Masters of the Air: Episode Discussion 6

[muccamukk]

In which we answer the burning question: will we finally see a female character with both a speaking role and decent hair? Also, is Egan going to die, or whatever?

Rules:

1. Don't be a dick. Specifically (but not limited to):


1. Not liking something is fine, and negative comments are fine. Please do not directly tell other participants why the thing they like is bad or that they are bad for liking it.


2. Kink shaming will be deleted.


3. Racism, homophobia, transphobia, antisemitism, misogyny, etc will be deleted.


2. Discussing material from the books is fine, but if you're going to discuss something that happens in future episodes, or the fate of historical characters, please put it under a cut and title the comment Book spoilers! or something similar.


3. Likewise, wanting to treat the show as a self-contained unit and not engage with the books/history is perfectly valid.

How to do an in-comment spoiler cut:
<details><summary>Describe what you're spoiling here</summary>All the spoilers go in this part.</details>

Comments

[muccamukk]

Somewhat mixed feelings about this one.

Good: It was nice to follow just three characters, who were wearing masks 0% of the time! Tracking who the fuck was who much improved. (Still don't know who Rosie's crew are, but oh well.)

A female character with a personality! And decent hair! Who wasn't a love interest! Hooray! She and Croz were really cute, and I liked the continued impact of losing Bubbles.

A lot of the Egan running around scenes were genuinely tense.

It felt like they were nodding to combat fatigue existing, which is a nice change of pace, even if nothing of the kind would happen to our heroes.

Nice to see Cleven again.

Rosie's hair remains A+


Less good:
I didn't like the juxtaposition of the bombed out city (making sure we knew it was the RAF, not our guys) and civilian suffering with those civilians brutally murdering prisoners of war. (Which did happen in Berlin late in the war, but not to Egan). Especially given how often the shouting Germans were shot slow-motion firelit less-than-human. It felt like a lot of the way this episode was cut was to reassure us that the Germans had it coming. And I really feel like there's middle ground between "Nazis are evil and Hitler had to be stopped" and "bombing civilian centres is justified." I don't think the show's interested in any ambiguity on that point.

I actually would like to see some of the psychological impact people keep talking about. Maybe that's next episode? *mutters about Twelve O'Clock High doing better with this in fucking 1949*

There were a couple really weird errors, like Oxford having a "campus." and Alexandra 'Landra' M. Wingate changing to A.M. 'Sandra' Westgate.

All of the Brit V. American stuff was just annoyingly unsubtle, which I guess some of it was at the time, but we already got several rounds of this with the RAF pilots. *sighs*

*fly squint most of the rest of the hair*

[partypaprika]

Re Sandra, I was genuinely uncertain if they would be having some kind of romantic relationship arise. There seemed to be a few deep looks at her by Crosby. I really didn't want anything to happen between them, so I'm glad that it didn't.

There were some ups and downs this episode. I definitely felt the tension with Egan's on the run experience.

I see what you're saying about the lighting and slow mo of the guards, but I felt like that was more in service to the fear and surreality of being a POW. I actually felt like the episode engendered more compassion for the civilians in the city (despite the killing of the POWs) with the destruction and loss of life very present.

[muccamukk]

I had faith that they wouldn't show Croz cheating on his wife, but his bedroom eyes indicated that he wouldn't have kicked Sandra out of bed, admittedly. I liked what someone on chat said about it feeling like he was just passing through her story, and she was off on her "borrowed" bicycle to have Spy Adventures or whatever.

I didn't mind the guards as much, though I felt they were leaning a little too hard on it, but the citizens where shot like the village mob at the start of Nosferatu! I just don't think adding them killing PoWs added anything to the plot, other than to underline the brutality of random German civilians. You don't need that to justify the war in general! You certainly don't need a literal musical number about it! Anyway, MMV.

[sovay]

Rosie's hair remains A+

It does! The mustache works for him, too.

I don't think the show's interested in any ambiguity on that point.

I don't think it is, either, which is making it less nuanced than actual films produced during World War II.

I actually would like to see some of the psychological impact people keep talking about.

I did feel it was present in the intercut conversations of Rosenthal with the doctor and Crosby with Sandra, about responsibility and guilt and wear and tear. Agreed that no one we know is actually breaking down and someone in the main cast should blow at least a small fuse one of these days.

Alexandra 'Landra' M. Wingate changing to A.M. 'Sandra' Westgate.

I didn't realize she was meant to be a historical person with the serial numbers thinly filed off. Maybe the show couldn't get permission from her family?

[muccamukk]

Landra/Sandra was in Crosby's book, though it's possible he didn't remember her name right, and the show corrected it. The situation remains murky.

[sovay]

The situation remains murky.

Check.

[wearing_tearing]

A female character with a personality! And decent hair!
Only took 6 episodes! Her character was very much a breath of fresh air.

Nice to see Cleven again.
The contrast of Egan being happy to see him while in the awful situation they're in. Better to be among friends, I guess.

And I really feel like there's middle ground between "Nazis are evil and Hitler had to be stopped" and "bombing civilian centres is justified." I don't think the show's interested in any ambiguity on that point.
Agreed! Your point about how the shouting Germans were shot hits on that perfectly. Same with the German soldiers mostly being shown yelling aggressively at POWs.

I actually would like to see some of the psychological impact people keep talking about.
Isn't one crying man enough? :O

[muccamukk]

We didn't get good female characters until later than this in BoB, but somehow this feels longer. Maybe because there's all those women around they could give personalities to, and yet...

Well, and as far as Egan knew, Cleven was dead! Which is a trope I'm always 100% here for.

I guess we also had the guy who said he wouldn't go back up last week, but he seems to be fine now, so *shrugs*

[wearing_tearing]

but somehow this feels longer. Maybe because there's all those women around they could give personalities to, and yet...
I believe this is exactly why.

Which is a trope I'm always 100% here for.
Yes!!! I do wish we had like a scene of them hugging and staring into each other's eyes, glad they're both alive and together again, or something.

Trauma is a passing thing, as we all know...

[partypaprika]

I definitely have a lot more excitement going into this episode than the previous ones. I really think that a lot has to do with Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck.

My thoughts:

Great music in this one as well.

Landing in German territory and having the citizens be openly hostile was really interesting. Great tension there. When it escalated to killing the POWs while under German guard, that genuinely surprised me.

Love the humor of american english v. british english in subaltern.

A woman with a speaking role! More please. I haven't seen Bel Powley in anything for a while, so it was nice to see her here.

The contrast of the flack house and Bucky's experience was well done and highlighted the complete opposites of genuinely being in fear of Bucky's life and Rosenthal's desire to get back (even though he absolutely needed time off). I like the discussion between Dr. Huston and Rosenthal and working through Rosenthal's feelings about how he should be able to keep everything in.

"Baseball is still a bit of a mystery to me." Me too.

The train scene with the women was so hard to watch, but I'm glad that they included it.

Bucky seeing Buck at the end felt very emotional. It was well done.

It was interesting seeing that the luftwaffe controlled the POW camp. In the US (I believe) it was all administered by the same department, so I'm surprised that it wasn't the same in Germany.

I still think that the show is trying to do too much at once and follow too many people. I think I would have appreciated it more if they had stuck to one main character (or at least one main character per episode). But while I did like episode 5 better than this one, I do think that these two felt cohesive together and I enjoyed them more than 1-4.

[muccamukk]

I don't think I've seen Bel Powley in anything, but she was lovely here.

I agree that the chopping back and forth felt a bit too stuttery a lot of the time. Maybe they could've been in longer sections or something? It felt like they were trying to get a lot in, though this was also the longest episode since the pilot. Also, yeah, it's falling into the same thing as The Pacific with running multiple storylines at once, and underserving all of them, imo.

Guess we're just not going to see Sergeant Quinn again? Did he escape, or...?

On to adding even more characters next week!

[partypaprika]

As much as I like both Crosby and Bel's character, I wish that they had cut that storyline. It just seemed like too much time out of the action. I actually kind of wish that we'd had a whole episode about POWs and their different experiences after ejection from the planes. I'd love to compare contrast Egan's experience with other experiences (but I do understand why production might have thought that was overkill).

[muccamukk]

I think they could've shuffled things without cutting them. Had a whole On The Ground episode in England, and a contrasting one on the continent, and then one less "we're flying the same mission as last week" episode or something.

[wearing_tearing]

Landing in German territory and having the citizens be openly hostile was really interesting.
I was on the edge of my seat during those scenes!

Bucky seeing Buck at the end felt very emotional. It was well done.
This is the scene that actually makes me believe they're best friends and care deeply for each other.

But while I did like episode 5 better than this one, I do think that these two felt cohesive together and I enjoyed them more than 1-4.
Agreed! It makes me wonder what they were trying to do with the first 4 episodes and why time was spent on certain plot points in those hours...

[sovay]

(a) Narration still superfluous. The image of the living tiptoeing around the unspoken spaces left by the dead is very good and could have been worked into dialogue.

(b) Hey, it's the area bombing we were just talking about! We were also just talking about the American tendency to shove all the blame off on the RAF!

(c) Unless it is part of the historical record that Egan survived a semi-official mass murder of prisoners of war by letting himself be taken for dead and crawling off into the woods when it came time to dump the bodies, I have feelings of sufficient animus almost to derail my watching of the episode, that was interesting. If it is part of the historical record, reality gets a pass for being dumb as rocks.

(d) And then the sort of drawing-room parallel of Crosby insulted for being American by the random British officer, I really didn't think American fliers as a species needed woobifying. That said, Cros and Sandra: 10/10, no notes except that if she isn't meant to be SOE, the show is missing a real trick. "Basically I ended up with no quarters and no boots."

(e) Rosenthal: 10/10, just for the argument with his metaphor of Gene Krupa and using Artie Shaw to climb back in at the end. "Jews from Brooklyn don't ride horses."

(f) Oh, there's the Holocaust. Inevitable when your narrative crosses a railyard, I suppose. (Heads-up appreciated.)

(g) The folk singer has a nice vibrato, but she doesn't have a remotely '40's style.

(h) I feel like I'd have heard if Egan or Cleven were involved in any of the really famous escapes of Stalag Luft III, but I'm up for being surprised.

Altogether this episode along with the previous continues to feel like an improvement on the first four in terms of tracking characters in ways we are intended to care about, not to mention feeling like a coherent unit of narrative instead of a chunk of events. Cool.

[muccamukk]

a) Agreed. They really could just... not have it, and it'd be 100% the same storytelling, but less annoying.

b) The USAF apparently never hit civilian centres? Is what I'm getting?

c) He was not. IIRC, RL Egan ran about for a couple days, got caught, was processed and sent to a Stalag in a more or less orderly fashion. I can get changing things around for plot effect, like moving Bubbles' death forward by about four months, but this is nonsense.

d) RL Croz tried to call up the number she gave him/drop by her alleged workplace, and they were like WHOMST? She was, as far as he could tell, probably SOE.

e) really loving Rosie's everything.

h) 🤐 Define "really famous"?

[sovay]

b) The USAF apparently never hit civilian centres? Is what I'm getting?

It actually will annoy me if the show does not correct this impression, since it already exists in the wild as a myth in this country and there's no need—there's every reason not—to perpetuate it.

c) He was not. IIRC, RL Egan ran about for a couple days, got caught, was processed and sent to a Stalag in a more or less orderly fashion.

Or that will bother me more. I thought at first that the bombing of Rüsselsheim was meant to parallel the bombing of London, both sets of civilian streets seen by Egan under extremely different circumstances. It came out feeling instead like its own justification.

d) RL Croz tried to call up the number she gave him/drop by her alleged workplace, and they were like WHOMST? She was, as far as he could tell, probably SOE.

Awesome.

h) Define "really famous"?

I read the books of The Wooden Horse and The Great Escape.

[muccamukk]

Yeah, I'm really worried about the tone of all of this (and have been from the start). As you said, how this story was told with more nuance in the 1940s. It really didn't need Greatest Generation gloss smeared all over it.

Three episodes to go one way or another.

We're moving on to Dee Rees as director!

[sovay]

As you said, how this story was told with more nuance in the 1940s. It really didn't need Greatest Generation gloss smeared all over it.

Yes. The history is enough in itself. And it's a bad time for simple stories.

I found that the Rüsselsheim massacre was real; it occured almost a year after the events of the episode; Egan was obviously not involved. It seems relatively well-known. It shouldn't be fictionalized to make the audience feel for a protagonist.

We're moving on to Dee Rees as director!

I don't know her work! I look forward.

[muccamukk]

Not a great time for Hooray! Area bombing! either, though I don't suppose any time is.

I remembered that there was at least one real incident of German civilians killing downed airmen, all quite late in the war, but yeah... as I said above, it feels to much to me like "and this is why it was okay to bomb them."

[sovay]

I remembered that there was at least one real incident of German civilians killing downed airmen, all quite late in the war, but yeah... as I said above, it feels to much to me like "and this is why it was okay to bomb them."

It gave me that sense, too, especially in combination with Egan hunted for his life by the first German strangers he stumbles on in the cold open: any sympathy the viewer may feel for the civilians shell-shocked in their still-burning city is shown by their violence to be a mistake. It really did almost knock me out of the episode, which would have been a shame because of the strength of the other two threads, but. Meh.

[edit] Aside from how it makes me feel my sympathies are being directed, it's also just kind of nightmare overkill. For all Egan knows given the slaughter he went down in, he's the sole survivor, alone in a countryside where strangers are shoot-on-sight. It's tense and disorienting and fraught with bad discoveries. He doesn't need to have anything worse happen to him on his way to a prisoner-of-war camp than what happened to him in real life, as it happened to a lot of fliers in real life. (I'm thinking of a line from Margery Allingham's The China Governess (1963): "We were sent to Canada and I came back a navigator. I had a most inglorious war. Having cost the country a packet to train I went out on my first raid, got shot down, and went straight into the bag. It took me two years to get away.") And if the horror of officially sanctioned scapegoat murder is meant to run in parallel with his brush with genocide at the depot—a microcosm of how a community turns into a licensed mob—that's really distasteful and I hope it isn't. It occurred to me with Egan jolting on the dead-cart, getting away into the woods. I understand it really happened to a couple of Americans in 1944, but at the time when I was watching it, it felt a lot like survivor imagery and I felt very weird about it.

[muccamukk]

It's absolutely overkill. John Egan woke up that morning hung over and thinking it was pretty likely his best friend burned to death, watched most of his squadron blow up around him, and then spent two days stealing cabbages and running for his life DEEP inside a country that was immensely hostile, and then got caught, interrogated, and shipped off to a PoW camp. He was having a Very Bad week anyway!

If I had to guess as to why they added that plot element, I'd say that it goes with the show's Everything And the Kitchen Sink approach to narrative. They knew it'd happened to someone, it was pretty dramatic, so why not include it, with very little thought to what it did to the story or what themes it introduced. That's my charitable reading, anyway.

[sovay]

If I had to guess as to why they added that plot element, I'd say that it goes with the show's Everything And the Kitchen Sink approach to narrative.

I suspect you are correct, but it was at least two frying pans too many.

[kore]

Great Escape def, the 1950 book and especially the 1963 movie.

[muccamukk]

I can definitively say, without any real spoilers, that Buck Squared did not do anything equivalent to the 1963 movie version of The Great Escape!

[kore]

THAT BIKE JUMP

[partypaprika]

I agree about the narration. It really took me out of it. Same for the song. There were a bunch of good one-liners this episode that made me smile, including the Jews from Brooklyn comment.