Masters of the Air

Part 4 Season 1 Episode 4 Editor’s Rating 3 stars ***

Masters of the Air

Part 4 Season 1 Episode 4 Editor’s Rating 3 stars ***

In content and form, the fourth episode of Masters of the Air differs enough from the third to give you whiplash. Where Part Three unfolded over the course of a single day and a single mission, devoting almost the entirety of its run time to aerial combat, this chapter stretches out over a couple of months, following subplots on either side of the English Channel while keeping nearly all the action offscreen.

Showrunner John Orloff’s decisions about what to show us versus what to explain away with a line of dialogue or via group navigator Harry Crosby’s sporadic narration — another mainstay absent last episode but returns here — are increasingly opaque. The scene that opens this episode, wherein the crews of the 11 forts that survived the raid on Regensburg are finally picked up by the Twelfth Air Force three days after they limped to Algeria seems disposable. Other than confirming for us that along with seeing a lot of their friends killed, the bomber boys didn’t get the “ice cold beer and lobster tail” James Murray’s Colonel “Chic” Harding promised would be waiting for them in Africa, this doesn’t accomplish much.

Crosby is back with the clunky documentary-style narration as we cut to Flanders, Belgium, where the waist gunner we saw bail out of a flaming B-17 last episode — now identified as Sergeant William Quinn, which is how I can now name the actor who plays him as Kai Alexander, who is, would you believe, English — finds himself reunited with his crewmate Sergeant Bailey. They’re in the custody of the French Resistance, along with another airman calling himself Bob.

The montage of an unsmiling Frenchman attempting to weed out Nazi infiltrators by quizzing his charges on American culture is my favorite scene of the episode because, as near as I can tell, the thing “Bob” does to give himself away as a Nazi and earn himself a bullet to the face is to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” much more enthusiastically than the two American flyboys, and with a greater command of the lyrics. Sergeant Bailey, who’d proved his Yankee credentials by knowing which baseball teams Babe Ruth played for, protests that he’d talked to this man for an hour. His French protectors must be mistaken! “We don’t make mistakes,” one of them says, helping himself to the cigarette lighter of the man he’s just killed, who was almost certainly a Nazi spy, probably. Unless he wasn’t.

For what it’s worth, Bob’s last word was No! Instead of Nein!, but maybe he was just committed to his role. In a show full of millennial Brits and Irishmen doing their damndest to sound like Americans born roughly a century ago, I also wondered if Bob didn’t arouse his captors’ suspicion by over-egging his accent and dialect work: “Y’all sure musta kicked the hornet’s nest,” he tells Bailey. “They come at us with a fury like I ain’t never seen!” Uh-huh. And you know all the words to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” too? Not Great, Bob! If that is your real name!

After that always-stirring credits sequence, we return to Thorpe Abbots, where one of those erratically deployed title cards tells us it’s now September 16, 1943, a month after the opening scene in Algeria. Anthony Boyle’s narrator/navigator, Harry Crosby, drops back in to explain that the crew of the fort firing celebratory flares and buzzing the airfield in triumph before landing has just survived their 25th mission, the number after which bomber crews were rotated back to the United States to hawk war bonds — and prove to the public that bomber crews were not doomed. (Later in the war, this would stretch to 30 missions and then to 35.)

There’s a party on base that night in honor of those survivors, Captain Glenn Dye and his crew, before they head home. We’ve not been introduced to Dye (played by Englishman George Webster) before, but he points out to a table of his fellow old-timers — the guys who’ve been in England for three months now — that only 12 of the 35 crews that flew in from Greenland back in June are still alive. This takes some of the wind out of his fellows’ attempts to hold him up as their own Charlie Robertson, at that time the most recent baseballer to pitch a perfect game, 21 years earlier. One member of a replacement crew that’s just arrived at Thorpe Abbots points out that surviving 25 missions is rare enough an accomplishment to warrant a party, which is not an encouraging sign.

This crew, led by Nate Mann’s Lieutenant Robert “Rosie” Rosenthal, comes with enough of a reputation to get them a personal welcome from their seasoned superior officers, Austin Butler’s Gale “Buck” Clevin and Callum Turner’s John “Bucky” Egan. In this scene, we see Bucky’s bravado is finally fading away. The losses of the Regensburg mission haunt him. It gets worse when Rosie, without his crew, asks the two vets for advice. “Try to stay alive,” Buck shrugs.

One of Rosie’s crewmen, Lieutenant Nash, has no time for morbid reflection. He goes straight for a fetching brunette Red Cross volunteer at the party, who introduces herself as Helen. “Like Helen of Troy,” Nash coos. Was this the face that launched a thousand B-17s?

Colonel Harding was somewhat unusual, Miller reports, in that he drank and fraternized with the men under his command. The Colonel is already pickled when he arrives at the party. He tells his men he’s just had “a mood-killing conversation with Doc Stover.” We’ve had only brief glimpses of Captain Wendell C. “Smoky” Stover, the 100th Bomb Group’s flight surgeon, thus far. He rates some discussion in Miller’s book around the paradox of being a physician charged with diagnosing and treating combat fatigue — where “treatment” in most cases meant giving an airman just enough rest and sympathy that he could return to the combat that left him traumatized in the first place.

Anyway, Stover has expressed concern that the veteran crews are becoming “flak happy.” Harding tells his men he’s skeptical of this head shrinking; that war is war and it was ever thus, encouraging the flyboys to party as hard as necessary to keep the fear and grief at bay. When Bucky dares to tell the Colonel — in front of his other subordinates — that he may be flak-happy, Buck, recognizing the gross breach of discipline (though Harding lets it go), tells Bucky he ought to get himself a weekend pass. Bucky wants his pal to accompany him to London, but Buck, monogamous teetotaler that he is, declines. Instead, he picks up Meatball, the 100th’s canine mascot, and embraces the Very Good Boy for a slow spin around the dance floor. “I’m telling Marge,” Buck teases him.

Back in Flanders, downed airmen Quinn and Bailey are saying their good-byes to the Belgian family that has, we gather, sheltered them for the previous month. Quinn seems to have formed a relationship with the adolescent girl who first discovered him splashing across their farm. Their Resistance minder brings Quinn and Bailey to another adolescent woman, whom he tells them will guide them through France and on to Spain. She immediately spots a scarf Quinn is wearing — a gift from his Belgian sweetheart, we infer — as a giveaway. Searching Quinn’s bag, the Frenchman finds a love letter from the Belgian girl. Burning the note, he tells Quinn that if the Nazis captured him with that document in his possession, they would torture and murder the girl and her family, then do the same to other families in the area.

“Like pulling a thread on a sweater,” the Frenchman says. No time for love, Sergeant Quinn.

In London, where the third time-stamp of the episode tells us it’s now October 8, Bucky flirts and drinks with a beautiful Polish woman at Cafe Warsaw in Hammersmith. (She’s played by Polish actor and singer Joanna Kulig, and only from the end credits will I learn her character is named Paulina.) Her pilot husband has been missing since the Nazis invaded their home country four years earlier. “Perhaps you are drinking his spirit,” she says, pouring a little vodka for him. Later, bomb blasts and anti-aircraft fire light up the London skyline through her bedroom window as she and Bucky get to it. Away from the base and his men, a post-coital Bucky is even more dejected than before. “The Germans deserve every last one of your bombs,” Paulina assures him.

“If there’s any balance to this, my ticket was punched a long time ago,” Bucky broods. There is no balance, she tells him, before opining that “the closer you are to death, the more alive you feel” and mounting him for round two, or possibly four or seven. Big points to Turner and Kulig for making this dialogue work, sort of.

Back at Thorpe Abbots, Buck’s squadron is — as narrator Crosby tells us — being sent to bomb the submarine pens at Bremen again after the prior raid failed. Here, Orloff dramatizes a familiar occurrence Miller describes in his book, where Nash tries to get a farewell kiss from Helen, but coffee and a donut are all she’s prepared to offer him through the Red Cross Clubmobile window. There’s an odd bit of business with Raff Law’s crew chief, Sergeant Lemmons, trying to fix an engine on Buck’s fort as it’s taxiing down the runway for takeoff. This scene must’ve been murder to shoot, and its contribution to the narrative is minimal.

On a train bound for Paris, Quinn admits to Bailey that he was unable to free their fellow gunner Babyface from their fort’s jammed ball turret before bailing out himself. So he’s already keyed up to panic, which he does when asked for his ticket by the conductor, forcing his French guide and a strange woman who turns out to be part of the resistance to explain away his anxiety by claiming he’s deaf. There’s a heavy presence of uniformed Nazis at the train station, and Quinn’s panic attack nearly gets him and his companion killed.

Just a few minutes of screen time later, the forts that bombed Bremen — a mission we see none of, in stark contrast to last week’s all-aerial-action installment — are returning. Some of them: Eight are unaccounted for, including Buck’s and Crosby’s. In the post-mission interrogation, Rosie says he took command of the squadron after Buck’s fort went down. He also stops by the donut wagon to give Helen the unhappy news that Nash, her one-night lover, didn’t make it.

Back in London, Egan — that’s Bucky, lest you forget — is asking reflective, horny Paulinia to spend another day with him. “Let’s not make more of this than it was,” she says on her way out, letting him down easy by telling him she couldn’t bear to lose another pilot. Heading out to find a paper, Bucky walks past a bombed-out house where a woman wails in grief for whoever was killed inside. He buys a Daily Herald with headlines claiming that the Eighth Air Force has destroyed the submarine pens at Bremen at great cost. “30 BOMBERS LOST — NAZI U-BOAT BASE DESTROYED.” Calling the base from a phone booth, he reaches Harding’s aide, Stephen Campbell Moore’s Major Marvin “Red” Bowman, who tells him that Buck “went down swinging, along with most of the starting lineup.” Sticking to that easily deciphered code, Bucky tells Bowman to pass the word to the coach that he’ll be back in time for tomorrow’s game. “And I want to pitch,” Bucky declares.

Flak-Bait

• Since this episode follows Bucky on a weekend pass to get drunk and get laid, this is probably the right place to direct extra-credit seekers to the discussion of sex work and the venereal-disease epidemic that struck the U.K. in 1943 that Miller includes on pages 219-220 of Masters of the Air. Per Miller: “Soon, the American Red Cross was operating prophylactic stations in its clubs, and the Army finally built up a sufficient supply of condoms. The early ones, supplied by the British, were found to be ‘too small.’” Those quotation marks are Miller’s, though I had to peruse his book’s bibliography to learn where he was quoting from. It’s a volume called Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain 1942-1945 by David Reynolds. I don’t have that book, so I can’t source the assertion that the Yanks had their British allies outgunned any more deeply than that.

Masters of the Air Recap: London by Night