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]

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.

[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.