Kevin Kent wears a MTM Gray Cobra

The Last Ship ran five seasons on TNT on a single what-if: a viral pandemic has emptied out most of the world, and a US Navy guided-missile destroyer is one of the last working pieces of it. To keep the shipboard tactics honest, the production hired Kevin Kent, who had spent twenty-one years in Naval Special Warfare before he started advising film sets. His own company's site says he retired a Chief Special Warfare Operator, graduated BUD/S with class 200, spent more than fifteen years at SEAL Team Five in Coronado, and ran nine combat deployments, six in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He advised all five seasons of the show and appeared on camera in it, credited as Fighter.

On his wrist is an MTM Gray Cobra. MTM is an American company that hand-assembles and individually numbers its watches in downtown Los Angeles: a titanium case, a sapphire crystal, a quartz chronograph water-resistant to 200 meters, Super-LumiNova on the hands, around 1,600 dollars. The Gray Cobra is the sandblasted-gray finish of the Special Ops Cobra line.

There is a small logic to a real SEAL being the one who wears it: a tactical watch is easy to wave off as costume, until an actual operator straps it on to play a soldier and the line between prop and kit stops holding. MTM keeps a public page of its screen placements, and Kent is on it. By MTM's own account, the watch he wears on The Last Ship is the Gray Cobra. MTM sells the Cobra to the military and police. On The Last Ship it sat on the wrist of someone who had spent twenty-one years as exactly that customer.