THE PACIFIC - "Part Two" - Episode Review
Heroes (for a cup of coffee)
This is going to be a short one, mainly because I thought it was just an average episode, perhaps due to the technical issues I had with my 720p rip, which was so dark during the climatic battle scene as to be nearly incomprehensible. Mainly, I couldn't tell that that was Basilone running through the jungle for ammo, or picking up the machine gun sans mitts, or clearing the barbed wire under fire in order to clear the sight line, all of which was the main point of the episode, to show this one soldier's true valor (and making Lt. Spiers look like a piker in comparison).
But in a way, like last week's Battle of Alligator Creek, it further reinforced the hellish conditions the Marines endured on Guadacanal. The newsreel footage/interview footage set the stage, but it was the many tiny details of "Part Two" that helped flesh it out, from the weevils in the rice, the over-indulgence of peaches and the resultant vomiting, the clothes literally rotting off the men's backs, the much needed levity during the supply raid on the Army (which allowed us to see boys being just boys for a change). In a way, this was almost too short of a snapshot to perhaps fully convey the horror of the situation, but what else can you do with only an hour of screen time?
Like BAND, I'm still struggling to sort out the soldiers (repeat viewings help, it was on the second pass that I got Rodriguez was the soldier who nicknamed Basilone "Peaches"), and that's an after effect of last week's short shrift intro. However, I feel we're getting a better intro to Eugene Sledge out of all the Marines, and his conversation with his dad was particularly well placed -- after an hour of grueling hand-to-mouth existence, back home in a clean, comfortable environment, the idealist's father warns him about losing not his body, but his soul. Sledge has no idea what he's really getting himself into, nor does the cook back on board the ship, who practically comes off as insensitive when he asks the weary soldiers, "What was it like?" He'll never know, and neither do we, but now we have a better idea of it.
These heroes certainly don't see themselves as such. At that point, they're just lucky they stepped in one random direction, and for a simple cup of coffee.
Episode Grade: B