Band of Brothers

An astonishing episode, this one. If you look at the traditional depictions of the two world wars, The Great War (WW1) is often shown to be an absurd, incredibly cruel war in which the military didn't achieve much in four years, an exercise in exhaustion. World War Two looks like a campaign with lots of movement, with clear goals and brave soldiers who could get things done.



This episode shows that the Second World War had WW1 moments too. The men of Easy Company are stuck in the Ardennes in the cold, constantly shelled. Death could come any minute, even if you weren't doing anything. The brilliant thing about Band of Brothers is that you never know what will happen to your favourite character, and there are some (tragic) surprises here. At the same time it is shown that some officers were as clueless as their predecessors in World War One.



The story point of view changes in most episodes. This one is told through the eyes of a weary sergeant, beautifully played (=underacted) by Donnie Wahlberg. On a technical level I was constantly amazed by the way the snowy forest was recreated indoors. You couldn't tell it was fake.



The only criticism you could throw at the episode is that sometimes the irony seemed a bit forced. But then you realise that it really did happen this way. Life's little ironies...

This is my favourite episode in the Band Of Brothers series. Easy Company have survived Bastogne and are now preparing for their assault on the town Foy.



The men are shelled constantly and many men are killed on badly injured. Muck & Pencala (Malarkey's best friends) are killed and Toye and Guarnere (2 of my favourites) are severely wounded. Buck Compton who witnessed Toye and Guarnere getting hurt, breaks down and has to leave the line.



1st Sgt Lipton (this episodes narrator) he explains to Winters how easy company's commander Lt. Dike is such an incompetant leader, unfortunately Winters can't do anything about it.



During the assault of Foy, Dike freezes and Winters has to send in Lt. Speirs

(of Dog Company) to relive him. Speirs gets things under control quickly and Easy Company take Foy.



Speirs becomes Easy Company's new commander and Lipton gets promoted.



I loved every minute of Breaking Point. This is a defining episode for Easy Company, you sense that after they took Foy they had broken the Germans back.

Great episode with, surprise!, a moral undertone. If I had to choose a phrase to sum it up it would be "All that glitters is not gold".



We are treated to a particularly humorous bit where the newest 'leader' of the team keeps running off and leaving them all to fend for themselves. One of the soldiers naturally steps up and into his place, all the while they tear this new leader down because he just up and leaves them in the middle of war.



The one thing I did not like about this episode is when one of the members leaves. It is very choppy around there, with no real reasoning why he left. Overall, the flow of this episode is superb, conversations are had all around, and the humor is present, which is always entertaining.

This is an action packed episode. The main premise of this one is Leadership. While you see great leadership from Winters. You don't see that from the constant officers who replace him. While in most war time situations, the NCO's usually are the ones run the platoons, you rarely see that in company strength. While you Winters review possible candidates for Company Commander, you get to see each of their strengths and weaknesses. As said in this episode this was the lowest point for Easy Company in the war. The shelling claimed a large amount of soldiers. You get to see which officer is in charge of Easy Company. It's a great choice that I didn't see coming.

The Breaking point. It refers probably to the point where soldiers have had enough...enough to see their friends dead or handicap in war. Exactly what happened to Buck, a courageous soldier, who many wanted as the new Easy Company C.O instead of the unworthy Lt Dike. They focused a lot on that aspect on war, the break downs where some even went nuts.

I like the way the story is told by Lipton...brings on a lot of energy. The Germans bombing were intense and the causalities where perfectly represented graphically. Winters is now commanding officer and cannot go on the battlefield with his beloved Easy Company but I love it when he hold the gun and wanted to assault too. The assault on the Germans was awesome and what Speirs did was so brave and epic. Great Lipton was promoted, he deserved it and Speirs is a worthy C.O for Easy company.

This episode was not as strong as the previous, but still one of the better of the series. The main focus was on the importance of leadership, with Sgt Lipton in focus.



I couldn't help but wonder how come this episode focused the most on leadership (out of the episodes I've seen so far), yet the opening interviews that talked about leadership were in a different episode. Someone didn't think far enough on that one. But this episode was handled well, except for the constant voice over. I didn't mind the voice over per se, but it didn't fit in at all with the rest of the episodes. The second episode had a voice over towards the end which felt seriously out of place, in this episode it worked a bit better since it was consistent through the episode, but it doesn't work in the overall context of the series. When you're doing a ten episode series you simply cannot do six episodes sans voice over and then make it the main feature in episode seven. It breaks the flow and disjoints the episodes. Sometimes they're trying too hard to be creative, with such few episodes there's no real room for it.



Overall though this episode stayed at nearly the same high level as the previous. In many ways it felt like a follow-up on that episode, which was a positive, and it had the same mood as episode six. It also did a good job of taking us on an emotional journey with the characters, something which only episode six and to some degree episode three have even attempted at doing before.



The strongest scene of this episode was when they were in the convent towards the end. The peace and calm had a strong effect, along with the choire, and really showed that they were in heaven for the night, as oppose to the hell they live in usually. They used some really simple "tricks" in this scene, with the lighting, the singing and the lack of dialogue between the characters, which all worked out really well. I also really liked how they showed which soldiers they had lost. It was a good way of showing that they had lost them, but they carried them with them.

Wow what a episode, very exciting throughout. It would have to be the most graphically violent episode that results in loads of casualties.

Dike is such a crap leader that he goes off again and he puts the company in danger and it is almost completley destroyed. Spiers takes charge and does a fine job to try and restore some sort of order and control.

It would have taken a lot of courage for Lipton to speak out about Dike to Winters, something that I really admired.

It was sad to see Buck crack as I really enjoyed watching his character. I am surprised that more soldiers have not gone like that yet.



This episode is not for those with a weak stomach.

This episode, as the title suggests, really illustrates the mental consequences of war and seeing so much death. The term post-traumatic-stress disorder wasn't used at the time, but Sgt. Lipton, who is narrating the episode, seems to understand that combat can inflict psychological injuries as well as physical harm.



This episode and the previous one have very stark winter scenery. Black trees and icy snow. I've read that most of this was staged and not actually filmed outdoors, but you can't tell. It's very well done.



The last scene of this episode is haunting. The men of Easy Company are in a candlelit church listening to a choir sing and the ones who have been killed or wounded slowly fade out of sight. It's dramatic but not overdone.