Josh recaps Season 1 Episode 5 of The Last Ship, where we meet another villain, and Chandler has to figure out how to deal with him while not sacrificing the mission–collecting monkeys for Dr. Scott. Scott seems ever closer to a cure, but the Russians are trying to hunt them down. Let’s see what is going on with the crew of Nathan James this episode!
Don’t need the The Last Ship episode recap for El Toro? Click here to jump directly to Violet’s thoughts on the episode!
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Episode Recap of The Last Ship, Season 1 Episode 5: El Toro
This episode of The Last Ship begins with Captain Chandler preparing to head into Costa Rica in order to retrieve monkeys for Dr. Scott to experiment on.
XO Slattery later gives Chandler some bad news–Costa Rica is riddled with distress calls of infected people. Plan B is to head into Nicaragua to search for monkeys there. Chandler assembles the team, and they head in on two small pontoon boats. Back on the ship, the crew is prepared for when the teams go out of radio range.
Finding the reserve, they head to land. Unfortunately, their mission is cut short by dozens of infected pleading for help. Chandler and his men head back to their boats, and Chandler sends Dr. Scott back to the ship while Chandler and the men on his boat continue looking for monkeys–upriver.
Chandler’s team ends up out of radio range, and come across a derelict ship called El Toro. Moving to land again, Chandler continues his monkey search.
One of Chandler’s men hits a booby trap, and suddenly men surround the team, and are taken to a makeshift village. Chandler and his men witness some pretty harsh conditions for the villagers, with the guards bullying the “peasants”.
Chandler meets El Toro–leader of the village. He comes off smug, and threatens to let Chandler’s injured man die from poison in the trap, but he decides to let the soldier live. El Toro invites them to dinner.
At dinner, El Toro explains his ship running aground, and how he has taken leadership of this village. Chandler insults El Toro with regards to the slavery El Toro employs. El Toro introduces them to Ervin Delgado, the previous leader of the village. He seems to be under the thumb of El Toro. Meanwhile, the injured soldier luckily was given the cure.
Back at dinner, Delgado’s daughter calls El Toro a pig–which gets her a banishment from the village. El Toro then asks what Chandler’s monkey containers are for. Chandler tries to dodge the question, but El Toro demands to know–Chandler comes clean-ish. El Toro graciously offers them several monkeys.
Chandler’s men head back to their boats, but El Toro realizes that Chandler is out of radio contact. Slattery is getting agitated along with a couple other men as the mayor’s daughter is being forced out of the camp. Slattery and Green are taken prisoner, and Chandler demands their release.
El Toro “generously” offers to allow the men to leave still, but keeps all of their equipment. El Toro warns them that the children of the village will be sleeping in his tent, so missile recourse isn’t an option.
Chandler and his men begin to head back to the James, but Slattery refuses to leave the villagers under El Toro’s control. Chandler agrees. His men stealth in and begin taking out the guards. They are heard by gunshots however, and a shootout begins. Chandler chases down El Toro, who is attempting to flee. He holds Delgado’s other daughter hostage. El Toro surrenders, but Delgado doesn’t let him off–and shanks El Toro. Chandler and his men don’t seem to mind this murder.
Aboard the Nathan James, Tex hears that the men are on the way back, with their monkeys. Chandler and his men make one final pass by the sick villagers and all of the men on the boat seem guilt stricken, since they are unable to provide any help.
Josh’s Thoughts: The Last Ship, Season 1 Episode 5: El Toro
The Last Ship has been a consistently entertaining show, and this one is no exception. It is pretty heart wrenching watching as Chandler’s men ride by the sick villagers that they are unable to do anything for. Chandler almost comes off as a jerk when they flee from them the first time, almost treating the people as sub-human as they run, but what can Chandler’s men do for them? Sadly, there isn’t anything yet. Chandler is very good and that it is a tough decision leaving them though, as visibly, he looks distressed as they pull away from the beach.
I really hope we get to see more make-shift societies like we did with El Toro. Hopefully the goodness of humanity is shown as well, with more equal societies being shown. I think my favorite parts of the show are when we see other people attempting to navigate through this new world of chaos and anarchy. I like to think that most people would work together rather than tear each other apart.
I think the biggest question this episode comes down to the decision to provide help to the villagers. On the one hand, from a humanitarian perspective, no one deserves to be treated the way El Toro was treating these men. If you have the power and means to change it, perhaps change is needed. On the other hand, for Chandler, he has a whole lot more at stake–saving what remains of this world. But as Lt. Green puts it–the world should be worth saving. I think Chandler and the men made the right call–although perhaps they could have regrouped at the ship and came back with weapons, to make the situation a little easier to handle. In the end though, Chandler and his men were “bad mofos” and took El Toro down with little incident.
Hopefully these monkeys provide Dr. Scott some answers. I am sure Chandler doesn’t want this to all be for nothing. Hopefully we get some progress on the cure front in the next couple episodes!
Violet’s Thoughts on Season 1 Episode 5 of The Last Ship: El Toro
Finally! We get off that tiresome ship and onto land! This is the type of thing that I’ve been looking forward to all season – seeing what the conditions are like in the real world. Even though this was more of an out of the way jungle village than regular civilization – or what used to be known as civilization, that is – it was still interesting to see that the virus has spread even to this remote of a location.
It was quite heartbreaking to see all of those sick people converging on the soldiers, begging for help – help which they could not give. Then when they came across the village and its tyrant, that was also heartbreaking, but I felt it was another case of sticking to the mission, even though they wished they could help, considering how wrong the situation was. I find it hard to believe that Chandler would risk the mission and all his officers to go back and help the villagers, with just those few men. The fate of the world depended on them bringing back the monkeys, and on a lesser note, but what should have been equally important to him, that his crew was depending on him and his leadership. They may have lost not only him, but several of the high ranking, much experienced officers. They could have easily gone back to the ship and brought more crewmembers to help, considering how outnumbered they were.
But whatever, in the end they of course all ended up coming out victorious. Hopefully the village is able to defend itself going forward. It seems like there are a lot of infected people in that area. Although I enjoyed this episode more than the last few episodes because of the break from the monotony of the ship, I felt like a lot of dumb, foolish, irrational decisions were made which would not have come out in their favor in real life. The show needs to work on being a little more realistic. Hopefully we get to see more of the outside world in the near future. Though I have a feeling it’ll be back to the ship for awhile…
Scenes from The Last Ship, Season 1 Episode 6: Lockdown
Here are scenes from the next episode of The Last Ship, titled Lockdown:
