Masters of the Air opens with a voice-over, “When a crew goes down, they disappear.” Captain Harry Crosby’s (Anthony Boyle) voice contextualizes how the airmen feel the grief of their fallen brothers. They don’t mention the missing, and they pack up the belongings of the dead. They have to pack their pain away in order to keep moving forward and keep flying. Masters of the Air Episode 6, “Part Six,” is a quiet episode, with the moments of tension driven by character moments instead of aerial fights.
Happening in three parts, Masters of the Air Episode 6 shows centers on John ‘Bucky’ Egan (Callum Turner), Crosby, and Rosenthal (Nate Mann). After the bailout, Bucky’s survival is only the first step as he tries to escape German farmers hunting him. But he doesn’t get far before he’s captured and turned over to the Nazis. As we’ve already seen once before in Episode 4, surviving a bailout is only the first step. As he marches through the streets, the German people in the streets attack and kill most of the men he is with, surrounded by crying babies and destroyed buildings from a recent Royal Airforce bombing.
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You can see the damage that the RAF inflicted, the women in the homes, the crying babies, and the human toll that Crank was concerned with in the last episode. But the empathy is only stretched so far as the airmen are executed in the street, spurred by the citizen’s attack. When he’s thought to be dead, Bucky uses the blessing to run, only to become a prisoner of war again. Masters of the Air Episode 6 uses Bucky to build up the tension and keep the limited series focused on the actions of war, even as it focuses on its emotions.
He is interrogated, imprisoned, and has his best friend used against him. All he has to do is give up information, and he can find out about Buck. But he doesn’t. Instead, he repeats his name and identification number, only to end up in a camp with many of the friends he thought he had lost.
At the same time, Crosby is sent away from the base and to a conference for the Allied Nations at Oxford. Still carrying the weight of losing Bubbles (Louis Greatorex), the time away puts him directly in front of the British. His time at Oxford is focused on enduring members of the Royal Airforce and just the British more generally as they continue to rib Americans. But he also reflects on how the British and Americans are similar, thanks to his roommate Westgate (Bel Powley).
But his connections with the British are second to the weight that Crosby carries for replacing Bubbles as group navigator. Survivor’s guilt is crushing, and Crosby has to carry it. He cries. The vulnerability we see does not ignore the scars that the airmen carry nor reject their grief. While they may not speak about their losses in the barracks, they feel it all.
But the real emotional weight in Masters of the Air Episode 6 is Rosenthal. Played by Nate Mann, Rosenthal has only flown three missions. But those three missions were in three days, and 120 plus airmen were lost. Somehow, he survived them when the most seasoned among the Bloody Hundreth didn’t. Out of concern, Rosenthal and his crew spent to the Flack House. In the guise of R&R, the house is primarily for mental health.
Rosenthal is quiet and not easy to open up. He has flown so few missions that the grief he carries feels too little compared to others. But while he undercuts the depth of his survivor’s guilt, being surrounded by the joy of the British countryside, he is at least at peace.
Rosenthal doesn’t go much into how he feels, but the way that Mann plays the characters is somber and stunning. Always out of place but always thinking, feeling everything that he’s seen. Then, it’s back up in the air, back to flying.
As a whole, Masters of the Air Episode 6 is a strong entry into the series. It’s calm and quiet, but it’s also extremely heavy. The tension is there even if it’s not accompanied by roaring engines and bullets ripping through the hull of a Flying Fortress. Because of that, it’s one of the best episodes of the series. It’s the most human of the episodes we’ve seen so far that contextualizes the fight beyond just dropping bombs but surviving the mental toll of it all, both in the safety of R&R and the danger of captivity.
Masters of the Air Episode 6 is streaming now on Apple TV+, with new episodes every Friday.
