JAG (TV series): Difference between revisions

* [[Amoral Attorney]]: Singer.

* [[And Now for Something Completely Different]]: No more than four episodes had stories involving characters other than the main cast, though still played by the main cast.

** Season 6's "Mutiny" had a dramatization of the [[Real Life]] mutiny attempt on the USS Somers and the investigation that followed, framed by Mac preparing to lecture on those events.

** Season 8's "Each Of Us Angels" focused on a group of Navy nurses before and during the Battle of Iwo Jima, and is probably the only episode where the cast appears but doesn't play their characters.

** Actually, it's [[The Brigadier]], since Rear Admirals are equivalent to Army/Marine/USAF Brigadier Generals.

*** Actually, he's the upper half of Rear Admiral, which is equivalent to a Major General, not a Brigadier.

* [[The Cast Showoff]]: Harm plays the guitar, and Mac does kick-boxing and speaks Farsi.

* [[Celebrity Paradox]]: Donald P. Bellisario, the series show runner and creator, exists in the JAG-verse as does his series [[Quantum Leap]]. Actor Dean Stockwell who had a major part in [[Quantum Leap]], later plays Secretary of the Navy Edward Sheffield.

** Season 9's "A Merry Little Christmas"

** [[Spin-Off]] ''[[NCIS (TV)|NCIS]]'' has been carrying on the tradition with style.

** In fact, only the JAG lawyers acts like ideal police. Everybody else is concerned with controlling the publicity.

* [[Cliff Hanger]]: The first season ended {{spoiler|with Harm being arrested for murder}}, though same episode was a [[Missing Episode]] and later adapted, thus bordering on [[Canon Dis Continuity]]. The third season ended {{spoiler|with Harm and Mac about to be shot down in a Russian jet while looking for Harm's father}}. The sixth ended with {{spoiler|Harm lost at sea, having ejected from his F-14 trying to get back in time to catch Mac's wedding}}. The seventh ends with {{spoiler|Bud stepping on a landmine while trying to prevent an Afghan boy from doing likewise}}. The eighth ended with {{spoiler|Harm leaving JAG to save Mac and Webb against orders}}. The ninth ends with {{spoiler|Webb apparently killed and the Admiral's retirement}}. The series itself ends with something like a cliffhanger, {{spoiler|leaving the audience wondering if either Harm or Mac will retire after they decide to marry and whether they'll end up in London or San Diego afterwards}}.

** Or an episode when they were put on trial (the "People v. X" episodes, among others). Harm got two.

* [[Deadpan Snarker]]: The main characters, with the exceptions of Bud and Harriet, are prone to this. Chedgwidden is the king of this trope though.

** Another episode was basically [[Die Hard On an X|Die Hard]] [[Under Siege|on A Warship]], with Cuban hijackers seizing a frigate while it is taking a group of [[Military Brat|Navy Brats]] [[Bus Full of Innocents|on a Tiger Cruise]]. {{spoiler|Turns out, they are not supporters of Castro's regime, but instead want to use the ship's weapons to [[The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized|assassinate him.]]}}

* [[Dirty Harriet]]: Mac goes undercover in season 5 as a Chief Petty Officer trying infiltrate a Wicca group, including getting herself sky-clad.

** American actor Rex Linn plays a Russian KGB officer who speaks English like a native Texan. The in-universe explanation for this is that he grew up in Texas where his parents spied on the U.S. space program.

* [[Faking the Dead]]: Clayton Webb does this, twice, with Harm and Mac unintentionally doing likewise on one occasion.

* [[The General's Daughter]]: Bud's brother Mikey ends up briefly dating the daughter of the series' last JAG, Maj. Gen. Gordon Cresswell.

* [[Generation Xerox]]: Harm’s dad just so happened to look in his prime exactly like his son latter does in his prime (except for the moustache and the deeper voice)…

* [[Hauled Before a Senate Subcommittee]]: The first Secretary of the Navy in the series, Alexander Nelson, gets called before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to answer for his unauthorized intelligence activities carried out by JAG lawyers. Ironically enough, the Chairman of the Committee, Edward Sheffield, ends up becoming his successor.

* [[Heads or Tails]]: The series finale ends with {{spoiler|[[Ace Pilot|Harm]] and [[Semper Fi|Mac]] ([[Unresolved Sexual Tension|who]] [[Will They or Won't They?|finally]] [[They Do|tied the knot]]) flipping a [[Challenge Coin]] to decide which of them will leave the military and live with the other so they don't have to be stationed apart from each other.}}

* [[The Hero]] (and every other derivative of that): Harm.

* [[Hollywood Healing]]: Subverted. If a main character is injured, they will remain so for a few episodes. Then there's Lt. Bud Roberts who {{spoiler|never gets his leg back and we see him working with a prosthetic for the rest of the series.}}

** Season 9’s “Posse Comitatus”: The helocopter pilot is grounded as well.

* [[Kangaroo Court]]: An episode set in Iraq has an American judged for violating their territory. While the first part of the trial seems, if not sympathetic to the prisoner, remotely interested in distributing justice, at one point Harm manages to prove that the Marine was on the Kuwait side of the border. Then, a recess is asked, and when they come back, the witness changes the original distance that would prove the prisoner's innocence, and the records from where he stated the other distance just [[Blatant Lies|magically vanish]].

* [[Latin Land]]: An 1st season episode takes place at the U.S. embassy in Peru.

** Also the adventures in Paraguay in late season 8 & early season 9.

* [[Opening Narration]]: Used for the second and third seasons (and provided by [[Don La Fontaine]] for good measure!), but not for the others.

* [[Overranked Soldier]]: Averted mostly, even though the investigation's and field work done by Harm and Mac are borderline.

* [[Pardo Push]]: During Harm's brief return to flying carrier operations, he found himself flying with another Tomcat during the Kosovo War. The other jet was damaged and losing fuel, and would not make it over a mountain range before they could leave Serbian territory <ref> It is a general rule of thumb in air warfare to try and avoid bailing out over the area you just bombed</ref>. Harm used his own jet to physically push the other plane to keep it in flight long enough to clear the mountains. [[Reality Is Unrealistic|This was based on a Real Life incident]].<ref> Of course, [[Interservice Rivalry|the Air Force did it in real life.]]</ref>

* [[Permission to Speak Freely]]

* [[Real Life Writes the Plot]]: Catherine Bell's pregnancy in late season 8, as her character temporarily served as judge to hide the fact. And later that season she follwed Clayton Webb on a secret mission to Paraguay posing as his pregnant wife...

* [[Recurring Character]]: Quite a few. No surprise with a show that was on for 10 years.

* [[Rogue Agent]]: Clark Palmer, former DSD agent who has tried to either kill or frame on Harm several occasions.

* [[Romantic False Lead]]: So many.

* [[Semper Fi]]: Do or Die!

* [[Sergeant Rock]]: Most NCO's in JAG seems to be this. Could be case of [[Author Speak]].

** It is also interesting the first Scifi reference in the show - in the pilot, when Captain Boone (the CAG) and Lt Arrutti return from a flight, as Boone is about to get out of the cockpit, one of the yellow-shirt flight deck crew starts to paint on the F-14, and Boone comments, "Chief, if I bagged a Klingon, I believe you'd know what Flag to paint on her" - to which Chief Ned Bannon replies "Klingons are Easy, now a Romulan Warship now that might be a problem, they're invisible". So there's Trek fans among the fictional Seahawk crew aside from Bud, so an implied subversion of ''Hollywood Nerd''.

** In Season 2’s "Washington Holiday" (itself a take on ''[[Roman Holiday]]'') when the Rumanian Princess has escaped from doing her duties and went to a night club instead: Harm, as her military escort dressed in whites, carries her back to the limousine causing a woman in the background to say: "This is so like ''[[An Officer and A Gentleman]]''".

** Until it diverged with Cresswell becoming the JAG, in reality there has yet to be a Marine serving as Judge Advocate General of the Navy since Col. William Remey, the first Navy JAG.

*** Which simply makes a Marine serving as Navy JAG a distinct improbability, not an impossibility, considering that less than 500 of 1500 advocates in the Navy JAG are Marines.

* [[Un Cancelled]]: After the first season, the show was canceled by NBC. However, CBS picked it up immediately after NBC canceled it upon discovering that the show was [[Germans Love David Hasselhoff|absolutely huge in Australia]] and was slowly gaining a cult audience in the United States. CBS proceeded to turn it into the biggest hit on the network. NBC did keep a finger in the pie by securing exclusive cable syndication rights for its USA Network.

* [[Unresolved Sexual Tension]]: Mac and Harm.