Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		1.0
Overall		3.5

The Last Ship: The Complete Fourth Season Blu-ray Movie Review

Alone Again

Reviewed by Michael Reuben June 22, 2018

Spoiler warning: This review assumes that the reader is familiar with prior seasons of The Last Ship. Readers new to the series should stop here and consult the Season One review for a spoiler-free introduction.

How long can you prolong an apocalypse? That's the challenge facing every dystopian tale, especially if it's a TV series. At a certain point, the world either has to get saved or it ends, and if the story drags on for too long, its credibility seeps away.

The creative team behind TNT's original series, The Last Ship, has been struggling with that dilemma since the end of Season Two, when a cure for the deadly Red Flu was discovered and dispersed throughout the U.S., while the federal government was reconstituted in St. Louis. At that point, the battleship Nathan James could no longer be dubbed the "last" ship, as its heroic commander, Tom Chandler (Eric Dane), left his bridge to become the new administration's military chief and the Navy and other armed forces began to reorganize under his leadership. The series seemed to have reached its conclusion, which is probably why creators Steven Kane and Hank Steinberg felt it necessary to cap the season with a last-minute shocker by killing off a major character.

Season Three struggled to generate plot lines in the aftermath of the Red Flu's cure, diluting the series' focus on heavy weaponry and military heroics with geopolitical maneuvering, government conspiracies and an extended prison camp subplot. By the season's conclusion, the new U.S. government was in shambles, and Capt. Chandler had left both the bridge and the Navy, taking his two children (whose mother died before Chandler could reach her with the cure) and disappearing for parts unknown. But the apocalypse appeared to be over. The continuing challenge was to pick up the pieces of civilization and move on.

For Season Four, though, Kane and Steinberg devised a clever stratagem to reboot the threat of mass extinction and return The Last Ship to its original mission statement. As people are once again dying en masse and naval stations are being abandoned, Cmdr. Mike Slattery (Adam Baldwin), now the ship's captain, sums up the situation succinctly: "The Nathan James is once again on her own."

Season Four was limited to ten episodes, down from the previous two seasons' thirteen. It was filmed back-to-back with the upcoming fifth season, which TNT has already announced will be the series conclusion.

Sixteen months after Chandler left the Nathan James, a new threat has emerged. The virus that caused the Red Flu has mutated and is now known as "Red Rust", because it attacks plant life instead of people. With the world's food supply rapidly disappearing, starvation and riots have all but destroyed the fledgling governments attempting to salvage the five percent of humanity that survived the plague.

Now the world's only hope is a rare strain of ancient African palm tree that appears to be immune to the virus. Its genetics hold the key to creating new, Red Rust-resistant crops. As the series opens, Cmdr. Slattery and the Nathan James have been tasked with securing the only known supply of these precious seeds from the world seed bank in Morocco and delivering them to an international cooperative of agricultural scientists who hope to propagate new crops and feed the world. As usual, if the Nathan James is "the spear of the Navy" (as the crew's caps proudly proclaim), the tip of that spear is the elite commando group known as Vulture Team, led by Lts. Danny Green (Travis Van Winkle) and Carlton Burk (Jocko Sims). Australian Special Forces fighter Wolf Taylor (Bren Foster) and intelligence agent Sasha Cooper (Bridget Regan) are permanent members of the squad, the former noted for his martial arts expertise and the latter for her linguistic prowess. (Sasha's proficiency in Mandarin and Japanese is joined this season by equally fluent Arabic. Seriously: How many languages can one person speak?)

But Nathan James isn't the only party after the African palm seeds. The crew faces a succession of ruthless and increasingly dangerous competitors, starting with a thief named Mahmoud (Faruk Amireh) and continuing with a warlord, Omar (Anthony Azizi), both of whom are looking to sell the seeds to the highest bidder. Then there's a Greek-American pair of siblings, Giorgio and Lucia Vellek (Jackson Rathbone and Sibylla Deen), whose interest in the seeds is unclear but who appear to be well-backed by powerful interests, including the Greek navy (or what remains of it). Giorgio also has a number of side enterprises, including an organized fight club, in which the winners get to survive—and eat. Then there's a final opponent that Nathan James has to confront in its quest to restore the world's food supply, but it's an adversary who can't be identified without spoilers and is as fanatical as the messianic Ramseys in Season Two. He also has a plan for world domination that's a little different than most.

Season Four is set entirely in and around the Mediterranean Sea, which provides the creative team with new vistas and the crew of the Nathan James with new challenges. It also prompts periodic references to the voyage of Odysseus in Homer's Odyssey, which are entertaining if somewhat tangential. The ship's crew has been expanded with some interesting returnees, notably Lt. Kara Foster (Marissa Neitling), still married to Danny Green and now the ship's Tactical Action Officer, and Capt. Joseph Meylan (Emerson Brooks), who has remained aboard the Nathan James since his own ship was sunk in Season Three. New faces include Azima Kandie (Jodie Turner-Smith), a veteran of the Kenyan Navy who brings impressive fighting abilities to Vulture Team and who generates sexual sparks with Wolf (although, given the series' history of killing off Wolf's girlfriends, Azima should probably steer clear). Kathleen Nolan (Jade Chynoweth), the daughter of military contractor Tex Nolan, who was killed defending Chandler at the end of Season Three, is now training as a gunnery officer in Nathan James' helicopter, where she submerges her mourning in a determination to master a new set of deadly skills. Also in the mix is an MI6 operative, Fletcher (Jonathan Howard), whose relationship with Sasha is more than professional and who, like most career spies, probably knows more than he's telling.

And what of Capt. Chandler? The crew hasn't heard a word from him since he walked off the ship, as Chandler has attempted to fade into civilian life in a Greek fishing village with his two children and a new girlfriend. But unexpected events and the ingenuity of screenwriters contrive to reunite Chandler and the crew of the Nathan James. The catalyst is Giorgio Vellek, who, in addition to his other pursuits, runs a protection racket along the Greek coast, extorting the local fishermen who are already struggling to sustain a livelihood from the dwindling supplies of seafood in the Med. Chandler's innate hostility to injustice is aroused, and so is Giorgio's curiosity, as he immediately senses that Chandler is much more than he seems. It takes nearly half the season, but eventually Chandler is reunited with his former shipmates. ("Of all the gin joints in all the towns", mutters Slattery when he first sights Chandler in the last place he might have predicted.) The reunion isn't an easy one, after Chandler's long absence, but if there's one value that remains central to The Last Ship, it's the special bond among comrades-in-arms. By the season's end, Chandler is once again leaping into the fray with Vulture Team, backed by the powerful weaponry and skillful dedication of the vessel and crew that remain the Navy's unsinkable standard-bearers, even in the worst of times.

The Last Ship: The Complete Fourth Season Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

With only ten episodes instead of thirteen, Season Four of The Last Ship fits onto two discs more gracefully than the sardine-like packing to which TNT subjected Season Three, even though Warner and TNT still refuse to take full advantage of the available space, with over 20 GB left unused on each BD-50. The average bitrate of just under 17 Mbps slightly improves on that of even Season Two, and the image is correspondingly superior, with an absence of compression artifacts and less falloff in detail. It may not be the best possible image, but it's a small improvement over broadcast and streaming versions.

As far as I have been able to determine, the show continues to be shot on the Red Epic Dragon, with cinematographer Christopher Baffa (Glee and Nip/Tuck) responsible for the bulk of Season Four's episodes. Scenes aboard the Nathan James continue to feature bold, aggressive and heavily saturated reds, greens and blues (especially blues), while scenes in the various Mediterranean locales favor earth tones and more delicate, pastoral colors. Contrast is excellent, blacks are solid, and I did not observe any banding or aliasing. From a video perspective, this is the best presentation since Season One.

The Last Ship: The Complete Fourth Season Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Season Four's lossless Dolby TrueHD 5.1 soundtrack continues The Last Ship's proud tradition of aggressively loud, active and immersive audio mixes, with plenty of small weapons fire, artillery shell blasts, grenade explosions and missile strikes to enliven the proceedings. Amateur boxing matches organized by one of the season's villains offer a cacophony of body blows and cheering crowds. The ship's tactical operations headquarters is filled with beeping alerts and blaring alarms. The whir and hum of equipment in a lab run by an evil genius gives the place a distinct sonic character. Waves, wakes and ship engines add to the ambiance. Dialogue remains clear and intelligible, even when the ship's crew is spitting out mouthfuls of military jargon and yelling commands back and forth in the heat of battle. Composers Jim Dooley (Obsessed) and James S. Levine (American Horror Story ) resume their duties and deliver yet another rousing action/thriller score.

The Last Ship: The Complete Fourth Season Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Inside The Last Ship (disc 1) (1080p; 1.78:1; 17:50): A "play all" option is included for this collection of short behind-the-scenes featurettes focusing on different aspects of Season Four. There's a fair amount of overlap and repetition among the five segments.


• Season 4
• The "Med"
• Villains
• Tom Chandler
• Nostos



• The Last Ship's Odyssey (disc 2) (1080p; 1.78:1; 12:33): This featurette explores the inspiration drawn by the series' creators from Homer's epic poem. Some of the interview clips are repeated from "Inside The Last Ship", but the comments by classics Professor Vincent Farenga of USC are new (and one of the most interesting parts of the extras).

The Last Ship: The Complete Fourth Season Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

As the Nathan James prepares for its final voyage on TNT, one can only speculate at the ending that its creators have designed. The series now exists in a world that has been decimated by disease, famine and the collapse of every major national and social institution. Most of the crew have lost all or some of their families, so that the ship is now their only home and the crew their only kin. If they make it back to America (and this would be the third time), what chaos will they find? Whatever fate the writers room has in store for The Last Ship, you can be sure that the crew's discipline will never falter, and their commitment to military tradition and the values of truth, justice and the American way will remain steadfast to the end. Recommended.