‘The Last Ship’ season 3, episodes 1 and 2 review: Is Rachel Scott alive?

Tonight, “The Last Ship” finally premiered with two hours of television that definitely had us amped to see precisely what was going to happen, given that in some ways we felt like season 2, save for the whole Rachel Scott thing, had a somewhat happy ending with Michener firmly in power, and him assigning Chandler to help lead the Navy and make the world a better place.

As a result of that, Chandler was sent off to Asia with his crew from the Nathan James, and everything went to hell in a hand-basket. This mission not only ended severing off many members of the team, but to go along with that Chandler’s people back in America were led to believe that he and the crew were dead. Basically, they fell victim to a vast plot by President Peng to ensure that nothing stood in his way.

Ultimately, that didn’t quite happen as anticipated, mostly because of how resilient Chandler truly is. Even though it is clear that no one is quite out of the woods, there was something so poignant and remarkable about the closing minutes of the hour. This is a show that does emphasize heroism and the stakes of military warfare, and the build towards the end of the second episode was wonderfully-paced and some of the best stuff that we’ve had a chance to see to date.

Yet, of course through the majority of this episode we felt as though the story was going to be ending with some big Rachel Scott reveal, one where we realized that through it all, she was somehow still alive. That didn’t happen. Maybe that means she is gone, and while we’d hate it, at the same time we would applaud the series for the guts to kill off a major character. There’s also a part of us that still doesn’t trust Michener, but maybe that’s just us being cagey about people in leadership roles.

In many ways, the premiere of “The Last Ship” brought forward much of what you like about the show, and it moved things at a fast enough pace so that we were fully immersed in something new by the end of the two hours. Grade: A-.

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