Masters of the Air Episode 4 recap: “Don’t count on it”

❘ Updated: 2024-02-09T08:00:00

Austin Butler, Callum Turner, and the cast of Masters of the Air

Apple TV+

Masters of the Air Episode 4 takes a breather from aerial calamities; the boys make it home, but terror and grief still loom over them.

After three episodes, the 100th Bomb Group have already earned their notorious “bloody” namesake. Flying in itself, from the moment those tires lift off the tarmac to the second they touch down, is violence; these men took their lives in their hands every time they set foot on those revolutionary, dangerous planes.

Last week’s chapter was a heart-racing episode of television, following the men as they joined “the largest air armada in the history of mankind” to bomb two essential German targets before flying all the way to Africa, a hopeful bid to deceive and confuse the “Krauts.”

That’s the thing about war: even a successful mission can be classified as a catastrophe, and even though they get some brief respite, the fight is far from over.

Peace in the African sun

Austin Butler in Masters of the Air Episode 4

August 20, 1943: the 100th are still in Telergma, Algeria, awaiting the 12th Air Force and the ice-cold beers they were promised. The men have nothing to do but drink water, lie on the dusty ground, gaze at the sky, read, and write letters to their true loves back home. “You are and always will be the only girl for me… I hope,” James Douglass muses with a pencil as he sits under the shade of a wing.

As Harry Crosby narrates, the Regensburg and Schweinfurt was the largest and “costliest” mission to date. “We lost Biddick, Claytor, and Van Noy, and their crews. We didn’t know who was killed or who was captured,” he says. Moments later, Buck and Bucky see the 12th’s dust trail in the distance, so the men pack up their gear and get ready to go home.

We cut to Flanders, Belgium, where William Quinn is forced to accept the help of “foreign friends” to evade capture. “If anyone was caught helping a downed flyer, they were either thrown into a concentration camp or executed. The risks were enormous,” Crosby explains. He’s taken to a quiet restaurant, where he reunites with his pal Charles Bailey and another surviving bomber from the 306th, Bob. “You guys sure must have kicked the hornet’s nest, they came after us with a fury I ain’t ever seen,” he tells them.

Soon after, before William can confess what happened to Babyface (his friend whom he abandoned in the ball turret), the trio is interrogated by two Belgian men. They’re asked about their names, posts, baseball, and to sing the Star-Spangled Banner. It’s clearly a test to make sure they’re not “infiltrators” – and as they walk outside, Bob is shot through his hand in the head. William and Charles are horrified, but the men insist he was a spy trying to worm his way into their network. “We always catch them… we don’t make mistakes,” they say.

“25 is the magic number”

Back at Thorpe Abbotts, the 100th’s top brass, men, and the base’s crew nervously await the return of Glenn Dye, who should be coming home from his 25th mission – a milestone with an incredible reward: you’re sent home. As his girlfriend stares anxiously at the clouds, desperate for wings to break through, Bucky assures her everything will be okay.

The colonel says it’ll be “one hell of a party… or one hell of a wake”, depending on what happens. Mercifully, he soars towards the base with his flares sparkling in the sky, and the men erupt into cheers on the ground – for a group defined by their tragedy, this is a rare moment of joy.

Later that night, the men are suited and booted and dancing to Glenn Miller’s ‘In the Mood’, as Dye is hailed as the 100th’s “very own Charlie Robertson”, the White Sox player who famously threw a perfect game in 1922. He’s got all sorts planned; hunting with his father, letting his mother “fuss over” him, and stopping by some other stations to “prove the 25 can be done.”

The mood shifts at the table; not into anger, nor even resentment – it’s just a sobering reminder of how rare Dye’s feat may turn out to be. A mere 12 crews of the 25 that flew in from Greenland remain, so they raise a glass to “fellas who aren’t here tonight, who should’ve been.”

Other men lament the need for a big “shindig” just because someone gets to go home, while Lt. Nash catches sight of Helen, an American Red Cross volunteer at a nearby table. Then comes the introduction of one of the show’s newer main characters: Robert “Rosie” Rosenthal, who shuffles over to his friends as they’re “eyeing up the broads.”

Buck and Bucky come over to introduce themselves, and Rosie (embarrassingly) confesses to having flown in his “skivvies” because of the Texas heat. The majors say they have an incredible reputation, and Rosie responds: “We’re happy to be in the war, sir. We’ve been requesting a combat position for months. Now that we’re here, it feels like we’re actually gonna do something.”

Bucky tells them: “Oh you’ll do something alright.”

“I could be the last pretty face they ever see”

Nash and Helen share a dance. “I bet you give that look to any chump that wants some breakfast,” he says. “Well, I could be the last pretty face they ever see,” she replies. “Well, how am I supposed to tell?” he asks, wanting to know if she feels sorry for him or wants to kiss him. She pecks him on the cheek and nuzzles into his neck, and they keep on swaying on the dance floor.

Rosie asks Buck (who’s now on 21 missions – don’t forget that) and Bucky for advice. He tells him to make it to 11 missions, because by that point “you’ve beaten the odds… or you didn’t.”

As Rosie walks away, Bucky airs some anxieties out loud. “All these new faces, when we go down they won’t remember us either. It’ll be like we never existed,” he says, staring off blankly. Colonel Harding walks over to the men, revealing concerns that they’re getting “flak-happy” (reckless, basically).

“I told [the doctor] war is war, and the longer you go at it the more it screws a man up. And it’s been that way since the first caveman son of a b*tch picked up a club and went after the other. Did cavemen go for head-shrinking?” he asks, and the men respond with an emphatic no. When Red suggests this war is unlike what cavemen experienced, he wryly quips: “Every war has its novelties.”

His chuckles turn to a scowl when he catches sight of the plane on the wall at the party. “It looks like it’s in a nosedive,” he says, before sharing his own fantasy: loading up a fort with as many bombs as they can grab, and dropping them all on that “moustachioed little f**ker” in Germany. “Now who’s flak-happy,” Bucky says, and after a tense stare-off, he sets off to “get the lead out” with the “single fillies.”

Buck tells Bucky he needs a break and should get a weekend pass from the colonel. Bucky says they should go to London together and “paint the town red”, but Buck knows he needs time alone. “Maybe next time,” he says, before picking up Meatball and going for a dance.

The episode shifts back to Belgium, where William and Charles’ escorts explain they “have more downed airmen than people we can trust to guide them.” William bids adieu to the young woman on the farm, and they begin their perilous journey home. “I’m sure Baby Face found a way out,” William tells Charles, who’s still under the impression all of their crew are alive.

They arrive at a house to meet their guide, Michou. “She’s barely a teenager,” Charles says, but they’re told to do what she says. Seconds later, she points out the scarf around William’s neck. “Give it to me now,” he’s told, before a letter from the farm girl is pulled out of his bag. “If the Germans find this, what do you think they will do to Louise and her family, huh? They would torture them until they talked. and when they get the names they needed, they would shoot them. And then they would find the next one and do the same to them. Like pulling the thread on a sweater,” he’s told, before the letter is set alight. William apologises for his error, and Michou says: “Here, stupid means dead.”

London calling

Bucky and Paulina in Masters of the Air Episode 4

In London, Bucky is enjoying a drink with Paulina, a Polish woman in England’s capital. “So you’re not trying to get me into bed?” she asks. “I hadn’t thought that far ahead,” he responds.

They joke around (“You know to tell if a man is a pilot… he’ll tell you,” she cracks, earning a genuine laugh), before going back and forth on personal details; notably, her husband was a pilot who’s “either a prisoner of war or rotting in a potato field” and she left Poland after the Germans invaded. Bucky admits that the newsreels from Europe are what made him sign up in the first place. In a tender moment, she says they may be “drinking [her husband’s spirit” and says: “Do you want to take me to bed? Take me dancing first.”

They smooch and dance as sirens wail around them, with British flak lighting up the night sky as the Germans attack. “Never been on the business end of a bomb before,” Bucky says in their hotel room. “Business. A funny word for death,” Paulina responds.

She asks if the job weighs on his conscience, or as he puts it, a “lot of killing.” She tells him not to worry, because the Germans deserve “every last one” of his bombs. “Some believe there is a difference between war and senseless murder. They don’t… I believe we should be as merciless and severe as they were to my people. That would be fair,” she says. Bucky believes if there’s any balance, his “ticket was punched a long, long time ago” – but Paulina assures: “There is no balance. Just one event after another. The worst come out untouched. The innocent dead.”

As she sits on his lap, she says: “But you know one thing? The closer you are to death… the more alive you feel. Every second is a little death.”

The 100th flies again

Buck and the men of the 100th get ready to “scratch another one off.” Nash goes to get a doughnut from Helen, but as she playfully flirts, a quietly devastating note is played back to her: “You might be the last pretty face I ever see… and damned if you ain’t the prettiest.” He goes in for a kiss, but he’s knocked back with a smile, vowing that she’ll see him later.

The first bombing run on Bremen was a disaster, but that “seemed like a lifetime ago now”, and the 100th had been ordered to try and hit the U-boat pens again. Buck is especially keen to right the wrongs of his first mission, but Ken Lemmons says there’s an issue with the plane that he may be able to fix as it’s getting ready to take off.

He rides the wheel as the plane makes its way along the runway, and as expected, nobody should have doubted: its engine roars to life, and it lifts off perfectly.

William and Charles arrive into Paris on the train, and Michou instructs them to do exactly as she does and to never speak. She goes to the toilet, which gives William a chance to tell Charles about Babyface. “I couldn’t get him out, the hatch was jammed. I really tried… I left him there,” he explains, but Charles isn’t angry. “I would’ve done the same thing,” he says, as he gives him a comforting pat on the hand – and then worst case scenario happens: a ticket inspector shows up. They don’t understand a word he says, and soon they’re rolling into a station crawling with Nazis.

William makes a run for it, but he’s stopped by a random woman in another carriage, who tells him to calmly walk back to the cabin. It turns out Michou doesn’t work alone: Manon is another guide, and she pledges to get them to Spain as long as they “keep their head.”

A Buck down

The 100th return – well, some of them. 80 men were downed or killed on the mission, including Buck and Crosby. Rosie survived his first experience of war, but as he’s handed a glass of whisky, his breath is taken away when he sees Helen – evidently, Nash didn’t make it home either. “The whole first element” went down, the men explain, and Rosie breaks the news to Helen – she doesn’t say a word, but heartbreak washes across her face.

In London, Paulina and Bucky don’t wake up until noon. “Let’s not make more of this than what it was,” she tells him, saying her heart couldn’t take “another pilot in the potato field.” After she leaves, he goes for a walk in the city and stumbles on the ruins of a building destroyed by a bomb, and a mother screaming at the sight of her dead child being pulled from the rubble.

Bucky sees a headline on a newspaper stand that says the 8th Air Force “smashed Bremen”, but 30 bombers were lost. He phones the base immediately, and Red tells him about Buck. “He went down swinging, John,” he says. “Tell coach I’ll be there by game time, and Red: I wanna pitch,” he tells the colonel, before slamming the phone down.

Masters of the Air Episodes 1-4 are streaming on Apple TV+, which you can sign up for here. You can also check out our other coverage below:

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