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heavyartillery2024-02-01 10:30 am
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Masters of the Air: Episode Discussion 3

I recently learned (because someone had checked Wikipedia, and I had not) that there will only be 9 episodes, not 10 like the other series :'(
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Book spoilers!
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How to do an in-comment spoiler cut:
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(I can see that his refusal to leave Dickie even if it does kill them both is a counterpoint to the other character who abandons the tail gunner to die and also to Buck successfully landing with all engines gone, but still.)
I did like the cold equations stripping down of the shot-to-shit plane in order to make it across the water to Africa, also the guy who argues quite accurately that a B-17 would lose a head-on collision with a cow.
The pacing for this show remains extremely weird.
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The pacing is VERY weird.
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I think it may be the other way around in time: Curt who had previously made that ridiculous emergency landing in Scotland can't repeat the trick in Belgium or France or where the hell ever the trees took out his last aileron, so we shouldn't feel guaranteed that Buck is going to be able to bring in his equally damaged plane. Agreed that it works, just (a) I liked Curt, plus he was one of about four characters I could actually distinguish in the air (b) it still feels narratively jarring and not in a way that valuably increases the unpredictability of the narrative.
The pacing is VERY weird.
It starts like someone cut the episode where they actually all met!
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Then The Pacific didn't do that, just had a brief intro of the characters deciding to go to war (TRAGICALLY cutting the bit in Leckie's book where he introduces himself in the first paragraph as limping due to a USMC-mandated circumcision), then skips forward to combat and two episodes of yelling in the dark, where no one can tell who anyone is. It takes multiple watches of that show to get a sense of the characters, but then again the structure is... creative. And many people complained about that! (I'm sure at the time too.)
And the Bloody 100th had a HILARIOUSLY cursed time at training too, at one point they were trying to do a cross country flight from Nebraska to California, and one of the forts ended up in Tennessee!
Plus Marge (the blonde from the first episode) and Cleven were actually childhood sweethearts who met up again while he was training in Texas, which is kind of a sweet story, if they had to include her.
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Wow.
And the Bloody 100th had a HILARIOUSLY cursed time at training too, at one point they were trying to do a cross country flight from Nebraska to California, and one of the forts ended up in Tennessee!
That would have been delightful to watch, and what's more, it would have made a good buildup to their unhilariously cursed fog-scrubbed mission.
Even a brief intro would have helped Masters of the Air a lot. The whip-round of the voiceover really doesn't compensate. And again, medias res is a time-honored mode of dropping into a story, I don't understand why everything is so slightly out of focus here.
Plus Marge (the blonde from the first episode) and Cleven were actually childhood sweethearts who met up again while he was training in Texas, which is kind of a sweet story, if they had to include her.
Yeah, seriously, coming into this story with no historical knowledge of any of the characters, she just registers as J. Random Blonde.
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I just thought of this, but Band of Brothers was written before the kind of writers rooms we have now were a thing. Basically there was the book, a bunch of interviews with the guys, and then the story was divided up into ten parts, divided out, and written more or less independently. So each episode took place in a more or less emotionally coherent arc overall, since they were pulling from the same novel, and could ask the vets questions, but also was its own story, and each had a slightly different flavour.
Given what both the Pacific and MotA are like, I wonder if we should go back to not letting the writers talk to each other. Because I know John Orloff's writing from BoB, and he can do better than this.
Yeah, J. Random Blonde who's known Cleven for like two weeks tops. SHE WAS THE LOVE OF HIS LIFE, FOR CHRIST'S SAKE. WHAT IS HAPPENING!?
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Still not sure what happened there.
So each episode took place in a more or less emotionally coherent arc overall, since they were pulling from the same novel, and could ask the vets questions, but also was its own story, and each had a slightly different flavour.
I like the sound of the quasi-anthology feel that would have given the series. Was Orloff head writer on the earlier series, too?
SHE WAS THE LOVE OF HIS LIFE, FOR CHRIST'S SAKE. WHAT IS HAPPENING!?
Maybe we'll get flashbacks?
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Orloff wrote Day of Days, which was mostly excellent with a small amount of unnecessary voice over, and Why We Fight, which is probably my least favourite, but I feel like he did the best he could given the topic.
Day of Days has one of the best shorthand character introduction scenes I've ever seen, which I included in my top three favourite moments of the entire show.
I don't think he worked on The Pacific, at least not as a writer.
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Which one was that?
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I did NOT know this.
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