Entertainment, TV, Television - Marine Corps Times

New season of ‘Weaponology’ a bit off target

The Military Channel revives its “Weaponology” series Tuesday at 10 p.m., and while the new season’s episodes will not displease fans who got hooked on the show after it debuted last year, they’re strangely unsatisfying. Military Times got an advance first look at the new series, which plateaus, rather than ramps up, from where its earlier episodes left off.

Each “Weaponology” works from a reliable premise: start with a piece of today’s modern military hardware and work backwards through its ancestral iterations. So an F-22 Raptor can fly supersonic without using its afterburner and looks like a pigeon on radar — how’d that happen? One of last season’s episodes traced back to before World War I to show the origins of today’s super-warplanes.

But while each of those first shows started from a broad concept — including bombers, tanks or fire weapons — this season’s episodes address much more specific topics, including the Navy SEALs, the Marine Corps, Army Airborne units and Hitler’s Waffen SS.

So while a season one edition of “Weaponology” might’ve been about paratroopers, the concepts behind airborne warfare, how militaries throughout history have used airborne forces etc., in season two the show is specifically about the 82nd Airborne Division. Fine — but there have been plenty of earlier shows on the subject.

To be sure, “Weaponology” pays more attention to the troops’ gear than other shows, but because most of the new episodes are about traditional military units, i.e. guys advancing with rifles, many of the new “Weaponology” shows turn into small-arms clinics. Again: fine. But there are plenty of other places on TV and even the Military Channel to learn just about guns.

The first season of “Weaponology” worked because it gave broad-based surveys about war technologies — not just U.S. artillery, say, but all artillery and its doctrines throughout the history of warfare. When each season two episode pauses for an Old-Men-Shooting-Machine-Guns-At-Bricks segment, it just turns into another “Mail Call,” sans the charm of R. Lee Ermey.

Other quibbles: Aficionados could be irked with some editing and historical oversights in this new series. In the “U.S. paratroopers” episode, the show talks about the light weapons used by the 101st Airborne when it guarded Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge, but forgets to mention that troops rode into that fight aboard trucks, not their parachutes.

When the “Marine Corps” episode makes reference to the AV-8B Harrier jump-jets that Marines use for close air support, viewers will be peeved to see video of Royal Navy Sea Harriers taking off a British aircraft carrier. And throughout an episode on Hitler’s Waffen SS, our narrator calls it “wah-fen,” even though the German word is pronounced “vah-fen.”

“Weaponology” is still worth watching — high points from the new season include a segment in a “Navy SEALs” episode about the special operators’ custom suppressed weapons, and one about their highly modified Vietnam-era M-79 pump-action grenade launchers.

But so much time in the new series is spent on stuff that any military viewer will either know or have seen many times before, like a Marine Corps boot camp sequence; or an explanation of why buckshot rounds can be more effective than a single slug. With so much of that stuff available elsewhere, it makes you want “Weaponology” to get back to its slightly more unconventional roots.