[TP REWATCH] Part One and Part Two

[thrillingdetectivetales]

Welcome to the rewatch discussion post for PART ONE and PART TWO of The Pacific.
You are welcome to discuss any and all aspects of the episodes in the comments on this post. Please recognize that others may hold different opinions than yours and continue to abide by our #1 rule: don't be a dick. Additionally, I ask that y'all take care to keep spoiler content off of spoiler-free threads. Otherwise, have fun!

Part One
Spoiler-free thread.
Spoiler friendly thread.

Part Two
Spoiler-free thread.
Spoiler friendly thread.

If you'd like to chat about the episode in real time, join us over on Discord.*

* Please note that during this rewatch, we have done away with spoiler friendly and spoiler-free Discord channels and will simply be using the dedicated channel for The Pacific. As such, if you participate in the discussion on the Discord server you may encounter spoilers.

Comments

Re: Part One [SPOILER FREE]

[thrillingdetectivetales]

However, I didn't find that this really helped in getting to know the characters because there's only a little homefront info then jumping into deployment. Rather, there seem to be less development than in the other series, at least in the first episode.

I totally agree with this assessment. Even though I tend to prefer The Pacific for its take on the war that's less rose-tinted than Band of Brothers, I will say that the first few times I watched it, the first handful of episodes were difficult to get into. It's a much better experience having read both Sledge and Leckie's books, but I firmly believe that it ought to be able to stand up on its own without that background knowledge and it doesn't do an altogether stellar job there.

The overall structure of the episode also didn't really lend itself to much understanding of what was going on, aside from certain scenes. Part of this was probably the many night scenes, and also less clear progress in terms of troop movement.

I think TP overall suffers a bit for its focus on three different protagonists rather than sticking to one solid unit, though I do appreciate it for its tonal shift in showing how brutal the Pacific Theatre really was. I also appreciate that it doesn't shy away from the racism present in the American social fabric at the time, even if it's treated the Japanese soldiers so far mostly as faceless terrors in the night.

I do agree that I had a much harder time fixing in my mind the more granular troop movements and objectives this time around, even though the map graphics between segments helped a bit in terms of general placement.

I like the scene with them reading one another their letters. I wonder if that's still as popular today given so many more entertainment options.

I would imagine that letter reading, or at least gossiping about things back home, is probably still a pretty popular social practice among soldiers or really any group made up of a set of people that share a common background that's different from their current surroundings. I know when I was in college across the country from my hometown and met someone from that area there was always that innate drive to chat about the differences between "there" and "here," respectively.

Re: Part One [SPOILER FREE]

[yourlibrarian]

I firmly believe that it ought to be able to stand up on its own without that background knowledge

Oh definitely. This is the same argument going on in other fandoms, some of them book adaptations but others just poorly written screenplays (Rise of Skywalker). If you have to rely on outside sources, especially things like director or actor interviews as well as tie-in books, then you haven't done your job right.

I mean Leckie's pre-deployment scenes mostly amounted to explaining who Vera was and how repressed his father was. (Given the whole thing with the tire, I was 80% sure that his father was going to have a car wreck on the way home and die as a way of highlighting how no one was safe, whether they were going to war or not).

Yes, the map shots definitely helped, though even there they start at a distance and zoom in, whereas after the first time locating the island regionally, I thought they'd do better focusing just on the island, maybe with dashed lines showing the movement of the different groups.

I know when I was in college across the country from my hometown and met someone from that area there was always that innate drive to chat about the differences between "there" and "here," respectively.

Yes, that makes me think of the scene in Episode 2 of BoB where two soldiers on opposite sides came who from his same hometown.