More Than 50 Years Later, Fans Still Aren’t Over This Shocking TV Death

More than 50 years ago, a beloved television show dealt a massive blow to viewers with a tragic, unexpected character death. All of these years later, people still talk about how hard the death of Lt. Col. Henry Blake was on M*A*S*H.

During the episode of M*A*S*H titled “Abyssinia, Henry,” viewers saw the departure of Lt. Col. Henry Blake, played by McLean Stevenson. What nobody anticipated as they watched the episode was exactly how Blake would ultimately be written out of the show.

At first, during the episode that aired on March 18, 1975, everybody was celebrating that Blake had received his discharge orders. He said his goodbyes and boarded a helicopter that would take him on the first leg of his journey home.

What viewers could not have anticipated was that soon after that, a twist came. Soon, Walter “Radar” O’Reilly (Gary Burghoff) entered the operating room and announced, “Lt. Col. Henry Blake’s plane was shot down over the Sea of Japan. It spun in. There were no survivors.”

The episode was the Season 3 finale of M*A*S*H, which left viewers speechless and hanging for months until Season 4 began.

Show creator Larry Gelbart revealed that Blake’s death prompted “without question” the most “puzzled, angry, and passionate” flood of mail from viewers that the series ever received.

He shared that Stevenson had still been under contract, but he wanted to leave M*A*S*H. It was decided to let the actor out of the remaining two years of his contract, and what Gelbart came up with as a storyline was the heartbreaking death of Blake.

Gelbert said that talk about death was common on the show, and sometimes viewers would see a gurney go by with a sheet covering an unknown casualty. However, the core characters of the show hadn’t been impacted like this.

When he was tasked with deciding how to write out Stevenson’s character, Gelbert decided he wanted it to be especially powerful.

“We thought we’d have his death mean something, and so we devised the episode in which he is going home and his plane goes down in the Sea of Japan. We got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of letters,” Gelbert explained.

People still talk about Blake’s shocking death all these decades later.

On Reddit, one person noted, “My folks remember it so vividly they haven’t rewatched that episode since the day it aired. That’s how much it hurt them.”

Another person wrote, “This episode rivaled the final episode as far as emotional response goes.”

Someone else added, “I remember it. Stuff like that DID NOT happen on tv back then! Did not happen! It was a double shock because of that and very disturbing.”

In another thread on Reddit, a viewer shared, “50 yrs later and rewatching it just now, still cried. A very affecting scene.”

“Abyssinia, Henry” remains an episode of the iconic series that fans say still holds up now, over five decades after it first aired. Many admit that this particular episode of M*A*S*H continues to prompt powerful, emotional reactions unlike almost anything else they’ve ever watched.