“Last Resort”: What if the U.S. Navy mutinied?

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 16:58:00 +0000

"Last Resort," premiering tonight, is ABC's high-concept drama about an American nuclear submarine captain and his crew, who ignore suspicious orders to nuke Pakistan, find themselves at odds with the U.S. government, and hole themselves up on a tropical island.

It's the creation of Karl Gajdusek and Shawn Ryan, the man who made the stellar "The Shield," as well as the shorter-lived "Terriers" and "Chicago Code."

On the eve of the series premiere, Gajdusek and Ryan spoke with Salon about "Last Resort," its politics and its relationship to "Lost" and "Homeland."

How did this come together?

Gajdusek: My father had paperback novels, from the World War II era, all over the house, and I had been a submarine junkie as a young kid. After seeing how effective movies like "The Hunt for Red October" and "Crimson Tide" were, I thought there was something to the submarine story. And then I started looking into what the modern submarine was and how these machines really carry so much power that anyone who can claim ownership of one can basically raise a flag and say we’re a first-world nation. The idea was that these nuclear ballistic missile submarines carry so much firepower, and are so stealthy, and so self-sufficient with nuclear reactors, that they are the necessary arsenals to call yourself a nation, to call yourself independent on the first-world international stage.

No man is an island, unless he has the bomb

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 20:46:00 +0000

What constitutes a nation? This is the heady question that underpins the action-movie thrills of ABC’s submarine-gone-righteously-rogue drama “Last Resort,” one of the most promising dramas of the fall season, premiering Thursday night. The series' first, but certainly not its final, answer is simple: nukes. Nuclear-deterrence theory has never been advertised so entertainingly.

The high-stakes premise of “Last Resort,” co-created by “The Shield’s” Shawn Ryan, is as follows: The nuclear submarine the USS Colorado is contentedly swanning around the Indian Ocean when it receives suspicious orders to fire four nuclear bombs on Pakistan. Capt. Marcus Chaplin, the ever-commanding Andre Braugher, and XO Sam Kendal, the ever-whispering Scott Speedman, request that order be reconfirmed before they kill 4 million people. Instead of reconfirmation, the Colorado gets hit by an inbound missile, fired from another U.S. warship. The Colorado books it to an island paradise — verdant, well populated, home to a NATO satellite station, but, as of yet, anyway, without polar bears — to plot its next move. Things get crazier from there, with nukes detonated in both Pakistan and 200 miles off the coast of D.C. (“Last Resort” joins “The Dark Knight Rises” in being totally unconcerned with radiation poisoning), dissension among the crew, and the early unspooling of a grand conspiracy. The episode ends with Braugher, gone spine-tinglingly Colonel Kurtz, releasing a YouTube video establishing a 200-mile perimeter around the island. Anyone who enters will say hello to one of the 17 nuclear weapons in his arsenal. No man is an island, unless he has the bomb.

Salon.com > Shawn Ryan

“Last Resort”: What if the U.S. Navy mutinied?

No man is an island, unless he has the bomb