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Thursday, August 13, 2009

The General's Haircut

This is Steven Petrick Posting.

Last night I watched "Leverage". While I find many of the plots unbelievable on their face, most of them do not go near one of my beloved background points.

Last night, they did.

I do not care how critical it may be to the plot, no one who has been in the U.S. military long enough to make First Lieutenant, or Captain, or senior NCO, is going to see a three star general with Timothy Hutton's haircut and not start asking questions. Generals do not get to be Generals by having "non-regulation hair", nor do they remain generals very long, particularly around the Pentagon, with non-Regulation hair.

It SCREAMS "There is something wrong here". And Hutton's character may have tried to sound like what he thought a General would sound like (i.e., what the scriptwriters thought), but it was so "off" that combined with his haircut there would have been a net closing around him from the start.

I do not have a problem that no one would have heard of the General, even a three star, there are quite a few of them (and Lord Knows I deliberately avoided looking too closely at his "uniform", but at that I was noticing things that were "wrong" for a three-star).

It pretty much wrecked any hope of a "suspension of disbelief" on my part, even though I liked the basic plot of getting at one of those oh-so-smug reporters.