Masters of the Air Episode 9 is a grueling, emotional march to the show’s emotional ending, and a beautiful tribute to “a lot of brave men” lost.
A lot was riding on Masters of the Air’s last episode. After all, Band of Brothers boasts one of the most devastating, immaculate finales in all of television, revealing the names behind “Easy” Company’s real-life talking heads who guided us through the story.
It’s an ending worthy of its predecessor. In the penultimate chapter, Buck, Bucky, and the other men of the 100th at Stalag Luft III were joined by three downed Tuskegee Airmen. There was a tense air of racism at first, but they soon became allies in aid of plotting an escape.
Meanwhile, Rosie and Crosby were hard at work on D-Day – so much so that Crosby slept through the whole thing. But with Germany invaded and its resources dwindling, the war’s clock finally started to tick – now, Buck and Bucky just need to find a way home.
“We were the true masters of the air”
February 3, 1945: the skies above Berlin are still filled with flak, but the Third Reich is surrounded. “In the west, the allies were storming into Germany. In the east, the Russians were approaching the Oder River. And in the sky, the 8th Air Force flew uncontested. We were the true masters of the air,” Crosby narrates.
Just as Rosie and his men are about to drop their bombs, they’re hit by a missile. Oxygen tanks are punctured, engines are damaged, and a bombardier is killed as the back of the plane is blown to bits. Rosie tries to get it as far as he can before bailing. He sees Gene’s bloody, torn-apart body before jumping out, watching the plane fall through the clouds as he drifts into the middle of a firefight in unknown, frosty territory.
Injured, he crawls and collapses into a massive crater east of the Oder River, ducking under German and Russian gunfire. The Russians are basically just executing any German they see, and as Rosie peeks from the hole, he prepares for death – but when the Russians find him, he convinces them he’s American (remember, at this time, the Russians were allies). “Amerikanski. Roosevelt. Stalin. Coca-Cola,” he pleads, and they soon help him out and get him away from the fighting.
Over at Stalag Luft III, the men are told to gather at the gate in 30 minutes to march out of the camp. It’s unclear how far they’ll be marching with the Germans, or for how long. “Allies must be close,” Buck says as he advises the men to wear all of their warmest clothes and gather any essentials; food they’ll keep (because Krauts have already punctured most of their cans), weapons, matches etc. As other men scrap over their supplies, Buck talks to Bucky. “Would have preferred it if the Russians made it here first,” Bucky says, and Buck asks if he’s considering running. “Not in this icebox,” he replies.
“Anyone who tries to escape will be shot, please do not try,” the guards tell them as Russian gunfire and artillery booms in the distance. After a young, zealous Nazi soldier shouts at them all, Solomon is asked if he’s alright. “As okay as a Jew taking a midnight stroll in Germany can be,” he says. Stalag Luft III is set alight as they leave, and we next see them marching 20 miles southwest of the camp.
Back at base, Crosby chases for any update on Rosie and his crew after they went down in no man’s land. A lieutenant arrives in a panic. “We’ve got wheels up in five minutes and the equipment room is locked,” he reveals, so Crosby boots it open before storming into the canteen and slamming the captain’s head onto a plate. Evidently, there’s a sense of complacency among the newer recruits after D-day that doesn’t sit well with him.
The road to nowhere
The men are now 48 miles southwest of the camp on the road to Muskau. As they pass dead men and horses, a Nazi commander falls to his knees – but Solomon helps him up. “Danke,” he whispers, as they proceed forward, numbed by their shared pain (almost like anti-Semitism makes absolutely no sense!). “Heil Hitler,” the younger Nazi guard shouts as broken soldiers pass by him. “Children and old men… all is lost,” another older, hardened commander mutters.
When they arrive at a brick factory (used for forced labor), they nudge for a place around a tiny fire to try and warm themselves up. Buck hears they’re heading to a train station at first light, but there’s no indication of where they’re going. “They’re going to take us somewhere to kill us, aren’t they?” Solomon says after boarding the train, but Buck tells him things will be okay.
“You know, I really did believe that if there was only two B-17s left, it’d be young and me flying them,” Buck tells Bucky. “Last few years would have been a lot rougher without you John,” he adds, and Bucky replies: “Mmm… same.”
They roll into the mud and rubble of Nuremberg, “the heart of their fatherland.” They soon walk into Stalag Luft XIII, a consolidated POW camp , where Buck reunites with George Neithammer, “the only guy who knows more about baseball than you do,” he tells Bucky. They head off to find a tent with a fire, but at the very least, they just want to get out of the snow.
We find Rosie on the road to Poznan in Poland, with a Russian general explaining he’ll sort him a flight back home, but the journey will be dangerous. They end up stuck after a wagon loses its wheel, so Rosie stretches his legs… and wanders into the Żabikowo concentration camp. Through the stench of death, he finds unimaginable horrors: bodies of men, women, and children either frozen, charred, or hanged from posts, and desperate scribbles on the wall. “The judge of life will judge for life,” one reads. A Russian soldier tells him they’ve found many more camps like this, all designed to kill thousands of people at a time, “mainly Jews.”
When Rosie arrives at the air base, he asks a nearby man if he’s going home to see family. “He says his family are all dead, buried in his village. “He said he buried them himself with the other villagers the Germans killed. The Germans ordered him to fill in the ditch. Somewhere in there, his wife, his daughter, his grandchildren… so he takes the shovel. To live… one must make choices,” another woman translates.
Rosie asks him where he’ll go, and he says Palestine. “Go with God,” Rosie says. “If God exists, he’s forgotten me… not even the earth that covers our bones will remember us,” he says.
The great escape
April 2, 1945: rain pours on Stalag Luft XIII as the men prepare for another night march. The colonel manages to negotiate a 20km-per-night limit, before they set course to Berching. Bucky says he’s heard they’re being taken across the Danube tomorrow, so they should make a move sooner rather than later. An ally plane swoops in and fires at the men, believing them to be German troops (the young Nazi is killed in the assault). As Bucky fumes at the guard for forcing them to march when it’s so unsafe, Buck quietly tells him he’s game for the escape.
As they march through a small town, they take advantage of a brief window of confusion and leg it to a nearby wall. Bucky is last to follow Buck, and he’s spotted by a Nazi guard. Buck flees on Bucky’s say so, and the colonel orders the Nazi guard in charge to let Bucky go. He may not be free, but he’s not dead.
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Buck, George, and Bill run all the way to the forest, hiding under the cover of bushes from passing Nazis. They see a wounded white horse with blood running down its body, alone and confused; it no longer has any purpose, other than to be free and damaged from conflict. As they try to get some rest, George is attacked and killed by two members of the Hitler Youth. Buck grabs one of their guns and resists the urge to shoot them, instead allowing both of them to run away. “They didn’t even have any goddamn bullets,” he realizes as he checks the barrel.
Back at base, Rosie returns home to men cheering his name. He tells Crosby all about his journey, and Crosby reveals his wife is pregnant – but he doesn’t seem too happy about it. “You know, all this killing we do. Day in, day out… does something to a guy, makes him different, not in a good way. Sometimes I wake up, I don’t even recognize myself in the mirror,” he explains.
Crosby cites a quote by Nietzsche: “Whoever fights monsters, should take care not to become a monster himself, because if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes right back into you.” Rosie tells him they’re there to “fight the monsters… and yeah, that’s made us do some tough things. But we had to. There’s no other way. The things these people are capable of… no, they got it coming. Trust me.”
Bucky and Bill make it to a small village in the Bavarian countryside, where they’re stopped by American soldiers – what a result! Meanwhile, Bucky and the remaining men are taken to Stalag VIII in Moosburg, where the Tuskegee Airmen also find other Black POWs. None of them are processed: this is just a holding pen until they decide what to do with them next.
Buck makes it home
Buck returns to Thorpe Abbotts, where he reunites with Crosby and Rosie; he even jokes he left his musette bag “at the suite in the Stalag.” He catches sight of planes dropping boxes on the ground – the Dutch are starving to death, so as part of a (planned) flak truce with the Germans, they’re “dropping tons of food west and southwest of the Zuider Zee.”
He finds his trunk in the barracks. Crosby says Bucky wouldn’t let them send it back to his folks, because he was “just MIA.” As he looks at a photo of Marge and his lucky ‘buck’ from Bucky, Rosie asks if he wouldn’t mind flying the mercy mission to the Netherlands. “Be nice to get behind the yoke again,” he says.
Over at the camp, salvation arrives in the form of a P-51. “It’s the Yanks,” German guards scream as the plane howls towards them, tearing up their stations with gunfire. Before the men can celebrate too much, the Germans open fire on them as American forces arrive in tanks and on foot. Bucky finds a flag to claim the camp. He climbs the pole, throws the Nazi flag to the ground – where it’s torn up by the men – and raises the US flag. The German commander willingly hands over the camp and his men; their imprisonment is over.
Back home, on May 1, 1945, Buck gets himself ready for his flight to Holland; his first with Rosie as his co-pilot and Ken flying in a plane for the first time. As they break through the clouds, he gazes at the “beautiful” view. The planes get themselves into formation as they arrive in the Netherlands and prepare for any unexpected gunfire… but nothing comes. On the ground, Germans simply look up and watch as the Americans save a nation from starvation.
They fly over picturesque villages as families wave from below, running to collect the first fresh fruit they’ve seen in years. On a field, they see a large message: “Many thanks, yanks.”
The ending we all needed
Buck approaches Thorpe Abbotts, so he requests landing instructions… but the voice sounds a little too familiar, so he asks the air traffic controller to repeat himself. “You heard me the first goddamn time, Gale,” Bucky tells him. As he lands, Bucky rides alongside the plane. “The stone in my shoe!” Buck says, with a big smile on his face.
“We made a few of those supply drops in the last days of the war. And then, one day… it was over,” Crosby narrates, as we hear Winston Churchill’s announcement of the German surrender. If there’s a better excuse to start partying, we’d love to hear it.
As everyone at Thorpe Abbotts drinks, dances, and shoots flares with joyful abandon, Buck and Bucky enjoy a quiet drink together; they vowed to make it to the end together, and they did. “At first it felt unreal… impossible, unimaginable. And then, inevitable. We were going home, all of us. I had a wife to see, a son, a life to start,” Crosby narrates, as the men ready their planes for their final flight.
“You’re gonna be a hell of a father, Croz,” Rosie tells him, turning for one last grinning glance at each other as they part ways. Buck arrives soon after, giving the local children a final salute before boarding – only to find his best friend beside him. “This is it,” they say. “You looking forward to see Marge?” Bucky asks, and Buck’s groan is a good enough answer.
“Leaving a lot of good men behind,” Bucky says as they do their pre-flight checks. “A lot of brave men,” Buck replies.
“On occasion, the world must confront itself, answer what we are with who we are. I was going home. I just wished more of us were,” Crosby narrates as everyone waves them goodbye.
Masters of the Air Episodes 1-9 are streaming on Apple TV+ now. You can also check out our other coverage below:
Review | Premiere recap | Episode 3 recap | Episode 4 recap | Episode 5 recap | Episode 6 recap | Episode 7 recap | Episode 8 recap | How accurate is it? | Release schedule: Dates & episodes | Cast and real-life characters | Filming locations | Is it a Band of Brothers sequel? | Soundtrack & songs | Is Barry Keoghan’s Curt dead? | Did Buck die? | What happened to Babyface? | What is a subaltern? | Was Sandra Wesgate a real person?
