Boots has two genuinely good stories in it, and a great deal of connective tissue holding them apart. One is a teenager turning into someone he did not know he could be. The other is a decorated sergeant who made that same trade years ago and cannot live with what it cost him. The connective tissue is where the score comes from.
What being gay in the 1990 Marines actually meant
Don't Ask, Don't Tell arrived in late 1993. Boots opens three years earlier, in a New Orleans recruiter's office, when the rule was not a compromise but a flat ban: discharge was mandatory, and a separate sodomy statute put five years of hard labour on the table for anyone the investigators chose to pursue.
So Cameron Cope (Miles Heizer) enlists knowing the central fact of his life can never be said aloud, to anyone, for as long as he wears the uniform. That is the pressure the whole show runs on.
Its answer arrives in the first episode and never wears out. Cameron talks to a second, visible version of himself, the buried one, and that one is funny, blunt and unafraid. The hidden self is the free self, and Miles Heizer, who played Alex Standall in 13 Reasons Why, plays the two as men who have shared a body for years without enjoying it.
The scale everyone here is measured on
Cameron signs up because he was bullied at school and decided the Marines would be different. What he finds at Parris Island is the same bullying multiplied, except this version is institutional, evenly distributed and aimed at something. The show's sharpest idea is that these are the same substance, and only one of them is trying to build him.
It keeps a running measure on him, and the pull-up bar is the meter. In week one Cameron cannot manage three, and spends his turn talking the recruit beside him through his anyway. By the fourth episode he can hold his voice steady in front of an officer working to break it.
So the decency was never the thing that changed. What the Corps gives him is the capacity to act on it, and by mid-season he is rigging a rivalry between platoons to drag Ray McAffey (Liam Oh) through a swim qualification he is drowning in.
What the sergeant is actually doing
Sgt. Sullivan (Max Parker) is what the far end of that scale looks like when it costs everything. He sees himself in Cameron and sets about breaking him early, on the theory that the world will do it later and far less kindly. Max Parker plays the cruelty as a survival technique that will not switch off, and the show is quietly good on that particular male reflex, the one where a man does something loud and stupid to prove he is not the thing he fears being called.
The six episodes in the middle
Which is the problem, because there is a lot of middle. Six of the eight episodes are pleasant rather than urgent, accumulating incident instead of story: a confidence course here, a week on the rifle range there. The season's one hard turn is signposted two episodes out and absorbed inside one, and whether that reads as discipline or as a shrug is the argument it leaves you with.
Vera Farmiga gets the best of the comic material, playing Cameron's mother Barbara as a woman who finds a support group for Marine mothers and sees a customer base.
A short content note: hazing, period-accurate slurs, alcoholism, the sudden death of a recruit, and one act of violence with lasting consequences.
3 out of 5, GLOWING. All eight episodes are on Netflix, the season runs Greg Cope White's memoir The Pink Marine from enlistment to graduation, and it was cancelled two months after release, so it lands as a complete story with one thread left permanently open. Watch it for Sullivan, and for a last hour that pays off the first seven. Expect to like it, then to forget more of it than it deserves.
What Sullivan actually did. Sgt. Sullivan (Max Parker) is gay, and the investigation circling him is real. He had a relationship with a superior officer in Guam, and when that officer was caught he denied everything and let the man face a court-martial alone. Prison was not a hypothetical here: the sodomy statute on the books in 1990 carried up to five years of hard labour.
It also explains the volume. A man who has already sold someone out to keep a label off himself will do a great deal of loud, punishing, stupid work to keep it off.
How Ochoa dies, and why you see it coming. Eduardo Ochoa (Johnathan Nieves) is the first bunkmate of Cameron Cope (Miles Heizer), and his entire motivation is making his wife proud. In the fifth episode he shoots top marksman, wins a phone call home, and a stranger picks up. He comes apart, Sgt. Howitt (Nicholas Logan) buries him in punishment drills, and his heart stops on the floor.
The trouble is that you can see it from two episodes away. The chest pains, the letters, the devotion established a little too loudly: the track is laid so carefully that the crash arrives on schedule rather than as a shock. The next episode supplies a hidden heart condition as the official cause, which is either a real explanation or a tidy way of ensuring nobody in uniform is at fault. What the show does get right is the wake at the dumpsters, the best scene in the middle stretch.
What happens between Cameron and Jones. Joshua Jones (Jack Cameron Kay) is gay, tells Cameron so, and the friendship is genuine. Sullivan sees two gay recruits getting close, decides the visibility endangers all three of them, and offers Jones the medical discharge he wants in exchange for one favour: provoke Cameron in the ring until something gives way.
Jones takes the deal, warns Cameron they will stage the match, then calls him a slur mid-fight. Cameron puts him on the floor in front of the whole platoon, and Staff Sgt. McKinnon (Cedrick Cooper) tells Sullivan flatly that whatever that was, it was not training.
The shocking part is not the violence. It is how quickly the meanness took, and that is where the transformation stops being flattering.
Three closeted men, three answers. Sullivan buries it and it eats him from the inside. Jones refuses to bury it and trades it for an exit. Cameron is the only one still choosing, which is why the season belongs to him.
The brother who does not go. Mr Bowman dies in the final episode and the twins are offered leave for the funeral. Cody Bowman (Brandon Tyler Moore) wants to go; John Bowman (Blake Burt) will not mourn a man who beat Cody for failing to toughen him up. John has spent eight episodes as the son nobody picked, and refusing is the first thing he does entirely on his own account.
The Crucible. Jones sleepwalks into the woods during the 54-hour final test. Cameron carries him back to the medics, asks to finish the course alone, and the platoon that spent seven episodes at each other's throats waits at the line and cheers him through. Then they graduate, go to a bar, and watch a television tell them Iraq has invaded Kuwait.
What the ending of Boots actually means. Barbara Cope (Vera Farmiga) arrives at graduation and admits she altered his birth certificate years ago, which makes Cameron seventeen and his enlistment invalid. He talks her into signing a waiver, so that one resolves in the room.
Sullivan does not. Facing felony charges over the bar fight, he defies Capt. Fajardo (Ana Ayora), goes AWOL during the Crucible to find Jones, hands Cameron his radio, tells him he is a Marine now and does not need him any more, and walks off into the trees. The show never says where he goes, and two months later it was cancelled.
Bright Bulbs
- The platoon starts as strangers who would happily watch each other fail, and ends as something else. That turn is earned, not declared.
- The finale gives Cameron Cope (Miles Heizer) a standing ovation from men who spent seven episodes not caring, and it lands.
- The marching chants are a team-building exercise disguised as a song. A platoon hitting the same syllable stops being strangers.
Dull Bulbs
- The humour is constant and about half of it lands. The rest is pleasant enough and does no damage.
- The Bowman twins spend most of the season in setup for a single scene. The payoff is kind of ok and it arrives very late.
Shattered Bulbs
- The first three episodes give a newcomer little reason to stay, and the show only starts working once it stops introducing people.
- It survives being half-watched. Very little between the first and last episodes demands your eyes on the screen.
Cast
- Miles Heizer as Cameron Cope
- Liam Oh as Ray McAffey
- Max Parker as Sgt. Sullivan
- Vera Farmiga as Barbara Cope
- Ana Ayora as Capt. Fajardo
- Cedrick Cooper as Staff Sgt. McKinnon
- Nicholas Logan as Sgt. Howitt
- Johnathan Nieves as Eduardo Ochoa
- Jack Cameron Kay as Joshua Jones
- Dominic Goodman as Nash
- Angus O'Brien as Hicks
- Kieron Moore as Slovacek
- Blake Burt as John Bowman
- Brandon Tyler Moore as Cody Bowman
- Rico Paris as Santos
- Zach Roerig as Knox