This one starts with West being brought back from a combat scene, the only survivor of the Wild Cards. I guess they must’ve killed off most of the cast between episodes. Well, at least we’ll get a West-focused episode that isn’t about him pining for that ladyfriend of his.

When he comes to, West asks McQueen what happened to the rest of the team and McQueen is like “You know what happened, you told us.” The team is dead and they even have a recording of West saying so in his distress call. West can’t remember what happened, so the bulk of the episode is him stressed out and having hallucinations and such while insisting that they aren’t dead. McQueen is sympathetic, he is the only survivor of his team from the pilot after all, but he assumes West just has survivor’s guilt. Meanwhile, the doctors basically say “It’s really inconvenient for him to think his friends are still alive, so we could just do some sci-fi brain stuff and make him forget them” and that almost happens. In the end though, West’s memory comes in and he reveals that he sent the distress call as part of a plan to ambush the Chigs, then got separated from the rest of the team. Anyway, now that they know that they go and save the team, who held up fine while they were thought dead behind enemy lines for a couple days.

I like when war stories make war look bad, because I’m biased because I think war is bad, so seeing West suffer trauma and even break down in tears at the end is a plus for me. I’ll even allow the happy ending this time, because realistically I never expected anything else. Felt like a bottle episode. Not much to comment on. In the future they still use big loud floor buffers like we have now.