Masters of the Air: Episode Discussion 8

[muccamukk]

NCUTI GATWA! (that is all)

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]

I always say the penultimate episode is the best time to introduce a bunch of new characters and plots!

I liked the Red Tails, and felt like we got a better intro to at least Alex than we have to most of the mains in the rest of the series. Idk much about the other two. I do feel like... a) apparently white airmen expressed no racist attitudes whatsoever at anytime b) I don't understand why we've sprouted a Red Tails plot in episode 8/9.

Same with Sandra. Happy to watch five seasons and a movie of Bel Powell's spy adventures, but why the hell are they included on this show? The filming of her scenes were great though!

All the Buck Squared things in the camp were good, though I would've liked more about how Egan came around to being productive.

Don't really care about Croz anymore, and not nearly enough Rosie this episode.

[partypaprika]

WHAT DO YOU MEAN WE DON'T GET TO SEE ANY OF THE D-DAY MISSIONS??? What do you even--I don't even??? How do you do a WWII show about a unit that participates in D-Day and only have a five second blip???

This episode made me want to tear my hair out. I liked getting to see the Tuskegee airmen and I liked the characters introduced, but also their backstory didn't tie into anything. Why not introduce this episodes earlier and have us follow their progression? Also...so we saw Sandra for a moment in France and then...nothing about her mission? Why include?

Crosby's narration drove me crazy. I feel like we could have just seen this episode from Rosie's perspective and from the POW camp and that would have been so much more coherent. Such a frustrating episode for me.

[muccamukk]

I suspect they couldn't afford d-day? But yeah, it feels like they got caught up in "We have to tell this from Croz's perspective, and he slept through it, so oh well." when... no you didn't! Rosie is right there! Trying to be a main character! We all still actually like Rosie!

It feels like the show got told it had to include people of colour and women with significant roles, and instead of working out meaningful ways to do that, just sort of tacked them on.

[impala_chick]

I liked how they showed Crosby's perspective of not sleeping and how that felt to work himself to exhaustion - and how they were giving him uppers because they clearly needed him to do that job - but then he didn't even get to celebrate the victorious mission he had a big hand in planning. His voice is much more muddied now, he's not some paragon of virtue and I like that for him. He's the guy plotting their missions, but he's got all these issues he's clearly not dealing with - at least he can do this ONE thing well enough. I think about this in contrast with Dick Winters, the major POV of BoB - he was held out as this perfect leader, and that got a little unbelievable at times.

Alex!! Loved his character, loved how they showed they were getting shit missions and no promotions and they were still damn good pilots. It was exciting to see a bit of their backstory before they joined the Bucks - and the tension in the camp with all of the plotting and planning is intense.

Buck and Bucky and their VERY public spat.... I have many thoughts, none of them coherent.

Still not sure what they're trying to show with Sandra - I couldn't really understand what her handlers were saying to her in France. I just like that she's the one who isn't simping over Harry. For her, her missions always come first and she's always been clear about that. I want more of her though.

HOW are they wrapping all of this up in one more ep??? :(

[muccamukk]

The camera work around Croz getting more and more strung out was really well done. I liked the shot where everyone except him was slightly fast forwarded. I also thought the scene with him and Rosie was really sweet. I like that we're getting them interacting a bit more. I do wish we got a bit more about what planning the missions involved.

I felt like we got a really good sense of who Alex was and where he was coming from in not very much screentime, which I appreciated. And the shots of the red tails in flight were really cool!

Wrestling! In front of my salad stump puller thingy.

I'd watch the Sandra show! I wish the Sandra show was a thing.

NO IDEA how they're going to wrap all this up!

[wearing_tearing]

Positive things first:
--Great seeing the Tuskegee airmen and wish we had gotten an episode about them sooner. The show could have focused more on their own journeys through the war and how that was like for them.

--The camp scenes post-Egan getting his shit together were also fun! I always love scenes of people organizing and readying themselves to fuck shit up so they can be free.

Everything else:
--Couldn't be bothered with Crosby anymore and skipped pretty much all of his scenes.

--D-Day shown through only a glimpse because Crosby was passed out made me SO ANGRY.

--What was the point of giving us Sandra and doing nothing with her spy arc?? I wanted to see her be amazing!

--Not enough Rosie.

[muccamukk]

Someone on the HA discord had a vision of the show as 50% Red Tails and 50% the Bloody Hundredth, and then we see the plots come together with the PoWs, and it really digs into the characters and race issues. Alas. The fighter flying scenes were really cool though!

Love a good training montage.

Agreed on everything else.

[wearing_tearing]

That would have been AMAZING! We could have had it aaaaaaaaaaaaall. :(

[kore]

Now that sounds like a great show.

[soundandvision]

Why was a quarter of this episode: the cat scene and Crosby cheating on his wife with someone who had an interesting side plot they never finished like? And no dday scenes? Just barf boy cheating on his wife?

And then they introduced the Tuskegee airmen with one episode left. Can we get an entire show with them they were killing it with the chemistry.

[muccamukk]

If you find out what's even happening with the pacing of this show, do let me know! I'm baffled. I think they couldn't afford D-Day, is my only guess.

Have you seen Red Tails (2012)? That's got all of the Tuskegee airmen, none of the cat murder. But it's a single film, not the whole series they deserve.

[soundandvision]

I wish I could figure it out because the first two episodes should have been one and it's gotten messier ever since.

I will add that to my list. I just found out about the Searching for Augusta movie as well (about the nurse who worked w Renee).

For the record, I get why they ate that cat but like come on. This episode had way too much going on already and they thought they needed this? If you compare this to the episode of Chernobyl where they had to go around shooting radioactive animals* it's a stark difference in how they used it to drive the plot.

*do not watch that show if you are tender-hearted or cannot stand gross medical stuff you will be destroyed.

[muccamukk]

I still think we should've had a training episode, to get to know the characters a bit before we started killing them off higgledy piggledy. Oh well.

I haven't seen the Searching for Augusta movie, but I did read the book, which was mostly pretty good, though the author rags on Renée, and it's not Renée's fault that the show remembered what her actual name was.

Ditto Chernobyl actually, not seen the show, but did read the Svetlana Alexievich oral history, which was incredible. Though it did have people melting, etc.

I thought the cat thing was episode 7?

[soundandvision]

Exactly. Like it's never gonna be BOB but I really think the structure of BOB is really good. Everyone meeting/getting to know each other one ep, various battles with the narration driving the continuity, centering the episode on a theme/location etc.

Yeah people get weird about Renee. She died in the war it's not like she was behind erasing Augusta and the other black women who did a lot in the war.

Chernobyl also included the skin issues and other gruesome medical things that happened due to radiation exposure. I had to watch it w my partner in the other room because they can't stomach it. It was such a well-done show though.

Was it???????? I cannot remember cause I watched two in a row so my bad but I also needed to complain about it. Sorry! My complaint still stands for 1/4 the episode being about Crosby cheating and lack of dday.

lmao I had a really rough week please forgive me

[muccamukk]

I was saying this somewhere earlier in these posts: I think that what really worked for BoB, and that The Pacific and MotA are both missing, is dividing the story up into ten chunks, handing them out do different writers, and then (unintentionally) siloing those writers. We get ten stories with different flavours and point of view characters, each as a complete story in and of itself, that are easy to remember and tell apart. I could barely tell you what happened in any given episode of this show, because it feels like most of it dragged together. I remember the director blocks more than anything.

I can absolutely blame various people for not getting Augusta's NAME RIGHT, but that was not actually Renée's fault. She was very much dead and had been for fifty years!