‘Masters of the Air’ Episode 1 Recap: Mask Up

Like Band of Brothers and The Pacific before it, Masters of the Air takes a healthy handful of the young acting talent currently in the game and thrusts them into the good vs. evil binary of the Second World War, this time in the skies. Executive producers Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks have been clear about that connection – together with Saving Private Ryan and Hanks’ boutique-y naval commander film Greyhound, which he also wrote, these productions are collectively meant to illustrate the bravery of the ordinary people who signed up, trained up, and fought against the advance of the Axis powers, as well as to honor their sacrifice. And in June 1943, once the 100th bombing group of the United States Army Air Force had arrived in England with their B-17 bombers, sacrifice became a daily occurrence. 

“Don’t you die on me before I get over there,” Major Gale Cleven (Austin Butler) tells Major John Egan (Callum Turner) early in part one of Masters of the Air. It’s a standard-issue war movie line, and an example of how Masters falters a bit, trying to quickly sketch its characters’ emotional lives as it scrambles to fit everyone into the frame. As bomber pilots Cleven and Egan, Butler and Turner represent a dynamic similar to Damian Lewis and Ron Livingston in Brothers, whose bond as Major Richard “Dick” Winters and Captain Lewis Nixon was at the show’s heart. There is a lot made here of their similar nicknames – Cleven is “Buck” while Egan is “Bucky” – and while the former is a quiet, thoughtful teetotaler, the latter is boisterous and rash, with a penchant for drunk singing.  “A girl worth writing to is hard to find,” Cleven says to his sweetheart Marge (Isabel May) in another groaner of an early line, and soon he’s shipped out to join Egan at Thorpe Abbots Air Base in Norolk, England, the wartime home of the “Bloody Hundredth.” 

“They came from every corner of the country with a common purpose: to bring the war to Hitler’s doorstep.” Anthony Boyle, as navigator Major Harry Crosby, will be our narrator throughout Masters, and his voiceovers tend to drop in context and historical fast facts, as if he’s telling us about the 100th’s exploits long after the war ended. It’s from “Cros” that we get the download on the B-17. The bomber bristled with .50 caliber Browning machine guns. A tail gunner. A gunner squeezed into a ventral ball turret. Two gunners in the waist of the aircraft. A chin turret, cheek turret, top turret, and radio compartment gun. A cruising speed of almost 200 miles per hour, thousands of pounds of bombs, and a super secret piece of onboard equipment called the Norden bombsight. With pilots like Cleven and Egan as flight commanders, they were in charge of making a crew of ten work together in midair, for both effective bombing runs and staying alive to do it again the next day.

Which is a challenge compounded by strategy. Unlike the Royal Air Force, who stuck to bombing Germany at night, American Army Air Force leadership decided to use B-17s and their air crews to conduct daylight bombing raids of specific military installations. The analog computing power of the Norden was integral for providing accurate targeting, but the large planes were susceptible to attack by anti-aircraft flak guns and Lutwaffe fighters, and Masters of the Air moves quickly to show us just how susceptible.

With no fighter escort of their own – that’ll come later, after a stunning amount of loss in lives and equipment – the B-17s are pretty badly shot up. Some don’t make it (“Tail to pilot: I didn’t see chutes!”), and after the squadron limps back to base, Cleven squats inside the belly of his aircraft, where bullets and chunks of flak have ripped gaping holes in its aluminum skin. They had hundreds of hours of flight training in Nebraska, none of it like the real thing. And suddenly Cleven understands how daunting this work will be as both a pilot and leader of men. “We’ve got a long road ahead of us,” he tells Egan as they remember their air crews who weren’t as fortunate.

The special effects in Masters of the Air are pretty impressive. It was impossible for the production to use the few airworthy B-17s that survive, so they fabricated partially operable replicas, and the practical stuff combines with digital wizardry to reveal an onboard environment that’s cramped, utilitarian, and particularly subject to the elements. It’s 50 degrees below zero at 25,000 feet. Crewmen are wrapped in heavy, sheepskin-lined leather coats and pants, and use personal oxygen tanks in the unpressurized cabin. The masked-up crew and rapid cuts between the cockpits, turrets, and navigation stations makes for some confusion over who’s doing what on which plane, not to mention who’s surviving. But there’s also a lot of careful attention paid to the details. Flight checks and toggle switches, the mechanics of the ball turret, hard metal surfaces throughout, and the way men move through these spaces, nimbly or otherwise, make the in-flight portions of Masters an emerging highlight of the series. Now we just gotta keep track of everybody.

Barry Keoghan is along for this ride, too. As Lieutenant Curtis Biddick, he’s another B-17 pilot; Biddick’s also supposed to be from New York City, but the accent Keoghan’s doing is something all its own. We also briefly meet Raff Law as Sergeant Ken Lemmons, the 19-year-old crew chief of the 100th Bombing Group’s ground support crew, and later, Masters of the Air will further expand its cast with the addition of Nate Mann as bomber pilot Major Robert Rosenthal, and Ncuti Gatwa, Branden Cook, and Josiah Cross as pilots of the 332nd Fighter Group, better known as the Tuskegee Airmen. But for now, Masters is sticking with its core bomber crews, and especially the friendship between Cleven and Egan, as the Bloody Hundredth gets into the fight and takes its first licks. In June 1943, 36 bomb crews arrived at Thorpe Abbots in Norfolk, and in mere months 34 had been shot down. Maybe the solution to our not being able to properly track the cast lies in Masters of the Air revealing how quickly dangerous daylight bombing thinned the herd.    

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.