is Army green, with a strip of publicity stills across the top. A booklet (housed in its own pocket) provides an episode guide, including brief episode summaries. The digipak slides into an outer cardboard sleeve. Overall, the design is simple and effective.
The menus, which feature static publicity stills, are simple yet functional. Viewers can choose to watch all of the disc's episodes, or can choose an individual one. The episodes are divided into chapters (including one after the opening credits), but there are no scene selection menus.
