Pedro Pascal wears a Casio G-Shock

Comandante Veracruz comes down a green Colombian hillside in tactical gear, a load-bearing vest over his shoulders and a black resin watch on his wrist. Pedro Pascal plays him in Burn Notice: The Fall of Sam Axe, a 2011 television-movie prequel to the USA Network series that explains how the Navy SEAL Sam Axe, played by Bruce Campbell, ended up in Miami. The story sends Axe to Colombia in 2005 to assess a supposed insurgent group, and Veracruz is the local officer running the operation, a man whose military rank is genuine and whose loyalty is for sale. He is using the mission as cover for a drug corridor. This was Pascal years before Game of Thrones and Narcos, making the most of a small part.

The watch is a Casio G-Shock, the black resin kind that has been strapped to soldiers' wrists for forty years. The line began as a dare to physics. In 1981 a Casio engineer named Kikuo Ibe set out to build a watch that could survive a fall from a third-floor window, and after more than two hundred prototypes the first G-Shock reached shops in 1983. The point of it was that it would not break and would not cost much, which is why special forces units around the world have treated it as standard kit ever since. On Veracruz it is the right watch and the honest one. Whatever else the man is, the soldiering is real, and a G-Shock is a soldier's watch.