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

[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!