Season 5, Episode 12 (December 14, 1976). Story by Gene Reynolds & Jay Folb; Teleplay by Jay Folb; Directed by Alan Alda.
The 4077th's brush with the supernatural is set off by the kind of small accident that the show so often uses to launch its plots: Corporal Radar O'Reilly (Gary Burghoff), moving a heavy piece of lumber around the compound, accidentally dislodges a tall carved wooden post that the local villagers had placed at the edge of camp to ward off evil spirits. A streak of bad luck follows — accidents in O.R., equipment malfunctions, small injuries around the compound — and the camp's Korean staff and the nearby villagers immediately conclude that the spirits are angry. The 4077th's regulars are skeptical, but the unease is real enough that nobody wants to tempt fate [1][2].
The main plot kicks in when an elderly Korean man arrives at the 4077th needing surgery, and refuses to go under the knife until the disturbed spirits have been pacified. Hawkeye (Alan Alda), who doesn't believe a word of it, realizes the only way to get the man onto the operating table is to take the exorcism seriously enough to satisfy him. He calls in a Korean mudang — a shaman/priestess — to perform a traditional gut ritual, planning to use the ceremony as a pretext to wheel the patient straight into surgery as soon as the spirits have been "sent on their way" [1][2].
The post Radar moves is a jangseung (장승), a carved wooden spirit post traditionally erected at the edges of Korean villages, crossroads, and the boundaries of homes and fields. Jangseung are guardians: rough-hewn human-shaped totems meant to frighten away demons and disease, mark the boundary between the village and the wild, and direct good fortune inside. Their carving style varies by region — some are simple heads on posts, others are full figures with elaborate robes and hats — and they remain a common sight in the Korean countryside even today. The villagers' reaction in "Exorcism" is not superstition played for easy laughs; it's a real folk belief that the 4077th has stumbled into without meaning to.
The ritual itself is a gut (굿), a Korean shamanic ceremony performed by a mudang (무당, sometimes romanized mansin or shaman) to communicate with the spirit world, drive out misfortune, heal the sick, or guide the dead. Gut is at the heart of Korean folk religion — a syncretic tradition that has absorbed shamanism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucian elements over centuries and predates all of them. It's still practiced today in South Korea, both in private homes and at public festivals.
For Western viewers the most striking thing about the episode is the garb. Where the rest of the show runs on the muted olive drab and khaki of a 1950s U.S. Army camp, the mudang arrives in a riot of color that stops the scene cold. She wears the layered ceremonial robe often associated with Korean shamanic ritual — frequently described as the samjokgo, with red, blue, and yellow (sometimes white added) symbolizing the four cardinal directions and their guardian spirits. The robe is cut wide and flowing, with long ribbons trailing from the sleeves and hem. On her head she wears a tall ornate crown-like headdress, sometimes hung with bells and dangling ornaments that flash as she moves. In her hands she carries the ritual tools of the trade: a fan and a small mirror to catch and reflect the malevolent spirit, and a brass gong or small drum she strikes as she chants. As she dances the ribbons flare, the bells catch the light, and the whole figure becomes a moving, swirling column of color against the dusty compound — exactly the kind of visual the show rarely got to deploy, and one of the reasons the episode lingers in fan memory.
There's also a small cultural collision built into the plot that the show plays fairly: Hawkeye, the skeptical rationalist, doesn't believe in the ritual, but he knows the patient does. The exorcism isn't a cure; it's a stage-managed piece of theater whose real purpose is to honor the old man's beliefs enough that he'll consent to the surgery that actually saves him. It's one of the more graceful inversions of the usual "rational West vs. foolish superstition" dynamic the show otherwise leans on, and it's hard to imagine the writers landing the beat without the visual weight of the mudang's garb behind it.
"Exorcism" is one of several mid-Season-5 outings that Alan Alda directed. Alda, who by this point in the run was writing, directing, and starring on the show in nearly equal measure, had a clear interest in episodes that opened the 4077th up to the Korean characters and settings the war was actually being fought in — "In Love and War" (S6E07) the following season is the best-known example, and "Exorcism" is a clear precursor. The story credit goes jointly to Gene Reynolds, the show's executive producer, and Jay Folb, a frequent collaborator of Reynolds' who also wrote or co-wrote "Hawkeye Get Your Gun" (S5E11), "Movie Tonight" (S5E22), and the unproduced-in-this-form "Post Op" (S5E23); Folb took sole teleplay credit here, as he did on several other Season 5 episodes. The production code is U-815.
[1] M*A*S*H Season 5 - Wikipedia [2] Exorcism - MASH4077TV Episode Guide