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

[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.