Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.0

Six: Season 1 Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman February 25, 2017

Paul Harvey made much of his reputation as a radio personality with his oft quoted (and just as often mimicked) phrase, “and now. . .for the rest of the story,” with that ellipsis in the quote standing in for a pause that a radio DJ friend of mine once said was “long enough to drive a truck through”. In a way, I reacted to Six as a sort of “rest of the story” presentation of some of the missions that have taken place tangentially (and sometimes in the background) over the course of the many seasons of Homeland. If Carrie Mathison gets to (or at least got to) call the shots on various takedowns of terrorists, at least some of the incursions depicted in Homeland required a little “extra” assistance, often seen as various agents simply monitored the goings on from the safety of their high tech headquarters. Six wants to revisit some of the same paranoiac tendencies that have informed Homeland, albeit from the perspective of those who have their own “boots on the ground”. If Six had stuck mostly to the whole terrorism angle, and the efforts of SEAL Team Six to confront it, it might have been a home run from both a narrative and general action-adventure standpoint. Unfortunately, as tends to be the case in a lot of History efforts (whether “scripted” or supposedly “real life”), a bunch of supposedly supporting information is stuffed into the proceedings, not all of which is helpful or even very illuminative of the characters. The male bonding on display is somewhat reminiscent of other testosterone heavy efforts like Strike Back, and much like that Cinemax series, Six tends to do best when it’s focusing on big action set pieces, faltering somewhat more precariously when it tries to peer into the private lives of its focal characters. There are some other kind of interesting and perhaps not totally coincidental intersections between Six and Strike Back, including a character whose shaded past has led to his departure from an anti-terror organization.

When a show features characters who are nicknamed Rip (Walton Goggins), Bear (Barry Sloane) and Buddha (Juan Pablo Raba), it may be just a bit hard to take that whole “based on a real story” byline, though in this case it’s notable that History has amended that frequently seen descriptor to state that Six is “inspired” by actual SEAL Team Six missions. Even that amendation may be hard to take for some dedicated and patriotic vets (whether SEAL members or not) when one of the series’ main plot points is that Rip more or less shoots a so-called “enemy combatant” at point blank range despite the captive’s insistence that he’s an American and that he just wants to go back home. The fact that at least one other SEAL team member initially backs up this decision may stick in some viewers’ craw as well, though to be fair, it’s probably meant to.

That perhaps rash decision on the part of Rip continues to inform the rest of the first season of Six, in a plot conceit that is at least somewhat reminiscent of Carrie having to deal with “collateral damage” in Homeland: The Complete Fourth Season (though just how "collateral" this particular damage is turns out to be somewhat more ambiguous than in Homeland). The show segues from its opening in the rural enclaves of Afghanistan as Rip and his team attempt to hunt down a terrorist mastermind named Muttaqi (Jarreth J. Merz), to a couple of years later when Rip (again kind of like Carrie with regard to the CIA) has moved past his official duties as a SEAL Team member. Unfortunately his new private security job (yep, again like Carrie) puts him in harm’s way and that makes him the subject of a SEAL Team rescue mission, something that takes up quite a bit of this season’s narrative.

There’s a really riveting and even provocative tale at the center of Six with regard to Rip’s activities and their after effects, but Six delves so often into more soap operatic territory with regard to all of its characters (including Rip, as it happens) that the show comes off as a kind of angsty drama rather than a straight ahead action adventure enterprise. That’s all well and good, except that the personal issues being explored are all resolutely on the trite side, including marital dysfunctions, substance abuse and perhaps hopeful attempts to plan for a future when there’s only tragedy in store. There’s therefore a kind of bifurcated quality to Six that it’s never able to completely weave into one organic whole.

The fact that the real life SEAL Team Six tends to operate in the shadows of, if not “black ops”, at least “gray-ish ops”, where their exploits cannot (and, frankly, probably should not) be publicized puts the writing staff of Six at a kind of disadvantage. The kind of ironic thing about the show is that the depictions of raids and other combat maneuvers that SEAL Team Six undertakes are actually the most viscerally effective elements of this show. Whether the depictions in the series are accurate are anyone’s guess, but given this show's self-described "inspiration" from actual SEAL Team history, the fact that the “personal lives” elements often play as kind of flat and cliché ridden might indicate that maybe the real life SEAL Team members have their lives together, or at least are able to keep that side of their existences even more secret than what they do when they’re “on the job”.

Six: Season 1 Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Six: Season 1 is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of History and Lionsgate Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. There's no real authoritative technical data on the shoot that I was able to unearth, but this looks digitally shot, though the image has been tweaked variously throughout the first season, as can be seen in some of the screenshots accompanying this review. While some of the techniques, light "night vision" green, tend to minimize fine detail levels, other techniques, like the kind of grainy, sepia toned approach toward Rip's captivity, actually still offer decent detail and fine detail levels. That said, the attempt to give a lot of the sequences a "distressed" look tends to tip precariously close to noise some of the time. Commendably, almost all of the combat sequences seem to have used practical effects, and whatever CGI there is (which I have hunch includes the helicopters seen flying over Afghanistan in the series' opening moments, and, later, an explosion in an urban area) tends to look very good. When not being intentionally toyed with, the palette looks natural, and contrast and black levels are both consistent.

Six: Season 1 Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

As I've mentioned in some previous reviews of History titles, I've been at this reviewing game long enough that I remember taking History DVDs to task for not offering anamorphically enhanced video presentations. History has now taken an audio step backwards by offering only lossy Dolby Digital tracks on some of its most recent Blu-ray releases, and that unfortunate choice continues with Six: Season 1's Dolby Digital 5.1 track. While there is sufficient immersion and good surround activity present in virtually every episode, especially with regard to some of the missions, audiophiles are probably going to wonder how much more energy, and especially low end, could have been provided by a lossless track.

Six: Season 1 Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Don't be fooled by the "Extras" menu on both discs in this set. The only so-called supplements being offered are trailers for other Lionsgate releases and bookmarks, neither of which I count as a scorable supplement.

Six: Season 1 Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I found the combat aspects of Six routinely compelling, and the main story of Rip being held by terrorists is also interesting and relevant. But this series' tendencies to go for soap operatic gusto in detailing the private lives of these characters mostly left me cold. Six just got picked up for a second season, and it will at least be interesting to see how the show's creative staff wants to attack these dual approaches as the series continues. The series has a lot to recommend it, but History's unfortunate decision to continue offering only lossy audio on its releases, as well as no real supplements, may dissuade some who are otherwise interested in this show.