‘Masters Of The Air’ Season Finale Recap: Whoever Fights Monsters

With Apple maintaining strict radio silence on any chatter about a Masters of the Air Season 2, let’s consider part nine of the series as its ultimate finale. Because for the United States Army Air Force personnel who’ve managed to survive through February 1945, where this final episode begins, it has all come down to this. In England, Harry Crosby still sweats over details for the latest Eighth Air Force bombing run, which by this point in the war is occuring directly over Berlin. Squadron command pilot Major Robert “Rosie” Rosenthal still has that brave, dedicated dog in him, as he encounters what remains of German anti aircraft fire. And at Stalag-Luft III, POWs Gale “Buck” Cleven, John “Bucky” Egan, and Alexander “Alex” Jefferson must prepare for a forced march. From the east, the Red Army is closing in. And in the west, Allied forces have penetrated The Fatherland all the way to the Rhine. Caught inside this deadly squeeze, the Germans set fire to the stalag and push the stumbling prisoner column into blizzard conditions. The war in Europe is nearing its conclusion. But there are still a million ways to die.

“I’m gonna try to get us across the Russian lines, where we’ll be safe!” Everybody knows Rosie’s the best bomber pilot in the business, but when his ship’s hit hard over Berlin, bailing out is the crew’s only choice. Parachuting into a combat-scarred no man’s land, Rosenthal hollers stuff like “Roosevelt!” and “Stalin!” and “Coca-Cola!” to prevent being shot by the Red Army, and is soon moving with them toward Poznan, Poland. But while the Russians are technically winning, this is still a kind of death march. Trudging refugees, exhausted soldiers, and to Rosenthal’s horror, an abandoned concentration camp where the Germans burned or shot the remaining Jewish prisoners. “Our comrades found even bigger camps than this,” a Red Army lieutenant tells Rosenthal. “Built for killing.” As a human being, as a serviceman, and as a Jewish man from Brooklyn, New York, Rosie is appalled. Waiting for the plane that will begin his journey back to England, the pilot encounters an elderly refugee. “Go with God,” he offers in Yiddish. The man only says that if God exists, he has forgotten them. “Not even the earth that covers our bones will remember us.”

Freezing, hungry, and wandering at gunpoint through urban destruction, Cleven and Egan finally make their move to bolt. But while Buck makes his break, Bucky’s restrained by a German guard. With the golden bros once again separated, it’s convenient for Masters to introduce one last new character, a heroic patsy who will be killed by Wehrmacht child soldiers in the forests of Bavaria, and that character is Lt. George Neithammer. (George is played by Josh Dylan, aka Lord Richard Marable from The Buccaneers, another series Apple has not yet renewed for a second season.) As George joins the host of fallen Masters characters we never really knew – Barry Keoghan as Lt. Curtis Biddick, you deserved better! – Buck links up with American troops on patrol, and before long he’s dropping out of a B-17 hatch back at the AB in England. “Thanks for the lift, guys.” 

For Egan and Jefferson, their POW journey has a final chapter. In April, with an American armored division at the fences of the massive stalag at Moosburg, Bavaria, the airmen take part in a brief pitched battle with the prison camp’s guards before Bucky shinnies up a flagpole, tears down the Nazi flag, and raises a tattered stars and stripes in its place. Up there, as Alex and throngs of overwhelmed but happily liberated prisoners cheer below, the ever-confident and cocky John Egan finally lets himself cry tears of joy. Callum Turner was great throughout Masters of the Air, but this entire sequence represents him at his best.

By May 1945, with Winston Churchill’s announcement of the cessation of formal hostilities in Europe, the Eighth Air Force has become a humanitarian flying force. Cleven opens his fort’s bomb bay doors, but instead of destruction he drops fresh fruit and other badly needed supplies on a grateful Belgium. And later, back at base, Rosie and Cros toast each other with a bit of amazement. They actually made it through. But they’re different now. “All this killing we do, day in and day out…it does something to a guy,” Crosby muses, and he turns to a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche. “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” To which Rosenthal repeats a version of his part eight speech, now buttressed with the horror of what he witnessed on the ground in German-occupied Poland. They had to fight the monsters, he tells Cros. There was no other way. It’s part of the same message imparted by Paulina to Egan in part four – the Germans deserved the Allied forces’ bombs. In an upside down world, fighting to preserve order and stability and human freedom is even more paramount.

Like Band of Brothers and The Pacific before it, Masters of the Air concludes with epilogues for the principal members of the Bloody Hundredth, the actors’ faces merging with those of the men they portrayed. Men like Harry Crosby and Robert Rosenthal, Gale Cleven and John Egan, and Tuskegee Airmen Alexander Jefferson and Richard D. Macon. And whether it was about their wartime journey or the friends they made along the way, they packed up for home as victors over the monsters in the chaotic and brutal fight for Europe.

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.