This Masters of the Air ending explained of course contains spoilers! It's been a powerful and poignant ride, but Apple's sweeping World War Two saga comes to a tumultuous end here. The final episode is full of memorable moments, yet seeing Captain Egan hoist the stars and stripes above the POW camp is one of the defining images of the series.
The show is streaming on Apple TV Plus, and we've got a guide on how to watch Masters of the Air if you need any help in watching it yourself.
It’s early 1945 and the Allies are closing in on the Third Reich from all sides, including the skies, where the 8th Air Force flies uncontested over German soil as "the true masters of the air".
That’s good news for Rosie, who refused to go home after his 25th mission as he wanted to "finish the job". There’s still plenty of flak flying about though and when the nose of his Fort is blown away during a raid on Berlin, he makes a desperate push to get clear of the city and beyond the line of Soviet soldiers advancing from the East.
He stumbles through the smoke-filled fuselage, past dying comrades he’s unable to save and crashes to earth in a snowy no-man’s land during a running battle, with Russian and German bullets whistling over his head.
He's picked up by the Soviets, who eventually send him home, but not before he wanders into a nearby concentration camp that’s been abandoned by the Nazis. It’s a spine-chilling experience and seeing hundreds of frozen, emaciated bodies piled in the snow is an image that will be seared into his memory for the rest of his days. If that wasn’t bad enough, the words scrawled on the walls by hands long-since departed are even more heartbreaking.
Later on, he meets a man whose entire family was killed, with the Germans ordering him to bury them himself. "To live, one must make choices," he says. "If god exists he has forgotten me, not even the earth that covers our bones will remember us."
'We move tonight or we don't move at all...'
As the Soviets advance on Stalag Luft III, the prisoners are told they’re evacuating and have only a few minutes to grab provisions before being marched off into the night. How long and how far they’ll be walking, no one knows. The freezing conditions and the poor condition of the men mean some won’t make it and it’s clear that escape attempts will also be utterly futile.
During the march, they're overtaken by a weary battalion of German soldiers and while one enthusiastic young guard gives a "Heil Hitler" salute, everyone else in a Nazi uniform seems resigned to the inevitable.
The next morning they find themselves on a train, which is not a happy prospect for Bucky, who witnessed the agony of the Jewish prisoners crammed aboard similar death carriages. "I really did believe if there were only two B-17s left it would be me and you flying them," Buck tells Bucky, as they arrive in a POW camp just outside a decimated Nuremberg.
The next night leads to another march and with the prisoners about to cross the Danube river, it’s clear they need to make a run for it now or not at all. As Bucky, Buck and his pal break out into a small group to plan their escape, the POWs are attacked by a US plane.
When they reach a bombed-out town, Buck and two other men clamber over a wall to escape but are spotted before Bucky can join them. He manages to delay the German soldiers as they fire after his friends but has no idea if they are dead or alive.
We soon find out they did manage to escape, but in the woods, they’re soon set upon by a trio of German boys, who kill Buck’s pal. After fighting for so many years and spending so long in a POW camp, seeing the airman killed when freedom is within his grasp is a bitter moment. "They didn’t even have any goddamn bullets," says Buck bitterly.
At the last POW camp, a lone P-51 attacks the German machine gun tower, triggering a rebellion that sees prisoners scrambling in the mud to overpower their hopelessly outnumbered captors. The young German who gave the "Heil Hitler" salute earlier on is among the first to receive his comeuppance. As Allied tanks break down the fence, Bucky climbs the flagpole to cast down the Swastika and replace it with the stars and stripes. It’s a powerful moment, in which the emotions of everything he’s been through and the memory of friends he’s lost along the way, almost consumes him.
Yet the US flag isn’t the only one on show, with plenty of other nation’s colors flying in the breeze. This could well be the result of some generous creative licence, but it illustrates that it wasn’t just US, Soviet and British troops who brought down the Third Reich.
'A wife to see, a son, a life to start...'
At Thorpe Abbotts, Captain Crosby is waiting for news on Rosie when he hears the equipment room is locked with a mission about to take off. “I guess you’ve never flown over Germany without a parachute!” says Crosby when he finds the man responsible. While it seems only a matter of time before the Allies win the war, he knows the terrible personal consequences such complacency can have.
Crosby soon cheers up when Rosie makes it back to East Anglia and tells his pal his wife is pregnant, before admitting that being a father seems rather incongruous to the life he’s been leading of late. “Whoever fights monsters should take care not to become a monster himself,” he adds, quoting Nietzsche. “As you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes right back into you.” Rosie doesn’t share the details of what he saw in East Germany, but tells his friend their enemies “had it coming”.
It’s not long before Buck arrives back at Thorpe Abbotts and when he does he finds the 8th Air Force preparing to drop supplies to starving civilians in the Netherlands. His box is still beneath his bunk and Cros tells him Bucky wouldn’t let anyone ship it to his folks.
Buck agrees to “get behind the oak again” and co-pilots a supply flight with Rosie. Crosby is navigating and Sgt Lemmons is also aboard, in what will be his first ever time in an aircraft. Ironically, he’ll be part of a crew dropping oranges over European soil. How about that…
On the way home, Buck radios the tower for landing instructions and is answered by his pal Bucky, in a spine-tingling moment that is as schmaltzy as it is utterly irresistible and we totally have something in our eye. News of the German surrender comes through the next day and there’s quite a party. As bonfires burn and flares shot into the night sky, Buck and Bucky sit taking it all in.
“I had a wife to see, a son, a life to start!” says Crosby as they prepare to head home, before Buck and Bucky take off from Thorpe Abbotts together for the final time. “I was going home, I just wish more of us were,” he tells us, as the English civilians watch their planes depart.
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