JAG: Judge Advocate General- The Third Season

A Navy fighter pilot turned lawyer teams with a Marine lieutenant colonel to investigate and litigate crimes committed by Navy and Marine personnel.
Genre: Television
Rating: NR
Release Date: 15-JAN-2008
Media Type: DVD

Former Navy pilot-turned-JAG attorney Harmon "Harm" Rabb (David James Elliott) finds a connecting thread through a number of seemingly random cases he takes on in JAG (Judge Advocate General): The Complete Third Season. The thread concerns the fate of his father, a Navy pilot shot down over Vietnam and missing in action since the war, a fact that has possessed Harm since childhood. Building on scattered clues and shards of testimony, The Complete Third Season suggests that the elder Rabb fell into the hands of the Soviet Union, a possibility that Harm is compelled to investigate all the way through a taut, cliffhanger ending involving a stolen, Soviet MiG fighter. Not that everything is about one storyline. The rest of season three features the usual mix of interesting military cases, a few with strong parallels to events in the real world. "Ghost Ship" concerns the discovery of a human skeleton between two hulls of a decommissioned carrier (that happened to be where Harm’s father served). The remains are of a man who appears to have been murdered circa 1970, and the whole case brings back a lot of ghosts for Harm. "The Court-Martial of Sandra Gilbert" finds a welcome guest-starring role from Elizabeth Mitchell, who plays a Cobra pilot on trial for allegedly maintaining an affair with an enlisted man despite orders to cease. The situation pits Harm, defending Mitchell’s character, against his JAG colleague Sarah "Mac" MacKenzie (Catherine Bell), who volunteers to prosecute the case to assure fairness toward the accused. When the case becomes a hot, political football, both Harm and Mac find themselves in a very delicate situation in the national spotlight. "King of the Fleas" is an unsettling episode about a disabled, Vietnam War vet who kills a Vietnamese-American man he claims was a war criminal. He also provides the first eyewitness account that downed, U.S. pilots in Vietnam were taken into custody by Soviets, a claim that galvanizes Harm. Also provocative is "Above and Beyond," in which an African-American Navy SEAL, believing he is subject to a racist, double standard of scrutiny, chafes under an investigation into his worthiness to receive a Medal of Honor. --Tom Keogh