*Episode premise spoilers.*
And here we are at the end of the miniseries! Short and sweet, much like Ncuti Gatwa’s all-too-brief appearance. Guess it’s a good thing I’m watching this while Who is airing, so I can see much more of him outside of Masters of the Air! (Although it was unfortunate timing that my reviews of these two episodes sandwich such a Doctor-lite Who story.)
With the Allies getting ever closer to the POW camp, the Germans decide to cut and run, forcing the prisoners on a long march through the bitterly cold night. Buck, Bucky, and some of the other POWs look for chances to escape. Back with the 100th Bomber Group, Major Robert Rosenthal, nicknamed Rosie, goes down between German and Russian lines.
Last week, I talked about the unusual choice to focus on a lot of buildup to D-Day and then mostly skip the actual invasion itself. Here, the episode definitely feels like a finale in how a lot of things are framed, and I do really like the final scenes before we get to the lengthy “here’s how these guys’ lives turned out after the war” epilogue text. But a lot of the individual plot points that happen don’t really feel big-finale stories.
Considering how sprawling the miniseries is across all nine episodes, the finale really only has two main storylines. Rosie’s plot opens very suspensefully, with their plane sustaining more and more damage and Rosie desperately trying to get them across the Russian lines before going down. After that, though, his story takes more an emotional bent than a dramatic one, and it feels a bit more like a coda than a climax. That said, it’s still done well and gives us one of the miniseries’ few references to the Holocaust.
The POW storyline feels a little more climactic. It’s where the main protagonists are, and there’s a fair amount of peril and tension. Some good details, like the highest-ranking POW taking the Germans to task for making them march at night—in the dark, they wind up getting shot at by their own American planes. Still, it doesn’t exactly build to a crescendo, especially as a culmination to this arc over the last several episodes.
This episode has even less of Ncuti Gatwa than the previous one did. The three Tuskegee Airmen at the POW camp get hardly any focus. They’re largely just faces in the crowd as the prisoners march, suffer, and are threatened. And despite Buck explicitly inviting Alex into their covert planning in episode 8, due to his exceptional mapmaking skills, no one so much as looks in his direction when they discuss making a run for it.
Because all three of the Black characters are given so little time here, Daniels isn’t noticeably shortchanged compared to the other two (although Alex and Richard both get a spot in the epilogue text while Daniels doesn’t.) Gatwa only has a few lines.
I know we just did this last week, but here are my final thoughts for Masters of the Air:
Accent Watch
American. Gatwa doesn’t have enough lines to tell much more than it.
Recommend?
In General – Soft maybe. It’s decent, and the acting is good.
Ncuti Gatwa – Not a must. There’s hardly anything for him to do, which is a bummer.
Warnings
Violence, drinking/smoking, swearing, gross-out moments, and thematic elements.
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