- Vampire Panties
- Apr 18, 2001
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nposter
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Nap Ghost
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Also, why drop the bombs in the water instead of bringing them back to the base and using them the next time?
hey I didnt see this answered specifically in the thread but they armed the bombs by pulling the arming pins. The pins can go back into the fuse, but its dicey. Airfields dont want planes landing with potentially thousands of pounds of armed explosives
So far I like this show a lot
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Feb 9, 2024 14:08
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May 11, 2024 11:54
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- Vampire Panties
- Apr 18, 2001
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nposter
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Nap Ghost
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Leave the RAF alone, they are happy shooting .303 at armour plating. It'll work eventually.
Just use more of them! 
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Feb 11, 2024 00:26
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- Vampire Panties
- Apr 18, 2001
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nposter
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Nap Ghost
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The Soviets loved certain US planes as well
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Mar 2, 2024 15:03
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- Vampire Panties
- Apr 18, 2001
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nposter
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Nap Ghost
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I certainly don't think that MOA is bad but I'd be lying if I didn't say I think it's a significant step down from what BoB and The Pacific delivered.
Like a lot of streaming shows, it felt like there were certain points the creators wanted to hit, and then they just fluffed over the rest. Its like they felt they couldnt show multiple episodes of any one setting, so they rushed through everything with multiple crews showing up for 1-2 episodes. They could have put Austin Butler and the other dude in the same plane, condensed the france/belgium escape and POW camp into one crew had Rosie's Riveters go to Africa etc they could have even done the classic fakeout and introduce a bunch of dudes and have them all die for Black Thursday
also they could have built up the tension w/r/t the appearance of Mustangs. I think there's one passing shot of some thunderbolts waving off at the coast of France, but bomber crews were complaining about range of fighter escorts from day one.
EDIT
as it is, there's no room for anything on this show to breathe. Part of what makes BoB great is the down scenes, like Polar Bear Winters, and MOA is left with a bunch of randos getting drunk in a Quonset hut
Vampire Panties fucked around with this message at 13:26 on Mar 6, 2024
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Mar 6, 2024 03:46
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- Vampire Panties
- Apr 18, 2001
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nposter
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Nap Ghost
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9x 45 minute episodes of them getting shot up in their aluminum tubes would probably get very monotonous. Since the 8th air force was doing the equivalent of a full frontal assault for much of the time it would be gratuitous and how many ways can you depict a bomber crew getting eviscerated before you loses interest.
I have been enjoying the juxtaposition between what happens to the crews when they get back to base vs what happens when you get shot down.
True, but they didn't need to burn up the slaughter scenes in the 1st/2nd episodes
I'll watch the finale, but the chances of me rewatching this are exactly zero
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Mar 9, 2024 22:47
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- Vampire Panties
- Apr 18, 2001
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nposter
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Nap Ghost
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Finished watching it. Anyone else feel like these last two episodes were taken over by someone else who decided to throw as much "mandatory World War 2 film iconography" into the proceedings as possible? We've got a detour into the Holocaust for five minutes, soldiers quoting Nietzsche at each other, a mega patriotic camp uprising with a man openly weeping holding onto an American Flag, Black soldiers discussing the ideals of America when faced with racist Germans, etc. It became extremely "America wins the War".
This week certainly wasn't as bad as last week which felt like the nadir of the show, but I dunno, it is just as disjointed as the rest of it all. I'd like to see a version that doesn't include Crosby's stilted narration or the overbearing soundtrack.
I feel like this show's destiny is to exist primarily in clip form on youtube channels like Johnny's War Stories. In bite sized chunks the show can be good and even excellent, but I really can't see myself coming back to watch full episodes.
Yeah, i turned the last episode off when Rosie was extrapolated to seeing the Holocaust. Honestly, the whole show is poo poo. All of the genuine acting happens in the first three episodes, the story is convoluted bullshit, the effects are lazy, and the attention to detail only exists to not show something. I could've watched Memphis Belle 4 times instead of this show and been better for it.
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Mar 16, 2024 03:43
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- Vampire Panties
- Apr 18, 2001
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nposter
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Nap Ghost
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My bad, I haven't seen it since it was new. I seem to remember them mentioning having been in the same tank through all their campaigns.
In any case, still stupid:
If you're worried about your rear echelon troops getting surprise attacked by a battalion of enemies then the proper response is to go warn them instead of relying on Plot Armor to assume you'd stand a chance of beating that many guys.
The proper US Army solution to a bunch of Nazis marching in column in broad daylight in April 1945 is to plaster them with fire support from far away. No one would ever assume that these guys follow the stormtrooper school of accuracy.
Their radio was destroyed, and none of them had any illusions about surviving. They just wanted to slow the advance.
They could've probably outran the SS battalion on foot and called in arty though 
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Mar 27, 2024 10:49
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May 11, 2024 11:54
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- Vampire Panties
- Apr 18, 2001
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nposter
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Nap Ghost
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The Breaking Point is about as unsubtle an episode title as you can get for episode 7 of Band of Brothers. Following on from the locked down misery of Bastogne, Easy are now at least able to move around and aren't completely surrounded anymore, but they're still dangerously close to the Germans, it's still freezing, men are injured and fatigued, and there is a serious lack of leadership on display with Winters now overseeing but not personally leading, and Dike (who, to stress once again, was REALLY done dirty by the characterization the real-life guy got in the show) either constantly disappearing from view or failing to connect with any of the men when he is around, with the latter not even offset by being an effective combat leader.
Much of the episode is narrated by 1st Sergeant Lipton (I assume from the real soldier's own journals) as he goes about his day trying to keep an eye on things, helping out where he can. This leads to a fantastic moment near the end of the episode where his hard work is rewarded and Speirs is bemused to realize that Lipton had absolutely no idea of how much of a rock he has been for the soldiers, because he was just doing what he thought needed to be done. He certainly didn't have a choice, as in a rare sequence of "flashbacks" to support the dialogue, we see Winters and Nixon run through the current crop of Lieutenants and the many flaws they all exhibit - I think this is the first time Peacock is named? I mistook him for Dike in the previous episode so maybe I just missed his introduction. The best and most obvious candidate for Winters is Buck Compton, who appears to have shaken off the internal collapse he was undergoing, though a conversation between Guarnere and Heffron shows that this isn't quite fooling everybody. But as Winters points out, it doesn't matter in any case because this would leave the men without an effective combat platoon leader AND it's not like he can get rid of Dike anyway, since he's not actually technically done anything worth removing his command, along with a claim that Dike has connections that got him the spot so he could have "combat experience".
There are some obvious parallels between Dike and Sobel, and indeed Winters finds himself on the other side of the equation when Lipton finally feels he has no choice but to tell him that he simply does not trust Dike to lead the men and thinks he will get people needlessly killed. NCOs stepped up to say the same thing about Sobel back during training (albeit they did it formally in writing, rather than Lipton talking directly to Winters) which Winters ended up benefiting from, but now Winters has to dismiss Lipton and be careful not to criticize Dike in front of him despite his own reservations. His attempted solution - as Nixon notes, what he REALLY wants to do is lead the men in battle himself - is to painfully lay out an exact and extraordinarily specific set of directions to Dike to follow when they finally assault Foy. It does him no good though, as Dike panics at the first moment things don't go entirely according to plan and halts the assault to hunker down behind painfully weak cover and leave most of the men exposed, before coming up with a lunatic plan to send a small unit of men to circle around the entire town to "flank" the Germans.
Putting aside the character assassination of the real life Dike, the entire sequence is designed to showcase a common refrain from the episode that the soldiers often felt let down by their officers, with those who obviously were skilled and talented enough to be effective leaders either being promoted up and away from them or killed/injured. Foy might have been an entirely different kettle of fish if Moose Heyliger hadn't been injured, but we'll never know, and war is chaotic enough that there is no guarantee he wouldn't have been killed anyway. Because there is a LOT of death in this episode. An earlier sequence shows a replacement private being gently teased by the men pointing out how almost all of them have been shot/injured and that he will have his "turn" soon enough, a dark prediction when the poor bastard is unceremoniously shot through the head by a sniper during the assault and nobody realizes till they try to get him to move from his position. Luz, one of the few men not to be shot so far in the war, looks like he's doomed as he crawls towards a foxhole during German shelling, his friends Muck (who has also never been shot) and Penkala screaming for him to get to safety... only for them to be obliterated by a shell right in front of his eyes. That follows Joe Toye (who refused to stay in hospital after taking an arm wound) getting his leg blown off and Guarnare having his own horrifically mangled while trying to rescue him, and the combination of all these things is finally too much for Buck. He was already badly shaken by Hoobler accidentally shooting himself with a luger he took from a German he killed, severing the main artery and dying as the men tried to treat him, and seeing Toye and Guarnere injured so badly and then learning of Muck and Penkala's death hits his "breaking point", and he is removed from the line for "trenchfoot". It's a kind way of giving him an out, with Lipton at pains to say that none of the men thought any lesser of him, they all knew how tough he was, but he just couldn't stand to see his friends hurt and killed.
That leaves Easy without an experienced combat platoon leader, with a commanding Lieutenant that nobody trusts or respects, and the only person who seems to be keeping everybody together is Lipton, who at least finds one positive out of Hoobler's death by gifting the luger to Malarkey to help shake him out of his own funk, as Malarkey has been trying to get hold of one for his little brother since the series started. The one bonus is that they were able to get rid of Peacock by Nixon giving him the trip home to do PR ("We have to keep up morale for the folks back home," Sink notes at one point, and when Winters - exhausted and knowing his own men are the ones who need the morale boost - asks why, Sink pauses and says,"...I don't know.") and one Lieutenant from each of the other companies were brought over to help shore up Easy's flagging numbers. This includes Speirs, with a somewhat redundant conversation among some soldiers - including Michael Fassbender! - about the execution of the German prisoners and rumous he shot one of his own soldiers for being drunk.
It all leads to the assault on Foy, which is a disaster until Winters - forced to halt by Sink when his instincts kick in and he tries to rush into battle himself - turns and screams for Speirs to take over. That he does, and it's important I think to remember that Speirs is a very different leader to Winters despite undoubtedly being effective. He's direct and to the point, but he also has absolutely no hesitation in taking personal risks or risking the lives of his men (not pointlessly or cavalierly) because of his philosophy that in war all soldiers are already dead. An earlier episode has soldiers saying they saw him take the final gun "almost single handed" at the Battle of Brecourt Manor, which is technically true because most of the men with him got shot when he just ran directly up to it to attack it. Winters meanwhile had laid out a plan to be as efficient as possible not just in their objectives but the lives of the men. However, in comparison to Dike, Speirs must seem like a divine gift to the soldiers, and certainly to Lipton, who watches in awe as Speirs' reaction to learning some of the men are disconnected due to Dike's terrible plan is to... just run directly through the battlefield... and then come running right back through straight afterwards!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76XTG6dFgx0
Here at least is a leader they can respect, who they know will put his own life on the line, who will be if nothing else present. The episode ends with Lipton, given a battlefield promotion to Lieutenant, talking with Speirs as the men sit in a church listening to the choir sing, enjoying a brief respite not knowing their planned pullout is about to rescinded. He's relieved that they came through it all alive, that they're out of the cold for a change, but it also gives us a chance to be reminded of just how many men have died through the series so far and even just in these last two episodes. The packed pews of the church, filled with men watching the choir sing, suddenly grow large gaps as Lipton remembers the fallen and, with each named listed, the soldier sitting in the pew disappears from view.
At this point in the series, the characters are exhausted and it's exhausting for the viewer too, though not in a bad way. It's all with purpose, leading into The Last Patrol next and the utter bottom of the barrel/end of the line for many of the men who have been through hell through Bastogne, Foy, Noville and Rachamps, with Hagenau to come. To continue to drawl parallels between how Band of Brothers and Masters of the Air were structured, I can only think of the episode where the men are asked to fly three missions over three days and how it left most of them completely hollowed out... except we barely saw or felt any of it because we were told rather than shown. Bastogne and The Breaking Point, though far from the subtlest of episodes, are very definitely showing rather than telling.
Good review. I still remember the scene with the choir and how hard it hit
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Mar 28, 2024 20:44
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Feb 9, 2024 14:08
