Masters of the Air: Episode Discussion 9

[muccamukk]

A final episode, a 77-minute runtime, and a new director. Goodnight, sweet show!

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.


3. Likewise, wanting to treat the show as a self-contained unit and not engage with the books/history is perfectly valid.

Comments

[sovay]

I am about three episodes behind at this point, but just hit this article from the Library of America on the Regensburg raid in the airmen's own voices and this comm seemed a suitable place to leave it: "'Their Own Tiny Circle of War': Masters of the Air, in Their Own Words." (The Library of America seems to have opinions about the show.)

[muccamukk]

Well, if you wanted Gale/John content, this episode was a GOLD MINE. A+ shipping.

Rosie's escape from the plane and then landing in no-mans-land was mostly good, though the CGI took a wooble so bad even I noticed it. I liked that they included his tour of Eastern Europe. I'm... less impressed that they made a Jewish character go to a death camp when he (as far as I know) did not do that.

I thought they did a good job making Croz look like he'd aged about 20 years since the first episode. I'm still mad about him for cheating on his wife?

The PoW storyline generally held together really well, and the escape bits were really tense (again, great for John/Gale).

The scenes with Lemmons in the plane was really cute!

This is the director who did Episode Four of the Pacific, and it felt like he knew how to handle war plots?

I'm pretty disheartened on the whole that we had zero queer characters (but some more homophobic jokes!), the Tuskegee guys felt very tokenised after their introduction last episode (underlined by them being the only people outside the main four who got "what happened" bits at the end), and I guess one significant woman, who got treated pretty shabbily. The book to me felt like it'd been published twenty years before it was, and I think the same is true of the show.

So many plots just got dropped. There was so much voice over telling us what was happening. You wanted to know what happened to any of the other characters they spend so little time establishing? I guess that's what the Internet was for. I feel like this is going to be even worse on rewatch, though I currently can't see myself rewatching. It'll be "Oh yeah, that guy!" "Oh right, that was a plot that happened then we never saw again!" for days.

And to be very fucking clear: the Americans never bombed civilians, and if they did those civilians had it coming. Just in case anyone was wondering about war crimes: that would be something exclusive to the Germans. I knew they were going to do this, and then was pissed off that they did it.

[partypaprika]

I have to say that I was both so bitter and so happy at the start of the episode. It was so good. It was exactly what I've been wanting more of. This is an aside, but I will die on this hill--I think that so many of the airplane scenes could have been so much better throughout the series, by focusing more on the interior of the plane and its occupants (and would have been better at heightening tension).

I love the connection that we got to see between Buck and Bucky. I loved that moment when Buck calmed Bucky down by agreeing to go with the escape. And then the separation! AND BUCK'S FACE WHEN BUCKY'S VOICE CAME ON THE RADIO AFTER HE GOT BACK TO BASE.

I really wish that we had more of Alexander, Robert and Richard. I really wish that we had seen them from the beginning or at least several episodes sooner. I liked getting to see them in the "more about" section at the end, but it treated them as main characters where the show did not but really should have. So the showrunners knew that they should be main characters but didn't want to actually do it? I don't even know.

I also really liked how upset Crosby was about Rosie's plane going down. I'm still not sure when they really became friends, but I like that friendship. That exchange about meeting up after the war was nice.

I was SUPER not prepared for the bayonetting of the POW escapee.

For the camp attack, at first, I was like, was shooting at the POW camp a smart idea? But then the explosions started and it made a lot more sense.

They definitely packed in a lot at the end. I loved Ken getting to go up in a plane! Women! They exist!

This episode was good! But felt like it easily could have been split up into a few episodes. Even with the compressed time frame, the emotional beats felt so much better for this episode--again, why couldn't we have this in the other episodes?

The show ended on a high and I'm glad that it did, but on the overall, this show really felt like a let down.

[wearing_tearing]

Well! I'm glad it's over. There were parts of this episode that were great, but that only made me question even more some of the decisions made throughout the series. :/

Favorite moment was Lemmons in the plane! Finally!

[soundandvision]

Whomstever said "yeah 9 episodes is great" needs to be sent to federal prison