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]

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