Spoiler Alert: This post contains spoilers for “Part 6” of “Masters of the Air,” now streaming on Apple TV+.
When Major John “Bucky” Egan (Callum Turner) marches through the front gates of the Stalag Luft III prison camp in the final moments of Episode 6 of Apple TV+’s “Masters of the Air,” the last thing you expect to see is a smile. . And yet, despite the atrocities he’s endured to get here, there’s reason for Bucky to smile—even if he’s a changed man behind him.
Heading into last week’s mission, Egan was driven by a singular need to find his missing friend, Major Gale “Buck” Klavan (Austin Butler). But when he is forced out of his doomed plane, Egan finds himself with a new mission to survive behind enemy lines.
“This friendship means a lot to him,” says Turner. Diversity. “Until episode 5, Bucky is a superstitious man. He lives by his own rules and they keep him safe. But he breaks those rules to find his friend. I think when you destabilize yourself, you open yourself up to a different kind of vulnerability and eventually, it goes down. He betrays his lucky jacket because Buck doesn’t like it. It is extreme for him. And once it hits the ground, it’s just about survival. What he went through is truly extraordinary, and the violence he witnessed. So yes, by the end of the war, Bucky is a completely different man.
This fight for survival begins with Egan sneaking through the German countryside, avoiding detection and stealing cabbage from a backyard patch to eat. But when he is captured by vigilante locals, he marches with other prisoners of war (POWs) through a hostile, shell-shocked town still reeling from Allied bombing. When townspeople capture roving prisoners, their grievances and anger turn into violent, unrelenting massacres, with military escorts using the chaos to execute American prisoners at will. Egan survives only after being knocked unconscious and crushed under a pile of dead bodies, which he uses as cover to slip away. On foot, he is re-arrested and, after refusing to divulge secrets to a Nazi official, is put on a train bound for the Stalag Luft III prison camp in Germany, home to Allied Air Force pilots.
Walking through the front gates of the POW camp, Egan begins to recognize the familiar faces of his fellow Hundredth Bomb group men who are also MIA. Immediately, he starts looking for Klevan, who emerges from the crowd with a grin –– “What took you so long?”
It’s the only thing that can bring a smile out of a slain Egan, and Butler says the playful greeting came straight from the real Klevan.
“I spent time with Clevan’s nephew the other night and he said his uncle always told him (about that arrival at the POW camp),” says Butler. “He told me the line was absolutely accurate. Apparently that’s what Klaven told Egan.
Butler has not been seen on screen since Klavan and his crew went missing during a mission in episode 4, leaving his fate uncertain until now. Withholding the revelation of his fate meant that Butler was unable to play out Buck’s own remarkable trip to the camp after exiting his plane. That’s one thing he wishes could be included in the series.
“One of the details I loved was when Buck goes down, he pulls out a parachute and, apparently, he lands right in somebody’s kitchen,” says Butler. “He was trying to scout, and he went through their back door and into their kitchen, and he said it was a farmer who held a pitchfork to him. That was his rude awakening when he landed, and that’s one of those details. is what I wanted to see in the show. But I guess for the narrative, we were keeping the mystery alive.”
Although reunited, Egan and Clevan’s new reality as POWs will change their dynamics and force them out of the identity of the cockpits into a new mode of warfare. Early in the series, Egan is established as a talented playboy pilot and ball of energy, while Klavan is a man of precision and few words. Butler describes it as “the yin and yang of Egan and Clevan, Buck and Bucky.”
Their differences have made them such a perfectly balanced pair to lead the Hundreth thus far. In the upcoming episode, Turner says that the stress of their circumstances will test their friendship.
“Their whole relationship has changed because they’re in a completely different space, and have different ways of thinking about how to approach the situation for the first time,” says Turner. “That’s what’s so beautiful about their friendship because they constantly give each other room to be who they are, and they come to blows because the tension is rampant. It ruins their friendship. But they’re best friends, and that’s it. Always happens with best friends.”
One thing that will strain their bond is figuring out the best way to help the cause from the prison camp.
“I think it was incredibly frustrating for them because you want to be there doing what you do best,” Butler says. “You want to be part of the action and make a difference. But there was also part of the training where even if you were taken as a POW, you had to find a way to disrupt the enemy. You could do it anyway.”
To prepare for “Masters of the Air” –– from Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman, the team behind “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific” –– the cast went through a two-week boot camp. Real training for wartime pilots and their camaraderie as brothers in arms. He also asked each of them to get to know the real men they were playing.
“Honestly, it was a draining experience but very rewarding because I fully committed myself to this guy,” says Turner. “By the end of that year, I was probably speaking more as Egan than I was. I stayed in his accent almost all the time. I really enjoyed that commitment and leaning into someone else.”
But Turner also played a game with himself where he would place a mental barrier between him and the planes that defined Egan’s service in the war.
“I know Egan didn’t like being in the sky,” says Turner. “There’s nothing comfortable about that situation, and there’s nothing comfortable about thinking about going back to the ground. I hated going on those planes, and I just created that friction between me and that experience. Emotion is fear, and adrenaline is what gives you power.”
In contrast, the transition from the sky to Egan and Clevan’s time as POWs posed a different kind of challenge for Turner and Butler. The latter says that this new test was a rude awakening for their real counterparts, filled with harsh weather, tough living conditions and, as the show will show, the threat of not knowing what’s happening on the front lines or back home.
As one prisoner puts it upon Ivan’s arrival at the POW camp: “Welcome to Stalag Luft III, where you’re going to spend the best years of your wives.” The sight of Klevan wiped the smile from Egan’s face as quickly as it had put him there.
“It’s a different psychological toll when they don’t know how long the war will last and there’s very little information outside the camp,” says Butler. “So keeping morals in a healthy place, as healthy as can be, really becomes a key pillar of being a leader for Buck and Bucky at camp. And then figure out how you can get out of there and how you can come back. It will get really exciting in the later episodes.”
(TagsToTranslate)Austin Butler
