PicoBlog

“Leaving a lot of good men behind.”

Now that we have arrived at the final chapter of Masters of the Air, it’s worth identifying when you have to throw your hands up and accept that baffling creative choices are being made as opposed to trying to figure out why they’re being made at all. In the case of this series, it came with Robert Daniels (Ncuti Gatwa) stating to his fellow Tuskegee Airmen that “We’re in the heart of the fatherland now, boys,” after they and their fellow POWs are marched tens of miles in terribly cold weather (and then transported by train) to Stalag XIII in Nuremberg. Leaving aside the unnecessary aspect of that dialogue—it’s not as if they were in the Ritz-Carlton before—when Daniels spoke, I was cheered because I’d assumed the show had essentially forgotten the Tuskegee trio of Daniels, Jefferson, and Macon.

If the very end of Masters of the Air is any indication, we are meant to think that series developer John Orloff absolutely didn’t forget…well, at least Jefferson and Macon, each of whom merits their own set of “What happened to them after the war?” title cards. Why does Daniels not merit his own? Of course, the question could be flipped upside down, akin to watching how certain actors get billed in a TV show or movie: Jefferson and Macon get placed before Rosenthal? They get featured at all, after being treated as afterthoughts?

These title cards are valuable because they offer a remarkable amount of context to those of us who hadn’t read up on the men featured in this series. But it’s fascinating to see how Orloff prioritizes who gets the “Where are they now”-style treatment, as well as who gets resolution within the finale itself. The last few minutes of “Part Nine” make it seem like Crosby, Jefferson, Macon, Rosenthal, Cleven, and Egan were equally the main characters of this series. And in the end, the show got four out of six correct.

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