It's hard to board a train that's in motion. There's the whole "leaping onto a speeding locomotive" part, sure. But then, after you get on board? Where do you sit? There's already been enough of a journey that most ticket-holders are comfortably seated, and they're not going to get up to make you comfortable. 

While it might not be a direct analogue, this is a decent enough metaphor for David Ogden Stiers' circumstances on M*A*S*H. The former stage star joined the show's cast "en media res," during the show's sixth season. Some of his co-stars had a half-decade head start on creating their characters and developing chemistry on the set. 

What was it like hopping aboard a ratings behemoth, with a best-in-class ensemble already working at such a high caliber? Was David Ogden Stiers intimidated, or had he prepared for this inevitable hardship? In a press conference following M*A*S*H's final shooting day, the actor revealed that he was even teased during his first month on the show.

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"One day, maybe three and a half weeks after I'd joined the company, we'd just finished a close-up in the operation room and I was paying attention to the foam rubber and blood and stuff, I looked up out of the shot and 'wap!' came a piece of surgical gauze with adhesive tape on it. I thought, 'Jesus, I'm so bad, they're throwing stuff at me.'"

Was it all over for Maj. Charles Emerson Winchester III? Was David Ogden Stiers a bad fit for this incredible cast? Obviously, TV fans know that the opposite is true, but for a brief moment, Ogden Stiers probably felt like it was a wrap six years before the show went off the air.

"I realized there were grins behind the mask. It was a form of welcoming. They felt good enough about my being in the show to start joking, to start the practical jokes, and then I realized I had four surgical clamps down the back of my gown."

Phew!