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Masters of the Air Recap: Sleeping Through D-Day
Enter the Tuskegee Airmen — too little, too late.
We get a little hit of how 72 continuous hours of increasingly amphetamine-addled course-plotting sessions in the run-up to D-Day affected our faithful narratin’ navigator Harry Crosby, reminiscent of how Fight Club depicted its schizophrenic narrator’s chronic insomnia, then we leap ahead another two months to August 1944. But whoever it was at Amblin, Playtone, or Apple who decided to throw the venerated all-Black fighter squadron — one that operated out of Ramitelli Air Field in Italy, more than a thousand miles away from the England-based 100th Bomb Group whose high-mortality adventures we’ve been following up till now — a few hackneyed-as-hell scenes in the next-to-last episode would strike a blow for representation has judgment so questionable I don’t even want to express my rebuke as a joke. The guy who seems to be the highest-ranking American there — Lieutenant Colonel Albert “Bub” Clark, whom I was able to identify only because I recognized the actor playing him, Sam Hazeldine, as the undercover MI5 agent who got beheaded in the first season of Slow Horses — points out there are three likely eventualities for the thousands of prisoners at Stalag Luft III: mass execution, a forced march deeper into Germany, or hand-to-hand combat with their captors using whatever makeshift weapons they can come up with.
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