‘Masters of the Air’s First Big Sex Scene is a Look at Horror and Humanity in World War II

One of the boys of the Bloody Hundredth finally gets some steamy, romantic action in Masters of the Air Episode 4 “Part Four” on Apple TV+, and no, I’m not talking about how Gale “Buck” Cleven (Austin Butler) sweetly waltzes with a dog during a party on base. I’m of course talking about John “Bucky” Egan’s (Callum Turner) weekend getaway in London. While downing vodka at a haunt for Polish refugees in the British capital, Bucky kicks off a flirtation with Paulina (Joanna Kulig). The widow of a downed Polish pilot takes a shine to Bucky despite her reservations and the two share a tragic tryst: a wartime one night stand that exists just to provide connection, catharsis, and an escape from death.

For naysayers who think that sex scenes don’t contribute to the plot, Bucky and Paulina’s hookup might seem gratuitous. Truly, though, it offers us a meditation on the big moral picture of the atrocities of World War II. As the couple ruminates on the ethics of Bucky’s gig, dropping bombs on German targets, in the midst of a London blitz, Paulina re-emphasizes for Bucky and the audience that what the Nazis are doing is so much worse. They are the ones who have started this war. They are the ones who have obliterated homes to begin with. They are the ones without, in the framing of Masters of the Air, the humanity to even ponder these questions.

Callum Turner and Paulina Kulig’s sex scene in Masters of the Air is there to steam up the Apple TV+ show, but also to illustrate the stakes humanity really was facing during World War II.

Masters of the Air Episode 4 “Part Four” takes us to October 8, 1943. As casualties mount for the men of the Air Force’s 100th Bomb Group, so does the trauma. Bucky Egan has been given a weekend pass to London. There he finds himself in Hammersmith, at a Polish haunt, sharing vodka with Paulina. She explains that her husband Pavel was (or is) also a pilot. While she fled Poland when the Nazis invaded, he stayed to fight and be a hero. She later learned he was shot down over Silesia in the first week, meaning he’s either a POW or dead in a potato field. You get the sense the latter is more likely.

“You want to take me to bed?” Paulina asks. “Take me dancing first.”

Bucky and Paulina’s night dancing isn’t the stuff of crisp, dazzling lindy hops we sometimes see on screen, but sloppy drunken desire. Air raid sirens blare as they kiss and we cut to a London flat. A post-coital Bucky is watching the Germans bomb the city he’s in. Paulina stirs awake and he explains he’s never been on the “business end” of a bombing. The weight of the killing he’s done is finally sinking in.

Paulina then tells Bucky that she believes not only that the Germans don’t believes there is a difference between war and senseless killing, but that they deserve the same severity they gave her people. It would be fair. Then again, she admits there’s no balance in war. Only the innocent die. The most wicked survive. She then uses this as foreplay to point out the closer they get to death the more they feel alive. The two embrace once more as the bombs continue to fall.

So what does this all have to do with the overall plot of Masters of the Air? Well, it’s more about the show’s themes. Bucky’s regret over the bombing he’s done differentiates him, morally, from the Nazis, illustrating what our heroes is doing is an act of heroism. Furthermore, the show is expressing that just because some of its characters might make it out alive at the end of the war, that doesn’t mean they were more worthy of being spared. There’s no balance. One event just happens after the other. People just die.

And when real, empathic, ethical people, like the characters in Masters of the Air, find themselves tiptoeing on the edge of Hell, there’s no better escape than human connection. That could be the camaraderie of the mess hall or a one night stand with another cynical survivor. Sex — like drinking, friendship, or courage — is a human experience worth fighting for.