The Pacific, "Part Eight": Jarhead in love

A review of tonight's "The Pacific" coming up just as soon as I make a table appear out of thin air...

After three harrowing episodes focusing on Sledge's time on Peleliu, "The Pacific" takes a sharp right turn, leaving Sledge and Snafu behind for a bit (other than a brief cameo at the top of the episode) to spend the hour on John Basilone, who hasn't been a major part of the miniseries for a month.

I can see how that would be jarring to some. "The Pacific" has been a more sprawling, less tightly-focused miniseries than "Band of Brothers" was, but that's been by design, as the creative team has tried to show a broader picture of the Pacific theater than they did of the Atlantic. So that means not only bouncing from character to character as we cover different island conflicts - here with Basilone being killed during the early hours of the Iwo Jima invasion - but also showing how different kinds of characters were affected by the war.

Where Sledge was a naive kid emotionally unprepared for what he saw on Peleliu, and where Leckie was a cynic and iconoclast, Basilone was a career military man (first in the Army, then the Marines) who knew what he was getting into when he went to war, and had no regrets about the fighting, the command structure, or any other part of being in the Corps. Given the man that we saw in the early episodes, and the brief, frustrated glimpses we got of him on his war bond tour, it's not a surprise that Basilone would have declined promotion, a cushy detail or an outright discharge in favor of going back into action. But it was still moving to watch his journey, from bored and out-of-shape celebrity to misunderstood drill sergeant to inspiring leader of men, and to see that even though he didn't survive Iwo Jima, he was every bit as brave and resourceful there as he was on Guadalcanal.

But this hour is as much the story of Lena Riggi as it is of Basilone.

Unlike Stella, Leckie's Australian girlfriend Stella from the third episode, Riggi was entirely real: the woman Basilone fell for, courted and married before shipping back out to the Pacific. So where Stella ultimately was more symbol than character, Riggi gets to be both a stand-in for the many women who lost loved ones in the war as well as her own person, well-played by Annie Parisse in a nice romantic duet with Jon Seda. While the story hit some familiar war movie beats (Basilone and Riggi even huddle up on a wave-swept beach in a scene evoking the iconic kiss in "From Here to Eternity"), the idea of them as kindred spirits - fellow non-coms who feel most at home in the military, and who fully understand the dangers and responsibilities that come with the uniform and the stripes - made it feel unique to them, and compelling.

Now, by the time Basilone pushed his superiors to let him be a regular Marine again, a lot of time had passed since Guadalcanal. Other famous heroes of the war had emerged, and while Basilone still didn't have to buy himself a drink anywhere he went, it's understandable that one of the two young men who form the foundation of Basilone's new squad wouldn't have heard of him, and that both might at first think the hero of Guadalcanal was overdoing it in training them.

But as we see when everyone lands on Iwo Jima (in another Hell-on-earth sequence to rival the airfield crossing on Peleliu), Basilone knew what he was doing, both in terms of training the men and in terms of what he'd need to do to survive. That he died doesn't mean he was wrong - as he told JP back in the second episode, life and death in battle is often a matter of luck and inches - and even in the moments leading to his death, he was still thinking clearly, helping others and not blinking in the face of an unbelievable onslaught.

And for all his heroism and celebrity, the final shot of the Iwo Jima sequence - with the camera pulling up to show Basilone lying among so many other dead men - was a potent reminder of the hundreds upon thousands of less famous Americans died under similar circumstances to the great John Basilone, and how many of them left their own version of Lena behind.

Some other thoughts:

• When Google is not your friend: after Anna Torv turned up in the fifth episode as Virginia Grey, I decided to do some web-searching to find out more about the real Grey. One of my first stops was her IMDb biography, which told me, "During her participation in WWII bond drives, she developed a close relationship with John Basilone, US Marine Medal of Honor winner, who was later killed on Iwo Jima." Whoops. And that, boys and girls, is one of the reasons I've been so strict about trying to avoid spoiling the fates of Basilone, Sledge and Leckie.

• There are, of course, many books about John Basilone. The one I've been perusing for background detail has been James Brady's new one.

• I liked how the gravel falling on Basilone's face after he was shot resembled the pencil shavings that go flying throughout the miniseries' opening credits sequence.

What did everybody else think?

The Pacific, "Part Seven": My father's gun

A review of tonight's "The Pacific" - the most intense, harrowing, and best installment yet - coming up just as soon as I hit the driving range...

"You don't wanna do that." -Snafu

I complained in the early "Pacific" reviews that vignettes of Sledge back home in Mobile were sometimes a distraction - that I would have rather stayed with Leckie and Basilone in the field than to keep coming back to the kid who wouldn't be seeing combat for until the miniseries was almost half over.

But ultimately, those scenes turn out to have been essential. Because we spent a fair amount of time with Sledge as a naive kid eager to go to war to prove himself, it's far more striking to now see him as the veteran who leaves Peleliu haunted by what he saw and did there. The Sledge of Mobile would have looked at those women in white and then sheepishly averted his eyes when called on it; the Sledge of Peleliu was able to scare off another man in uniform with his stare. Terrific work by Joseph Mazzello throughout.

After being horrified by Snafu's amoral attitude and tooth-scavenging in Part Five, Sledge is ready to follow suit here - and in a wonderful moment, so ambiguously-played by Rami Malek, Snafu gets him to stop, perhaps because Snafu means what he says about germs, or perhaps because Snafu's not so far gone that he recognizes there's some part of Sledgehammer that should be protected from becoming like him. Of course, that he does it only moments after we see him casually dropping pebbles into a dead man's open skull cavity - a horrifying image that's not going to leave my brain anytime soon - only adds to the ambiguity(*), and the dark comedy of it all.

(*) Also ambiguous, and horrific: Snafu killing the wounded soldier whose teeth are being excavated by another Marine. He says he did it because it "makes it easier," but you could also read it as Snafu putting the poor bastard out of his misery.

By spending three episodes on one island, and most of that time with Sledge, this stretch of the miniseries feels a little more focused than some of the early episodes on Guadalcanal. By the time we leave Peleliu, I felt like I understood not only Sledge, but Snafu and Gunny Haney and the late Ack-Ack, where Leckie and Basilone were the only men in their respective stories who got much characterization. "The Pacific" was designed as a three-character piece, with each man trading spotlights, but given that they barely cross paths with each other, it helps if they have other people to react to, and Sledge in this Peleliu sequence has by far the richest supporting cast. Hell, Snafu alone is such a weird, compelling figure that this episode feels less a Sledge solo than a Sledge/Snafu duet.

There's more action at night than there was in the previous two episodes, and in general, director Tim Van Patten seems content to let things seem as chaotic and blurred together as it does to Sledge, whose only real way to differentiate the days is with the tally he keeps in his Bible-cum-journal.

Ultimately, nothing seems to matter on Peleliu except the chaos. Ack-Ack is killed by sniper fire (and his body is given a touching impromptu honor guard from the gathered Marines), Gunny Haney finally cracks under the pressure of a very different war from the one he fought as a young man, and the island itself turns out to have no military value. At episode's end, Eugene runs into the water on Pavuvu to get clean, but there are some thing you just can't wash off.

Some other thoughts

• In a role reversal, now it's Basilone as subject of a few random trips home while we follow Sledge in combat, with the hero of Guadalcanal miserable as a celebrity back in America while his buddies are getting chewed up overseas.

• Speaking of which, we get a couple of cameos from characters from earlier in the series, as Chesty Puller limps past Sledge while Leckie's pal Chuckler is carried off in a stretcher, wounded but alive. Bruce McKenna said he would have loved to feature more of Chesty, particularly after he saw William Sadler's performance; the problem was that after Guadalcanal, Chesty was never geographically all that close to the events our main characters were involved in.

• But if Chesty is largely absent, Scott Gibson got to do some nice work as Ack-Ack Haldane, who gets to show the kind of subtle leadership that Leckie never really seemed to witness during his time in action. Here, we see him distracting Sledge with talk of home, and then with a very important, but safe and easy to perform, task: waking him from a 20-minute cat nap.

• McKenna wrote the "Bastogne" episode of "Band of Brothers" that focused on combat from the point of view of the company medic. Here he echoes that idea with the sequence where Sledge has to serve as a stretcher bearer, running frantically through the field of fire, in as much danger as the other Marines but not in a position to fight back.

What did everybody else think?

The Pacific, "Part Six": To Hell and back

A review of "The Pacific" chapter six coming up just as soon as I count bandages...

"History is full of wars fought for a hundred reasons. But this war - our war - well, I want to believe - I have to believe - that if I step across that airfield, every man that's wounded, every man I lose, that it's all worthwhile because our cause is just. 'Course, if a just cause came with hot food and some water, that'd be okay, too." -Ack-Ack Haldane

I once interviewed CBS football analyst Phil Simms the day after a game where a punt returner got completely crushed by a defender a split-second after he caught the ball. We talked about that play, and I marveled that any human being could do a job where such a thing is required. Simms, who knew a thing or 12 about getting hit from his days as the Giants' quarterback, looked at me with the disappointment of a man who's spent a lifetime talking with people who don't understand the game he used to play, and said, "There's no choice. You don't think about it; you just do it, because that's the game."

I thought a lot about Simms' comment as I watched the Marines try to cross the Peleliu airfield in Part Six. Obviously, getting shot at by the Japanese is infinitely more dangerous than getting sacked by Reggie White, but watching the brutal airfield sequence, all I could think was, "How do men do this? How do they just run across a this killing zone?" And then I thought, like Simms said, "What other choice do they have? These are their orders, and this is what men in combat do."

"Part Six," directed by Tony To and shot once again by Remi Adefarasin, featured perhaps the most intense combat yet in "The Pacific." We got a taste of the savagery of Peleliu last week, but a lot of that episode was spent with the men enjoying some downtime on Pavuvu. Here, there's no let-up, no escape, unless you're someone like Leckie or Runner, who get hurt badly enough to be sent away on a Navy ship, but not killed.

Leckie gets taken out of action (leaving Sledge as the only one of our main characters still in the field), and there's that great moment on the ship where he's relieved to find Runner and says that he didn't abandon him, but got hurt looking for a corpsman to save him, and Runner tells him he doesn't need to say anything. Because that's another thing about being in combat with someone: you know them better than almost anyone else on the planet, and you know if they're the type who would run out of fear or the type who would run for help. By this point, Runner and Leckie have been through so much together that there's no doubt in Runner's mind what Leckie was up to. Very nice work by James Badge Dale, and by Keith Nobbs as Runner.

While Leckie's war is over for now, Sledge's is only getting worse, just as old buddy Sid feared, even as he tried to convince Eugene's parents otherwise on his return to Alabama.

As Sledge's unit moves across the airfield and then into the hills on Peleliu, we see again and again how savage, and how random, combat can be. Sledge goes back to help the fallen Snafu, and in the process another Marine dies while carrying the mortar that Sledge put down. At night, one Marine is so emotionally scarred from what he's seen so far on the island that he can't stop screaming, even when restrained and injected with morphine. The danger of giving away their position (and, though it's not exactly stated, of spurring panic in the rest of the men) becomes so great that the Marines have no choice but to kill the poor bastard with a shovel. (This really happened in front of Sledge.)

As Sledge, no longer innocent after only a few days of action, reluctantly tells Snafu, "I guess better him than all of us."

Yet despite isolated incidents of panic, brutal conditions, a lack of supplies and unbelievably fierce fighting in the daytime, most of the men aren't cracking under all of this. When one of Sledge's buddies admits he still has a little bit of precious water in his canteen, he passes it around, and every man takes only his small share. When the Marines aboard a transport vehicle won't take away the wounded men from Sledge's unit, the officers stand in front of the truck to block its passage until the wounded are loaded aboard. And when Sledge's CO Ack-Ack Haldane realizes his orders are going to get his men killed, he heads back to battalion and gets them changed.

If you go into a battle as horrible as the one on Peleliu, you don't always have a choice about where you have to go and what obstacles you have to get past. But if you're able to keep your wits about you, and are very lucky indeed, maybe you can make it to the other side in one piece.

Some other thoughts

• As mentioned above, this one was directed by Tony To, who's been a part of the Tom Hanks/HBO gang going back to "From the Earth to the Moon." Fienberg interviewed James Badge Dale before the miniseries began, and Dale gives a great account of the day everyone on set warned him, "Tony's To's gonna blow you up." Fair warning: the interview gives away some things about Leckie post-Peleliu, which we won't be discussing here.

• The green screen shot at the end on the boat is the first effect of the series that doesn't look all that convincing. Given how incredible the rest of the hour looks, I'll allow it.

• Bit by bit, we've been seeing the shots from the opening title sequence turn up in the episodes, and here we get a big one, with Leckie making his way back across the airfield while gravel and debris flies all around.

• Sledge actually picked up the "Sledgehammer" nickname in basic training, but it was still a good moment for the slightly fictionalized Sledge and Snafu for Snafu to bestow it upon him here as semi-stated thanks for saving his life. (And in real life, the basic training nickname was half-mocking; here, it's a compliment to his fortitude in battle.)

• And speaking of nicknames, nice callback for Runner to call Leckie "Peaches" when they find each other on the ship.

Once again, as alluded to above, we're not going to talk about events that took place after what's depicted in this episode, and specifically treating the fates of Sledge, Leckie and Basilone as spoilers. But with that in mind, what did everybody else think?

The Pacific, "Part Five": On the beach

A review of "The Pacific" part five coming up just as soon as I spell my last name for you...

"Sid, what's it like?" -Sledge
"I slept with a woman in Melbourne. I'm not bragging. That's at one end, right? And then way down there, as far as you can go, that's what it's like. And that... that you can never imagine." -Phillips

"The Pacific" opened with two episodes packed with action and tension, then took a break in Part Three for the extended stay in Melbourne, then went claustrophobic with a Part Four more concerned with the psychological damage of war than the physical. In Part Five, Eugene Sledge finally arrives in the Pacific, briefly spends time with his buddy Sid Phillips and debates theology with Leckie, and with two central characters in the field again (while Basilone is home selling war bonds and sleeping with movie stars), the series moves on to the jaw-dropping action that will dominate its middle hours, with the Battle of Peleliu.

As Tom Hanks says in the opening documentary, the U.S. expected the conflict on Peleliu to last maybe a few days, when instead it dragged on for more than two months. After Guadalcanal, the Japanese realized that hurling themselves at American machine guns wasn't a viable tactic, and instead realized they could dig in, use the terrain as cover, and go after the Americans in a more protected, more ruthless fashion.

And the Americans were not at all ready for that.

Part One featured a kind of nod and a wink to the Omaha Beach sequence from "Saving Private Ryan," with Leckie and his buddies bracing for a brutal beach assault that never materialized. Here, we finally got the "Private Ryan" level of spectacle, with director Carl Franklin, director of photography Remi Adefarasin and company making like Spielberg to depict the complete hell(*) that Sledge and Leckie and the others experienced as the boats landed on Peleliu.

(*) Interestingly, Adefarasin again went with a kind of heavenly light approach (as he did when Leckie climbed back up onto the ship at the end of Part Two) as the front of Sledge's boat opened up - only here what was visible once Sledge's eyes adjusted was the exact opposite of heavenly.

The danger of Spielberg producing another World War II project, and one that features soldiers/Marines landing on a beach under heavy fire, is that it becomes impossible to not compare it to the earlier work - particularly since Sledge, like Tom Hanks's character, briefly loses his hearing from all the bullets and exploding shells whizzing by. But if parts of it were a bit familiar, even shot in the bright blue pallette of this miniseries versus the desaturated grays of "Private Ryan" and "Band," it was still incredible to look at, and harrowing to watch as the attack kept going and going and going. The scope is much greater than anything we saw in "Band" (which had a lower budget and more primitive computer effects), where even the D-Day jump mainly focused in on what Dick Winters was doing and could see.

But Part Five, written by Lawrence Andries and head writer Bruce McKenna, wisely takes its time getting to Peleliu. We've gotten to know Leckie by now, particularly in the third and fourth hours of the miniseries, and here we get to spend a while with Sledge as he adjusts to being in the theater of operations. As we saw in "Band" when Easy Company's replacements started to arrive, there's this great distance between Eugene and best friend Sid, and between the devout, undamaged Eugene and bitter agnostic Leckie, because they've seen and done things he can't possibly imagine.

The episode closes in a brief moment of calm, as Sledge and his buddies talk about family vacations to distract themselves from the horrors they've witnessed, and the horrors yet to come when the sun rises. One guy quotes his father's opinion about the Grand Canyon: "You have to see it to understand... You have to be there, looking down into it."

Eugene Sledge is on Peleliu now, looking down into the nightmare the 1st Marine Division didn't realize it was walking into. He may not understand everything that Sid and Leckie and the rest have experienced over the past two years, but he's already starting to get a pretty clear, bleak picture.

Some other thoughts:

• There's no record of Leckie and Sledge having met, but McKenna justified the scene by pointing out that Sid (who was educated and liked to read) served with Leckie, and Leckie had a reputation as "the book guy," whom other soldiers would go to see for reading material on Pavuvu. Sid would have told Eugene this, and given Sledge's own love of reading and writing, they could have very easily crossed paths. McKenna: "Do I know that it happened, fact positive? No. But it's very likely."

• I know I complained in episode two that the digressions to see Sledge in America were a bit distracting, but I liked how his basic training scene in last week's episode was used to foreshadow the action here, as Sledge winds up in a combat scenario that's exactly what we saw him training for in Part Four.

• Sledge's arrival brings with it the introduction of a bunch of new supporting characters to keep track of. Three that stood out immediately: Capt. Andrew "Ack-Ack" Haldane (played by Scott Gibson), the officer who cuts Sid and Eugene some slack when he catches them wrestling in the dirt; Gunny Haney (Gary Sweet), the old (Haney was a WWI vet), very tan, very intense guy who yells at the sky when the rain stops in mid-shower, and who can get away with chewing out a lieutenant for poor handling of his weapon; and, especially, Rami Malek as Snafu, Sledge's completely amoral new mentor, who smokes and pukes and likes to extract gold teeth from fallen Japanese soldiers. (This was actually a not-uncommon practice in the Pacific theater.)

• Yes, that's Anna Torv from "Fringe" as actress Virginia Grey, who was at the peak of her box office powers at the time she met and fell for Basilone during their war bond drive together. (Basilone told others that he liked Grey because she cared more about the bond drive than her acting career.) "The Pacific" was actually filmed several years ago, before "Fringe" debuted; Torv at the time was just another Australian actor (who could affect a decent American accent) in a miniseries that hired a lot of them in supporting roles.

• I also thought it was a nice touch to show Basilone not only being uncomfortable with celebrity and being out of action, but with the fear that his brother George might get himself killed trying to live up to John's reputation. Being celebrated as a hero can be a burden, especially when you have a large family with others trying to follow in your footsteps.

• The movie the men are watching is 1943's "For Whom the Bell Tolls" with Ingrid Bergman (uttering the famous line "Where do the noses go?") and Gary Cooper. Hoosier's blunt, R-rated advice for Cooper is one of many reminders throughout the episode of how unfiltered the Marines were.

Okay, once again the goal is to treat the big historical aspects of the war (i.e., we won, Peleliu was brutal) as understood fact, while trying to avoid spoiling the fates of Sledge, Leckie and Basilone. Keeping that in mind, what did everybody else think?

The Pacific, "Part Four": Bad-ass bed-wetter

A review of "The Pacific" chapter four coming up just as soon as I have the pause that refreshes...

"This is as bad as my war gets." -Cpl. Ruddiger

The 1st Marine Division is back in action as Part Four begins, but Basilone is back home selling war bonds (and appears only as a character in a comic book being read by Pvt. Loudmouth) and Sledge is still in basic training. So the man of this gripping, nightmarish hour is Bob Leckie, in a tour de force performance by James Badge Dale, who shows you just how bad another man's war can get.

The Battle of Cape Gloucester isn't a particularly famous one, but Part Four worked as a reminder that all battles have their terrifying moments - and that the time in between action can be just as oppressive and soul-wearying, particularly in environments like New Britain and Pavuvu during the rainy season.

So we got that mesmerizing battle scene where the Japanese charge in the torrential rain like a horde of Orcs from "Lord of the Rings," while Leckie has to stand in the intelligence tent and wait to see if he has to blow it (and, possibly, himself) up to keep it from falling into enemy hands. But we also got a lot of scenes of the Marines slowly going crazy amid the rain and the mud and the waiting. Lebec eats his gun (stripping off his clothes first to keep the blood off his uniform). Gibson strangles a Japanese soldier to death and winds up being sent to a mental hospital - where Leckie himself joins him after everyone assumes his bed-wetting is a sign of him losing his marbles.

Leckie does, in fact, suffer from enuresis, but the mental hospital isn't an inappropriate place for him to be. As Dale shows throughout the episode, Leckie is struggling to keep it together out in the jungle. He can hold up enough to take out a Japanese squad by himself when he gets separated from his patrol, but the endless rain and fighting and waiting are getting to him, even worse than the other Marines. For Leckie to wind up in the loony bin, even briefly, is a shocking thing to see in a World War II story(*), but it really did happen to Leckie, and could just as easily have happened to anyone else in his company.

(*) As Bruce McKenna points out, "Band" did show Buck Compton cracking, "but you don't see Buck in the mental hospital after."

Ultimately, Leckie just needs a respite from the front, where Gibson appears irreparably broken, but watching this episode, it's not hard to understand how this could have happened to either of them, or so many other men like them.

Some other thoughts:

• This one was both directed and co-written (with Robert Schenkkan) by "Band of Brothers" veteran Graham Yost (who's now doing FX's "Justified"). Yost also served as one of the showrunners of "The Pacific." Matt Craven, who plays Dr. Grant, is a staple of Yost's work, having appeared in the Yost-directed episode of "From the Earth to the Moon" (my favorite one, about the engineers who built the lunar lander), a couple of episodes of Yost's "Boomtown" and was a regular on his short-lived Jeff Goldblum cop show "Raines." When I interviewed Yost for this feature about Elmore Leonard and "Justified," we eventually got to talking about "The Pacific." Yost told me a story about how Craven was on vacation in Europe and happened to cross paths with Tom Hanks, who was there to either film or promote "Angels and Demons." Hanks saw him, smiled, and said (in that high-pitched voice Hanks uses when he's about to be sarcastic), "Matt? Matt Craven?" Then Hanks looked around, puzzled, and asked, "Where's Graham?"

• That's Nate Corddry as Loudmouth. I wouldn't put his appearance on par with Jimmy Fallon's "Band" cameo (which many people felt was too distracting), in part because Corddry isn't as famous, in part because he already has a track record in drama (he was one of the better parts of "Studio 60"), but I have to admit it was briefly jarring to see him, particularly since he was a new addition to the company. (Had they cast Corddry as, say, Runner, I'd have more easily gone with it.) The real Loudmouth, by the way, was described by Leckie as being quite a bit heavier than Corddry, and was apparently killed by a falling boulder when the Marines tried to dynamite a path through the jungle.

• Soldiers wanting to bring home a Luger as a souvenir was a running story in "Band" (and got at least one paratrooper killed), and here we see Leckie and Lt. Larkin battling for ownership of the Luger-looking Japanese pistol. (I don't know much about weapons, but a cursory Google search suggests it was a Nambu.) And that in turn leads to the great scene where Ruddiger is collecting Leckie's potentially suicide-aiding possessions and Leckie points the gun at him. Who, in that moment, wouldn't take him as a crazy person?

Keeping in mind once again that we're going to avoid discussing any details about the main characters past the events depicted in this particular episode (for the benefit of people who know that we won the war but not what happened to Leckie, Sledge or Basilone), what did everybody else think?

The Pacific, "Part Three": My big fat Greek shore leave

A review of "The Pacific" episode three coming up just as soon as I read you the articles of war...

"You have to go away, Bob." -Stella

After the intense combat action of the first two episodes, "The Pacific" chapter three comes as something of a jarring change. Like Leckie and the other puzzled Marines trying to make sense of the enthusiastic greetings of the Melbourne women, it's hard to fathom that this place is part of the same planet, or miniseries, as what we saw on Guadalcanal.

But if "The Pacific" aims to tell the entire story of the 1st Marine Division's time over there, then a Melbourne stopover is a necessary one - as head writer Bruce McKenna notes, "The 1st Marine Division spent more time in Australia than Easy Company did in Europe" - and one that begins to expand the scope of the series. It's not just about grimy men in foxholes before, during and after combat; it's about the emotional cost of war, not just on the men who fight it, but on those who care for them.

In real life, Leckie never had a great romance with a Greek-Australian girl and her family (he mostly spent his time Down Under having affairs with a variety of women), and you can kind of tell. (I suspected it was fictionalized even before I started reading up on Leckie.) There's a difference between compressing events (or assigning moments one character had in real life to another character in the film) and inventing things out of whole cloth, and it sticks out in the middle of a production that's largely so committed to fidelity.

Which isn't to say that I disliked the story of Stella and her family. I liked the writing and performances. I liked what it told us about Leckie, who got to open up to Stella about his family and background(*) in a way that wouldn't be plausible with his fellow Marines. And Stella's fear of falling for a man she assumes will be killed in combat rang very true as something that many real girlfriends of Marines and soldiers felt, even if the sentiments had to be placed in the mouth of an obviously fictional character.

(*) And the talk about being the unwanted final child of a large family kind of puts a new angle on his goodbye scene with his father in the debut, doesn't it? at the time, I watched that and read it as his father talking so much about his car because he couldn't deal with the thought that Bob could die soon. Instead, maybe it's just as Leckie tells Stella: his dad didn't much care about him.

Leckie took a backseat to Basilone in the second episode, and James Badge Dale did really well with the renewed focus on his character here. I really only knew him as Chase on "24," and he's very impressive throughout this hour, whether he's showing Leckie letting himself fall under the spell of Stella and her family, Leckie starting to go native enough that he begins to resent being back training among the men, and, especially, Leckie's simmering anger after Stella not only dumps him, but does it in a way that amplifies the sense of impending doom that comes with serving in this theater of operation. Leckie's kind of a broken individual to begin with, and what he's witnessing in both war and relative peace is only making him worse.

Because we spent so much time on combat in the first two hours, Part Three provides some much-needed characterization not only of Leckie, but of Basilone. Episodes like this one are essential for keeping our investment in the hours that are largely about action, particularly since there are only three characters to zero in on, and one of them's headed back to the States for the forseeable future.

I knew nothing about Basilone going into the miniseries, save that he's from Jersey and beloved in his hometown of Raritan. When Chesty mentioned in Part Two that he felt Basilone's actions deserved a medal, I began wondering what it might be. To bring it back to "Band of Brothers" for a moment, Dick Winters somehow didn't get the Medal of Honor for leading Easy Company's attack on the guns at Brecourt Manor on D-Day, so the bar's pretty high. (The Medal can also be a very political thing; as I understand it, only one was going to be awarded to someone from the parachute infantry on that day.) But if a man like Basilone can't get one for what he did on October 24, who can?

As I've said before, I never much liked Jon Seda in previous roles (his arrival on "Homicide" really accelerated that once-great show's decline), but whatever direction he's been given here is really working. It's a very minimalist performance, but when he hears Chesty tell him about the medal, or when he has to receive it, or says goodbye to J.P., his eyes say everything that's needed.

And even before the Pentagon sends him home for a war bond drive, we get to see how the responsibility of the Medal is starting to weigh on him. Basilone may have deserved it, but he was also a carouser not prepared to suddenly become a role model, and some of the episode's lightest, most memorable moments, come from seeing what a party-hound he was.

The peaceful time in Australia eventually comes to an end, as the men (and the series) prepare to return to action. It will not be pretty.

Some other thoughts:

• This is the first episode with a script not credited to McKenna, with novelist and "Wire" veteran George Pelecanos sharing credit with Michelle Ashford.

• The series rotated between two different directors of photography: Remi Adefarasin, who did the first two episodes, and Stephen Windon, who does this one. Windon and director Jeremy Podeswa were really on their game in making the scenes at Stella's home, particularly in the backyard garden, look more and more idyllic as the affair went on. By the end of it, I wanted to move in with that family.

• No combat, but still room for some really graphic imagery, here with Leckie and some of the other guys having to cut blisters off their feet from all the rocks getting in there during the march back to town. Ugh.

• More good comic relief: Sid listening patiently to the old man's lecture about the three simple rules (which he would later break) for dating his granddaughter.

Finally, let me again repeat how the No Spoiler policy is going to apply to this series. History on a big scale is not and should not be considered a spoiler. If you don't know the larger points of World War II and/or the Pacific campaign, then you and your high school history teacher need to have a chat. But the lives and military careers of Basilone, Leckie and Sledge, for our purposes, will be considered spoilers. So if you know more about one or more of them going in, or read up on them over the course of the miniseries, do not share any of that info in your comments, okay? We were able to get through the "Band of Brothers" reviews without giving away who lived, who died, who got promoted, transferred, etc., and I'm sure we can do that here as well. So until we get to the final episode in 10 weeks, no talking about anything that took place after the events depicted in a given episode. Okay?

What did everybody else think?

The Pacific, "Part Two": Basilone together

A review of "The Pacific" episode two coming up just as soon as I enjoy Rice Without...

"Everybody's heard of Guadalcanal and the 1st Marine Division. You guys are on the front page of every newspaper in America. You're heroes back home." -The cook

The particular kind of heroism on display for much of "The Pacific" is very different than what we most often saw in "Band of Brothers." "Band" was largely about advancing - moving forward, achieving objectives, saving your buddies. "The Pacific" is largely about the heroism of simply enduring - of getting through a brutal artillery barrage by night, knowing you're going to have to go out and face the enemy again come morning, of trying desperately to keep your body and (as Dr. Sledge notes to Eugene) soul intact.

Part Two certainly has a lot of the latter brand, and you can see Leckie and his pals (who spend most of the hour just hanging on) feeling sheepish and confused to hear themselves described as heroes(*). But it also offers us a concentrated burst of the more traditional form of heroism as we follow Basilone through one of the most terrifying, amazing, and 100 percent heroic nights any Marine has ever been through.

(*) In a conversation the real Leckie had with a cook shortly after leaving Guadalcanal.

There's a danger in all the movie action we're exposed to that we might become desensitized to true, extraordinary feats of bravery - that we might look at a night like Basilone had on October 24, 1942 and either shrug it off as too Hollywood or (worse?) not Hollywood enough.

But as directed by David Nutter (who helmed the "Band" episode "Replacements") and played by Jon Seda (doing wonders with what I have to assume was a lot of less-is-more direction from Nutter and others), Basilone's night - fixing one machine gun in the dark and under fire, carrying another without benefit of the special oven mitt to protect his skin, running back and forth for ammo and engaging the enemy hand-to-hand, leaving his machine gun nest to clear bodies so his comrades will have a better field of fire, and just shooting and shooting and shooting until the enemy stopped coming - is incredible both as a piece of filmmaking and as a sequence that makes Basilone stand out among the many brave men who served on Guadalcanal.

When I talked to "Pacific" head writer Bruce McKenna, who also wrote the script for this episode, I asked him about the fear that Basilone's night might seem implausible. He said:

"The first hurdle you have to get over is the innate skepticism of the 21st century citizen of what those guys could do heroically. The problem is you only have 8 minutes of film time to show 18 hours of Basilone's life. There are a lot of conflicting accounts of what happened that night, but we talked to as many people as we could. Showing him running out in the line, clearing the bodies, that was crazy. And a lot of people saw him do it... What Basilone did that night was way beyond what the average Marine in combat would have done. He was extraordinarily brave.

That Basilone managed to do all that - to help hold off a regiment of over 3,000 Japanese troops with only a handful of men and a couple of machine guns - is a testament to his bravery, skill and determination. But it's also a mark of luck. When he's out clearing those bodies, the Japanese shoot at him and miss, for instance.

At several points in Part Two, Basilone and his buddies remark on the small margin of error that separates life and death in combat. Manny, surveying a foxhole destroyed by a direct hit, notes that if the women in the artillery factory had included slightly more or less gunpowder, things might have gone differently. And after Manny himself dies while serving as a runner on that terrifying night, Basilone is consumed with the notion that if Manny had just stepped left instead of right, or moved a second slower, he might have survived.

"Yeah, but he didn't," says J.P., trying not to dwell on the randomness and danger of it all. "He was where he was and he did what he did."

And after the hell that was Guadalcanal, the Marines return to their boats - and their ascent up the rope ladders is bathed with a heavenly light by director of photography Remi Adefarasin - to discover that while they were hot, and hungry, and terrified and wondering why they were likely to die on this tiny speck of Earth they never heard of, the people back home were reading of their exploits and calling them heroes. In that moment, Leckie and his buddies are tired and filthy and so very, very much older than they were when they landed a few months before, and they're not sure how to react to being considered heroes when they were just barely holding on half the time. But you can also see that the word means something to them - that their sacrifices, and the ultimate sacrifices of the comrades who didn't make it off Guadalcanal alive, weren't happening in a vacuum. People in 1942 knew of the heroism of the 1st Marines and now, 68 years later, they know it again.

Some other thoughts:

• Nutter's episode of "Band" featured a scene where Nixon gets shot in the head but survives because the helmet takes all the damage, and a similar thing happens here to J.P. And, of course, there was a similar gag in the Normandy sequence of "Saving Private Ryan" (only there, I believe, the soldier dies because he's shot in the head again after taking off the helmet to admire his dumb luck). I know the head shot happened to Nixon during Operation Market-Garden, and I'm sure it happened to countless other soldiers and Marines, but it's kind of funny to imagine it as a kind of stylistic tic that Nutter and/or Steven Spielberg enjoys.

• Once again, we see both the Marines' esprit de corps and their utter devotion to Chesty Puller in the scene where he orders them to shave and clean themselves up before the Army arrives. And we see, with the wonderful way William Sadler later delivers the line, "We don't have enough men," just why Chesty's men adored him so much: because their lives and deaths really mattered to him as something other than statistics and strategical elements.

• Speaking of the Army's arrival, "The Pacific" isn't a particularly light miniseries (it certainly doesn't have as much room for comic relief as "Band" did with characters like Luz, Guarnere and Perconte). This episode, though, has some very amusing moments revolving around the Marine/Army rivalry, with the Marines stealing as much Army gear as they can get their hands on, Leckie enjoying his stolen mocasins, and Leckie getting sick on the peaches (and briefly earning a new nickname). About the stolen equipment, by the way: I've been getting a lot of e-mails and old-fashioned letters from Pacific veterans since I started writing about the series, and one was from an Army vet who wrote, "If they had equipped the Army like what I saw the Marines had, the Army would have done better or as good as the Marines did most of the time." I'm guessing he's not going to love this episode.

• Our visit back to Sledge's home in Alabama is even more distracting here than in Part One. At least there, it happened during an extended sequence with all three leads still on the homefront, and also helped introduce Sid Phillips. It allows us to keep track of Sledge in these episodes before he gets to the Pacific himself, and this visit lets Dr. Sledge spell out the torn-souls theme of the series, but I think I would have been okay with him being absent for a few episodes.

• I've been skimming James Brady's book "Hero of the Pacific: The Life of Marine Legend John Basilone" and couldn't find any mention of either Manny or J.P., so I asked McKenna if either or both were composite characters. (While many of the figures in the miniseries are real, McKenna and company had to combine some others, or in some cases attribute one person's words or actions to another for simplicity's sake.) He said, "Manny is a composite of two or three characters, one of whom died that night on the Canal. J.P. is real and was one of Basilone's better friends before and during the war."

Finally, let me again repeat how the No Spoiler policy is going to apply to this series. History on a big scale is not and should not be considered a spoiler. If you don't know the larger points of World War II and/or the Pacific campaign, then you and your high school history teacher need to have a chat. But the lives and military careers of Basilone, Leckie and Sledge, for our purposes, will be considered spoilers. So if you know more about one or more of them going in, or read up on them over the course of the miniseries, do not share any of that info in your comments, okay? We were able to get through the "Band of Brothers" reviews without giving away who lived, who died, who got promoted, transferred, etc., and I'm sure we can do that here as well. So until we get to the final episode in 10 weeks, no talking about anything that took place after the events depicted in a given episode (and that includes no talking about what's in the previews for next week's episode). Okay?

What did everybody else think?

The Pacific, "Part One": A real turkey shoot

I've already written about HBO's "The Pacific" in both a column review and a behind-the-scenes feature. So now it's time to start reviewing each episode. My take on part one coming up just as soon as I poison a billion coconuts...

"There are things that men can do to each other that are sobering to the soul." -Leckie

I watched the first two episodes of "The Pacific" back in January in the run-up to the Television Critics Association winter press tour. At the time, I liked but didn't love them, finding it hard to let go of my worship of "Band of Brothers" - which shares many producers but not an aesthetic with the new project - and to keep track of the characters and the dizzying action.

Then I watched those same two episodes on the new screeners HBO sent out a few weeks back, and I was much more engaged, and had a much easier time following the action. Some of that, of course, comes from seeing the episodes twice (just like I knew who Muck and Penkala were my second time through "Band," but not the first), and some from the improved picture quality of the final cuts.

I'm hoping the picture issue was the more important one, and that therefore those of you who just watched it for the first time tonight were absorbed by this world from the jump. And if not, I strongly recommend giving Part One (and, if necessary, Part Two) a second viewing if you have the time, as it'll greatly improve your appreciation going forward.

So, no, this isn't "Band." We spend a lot of time in this first episode on the homefront, and not even on basic training like with Easy Company. We follow John Basilone (Jon Seda) to his parents' Jersey home for a family Christmas dinner. We spend time in Alabama with Eugene Sledge (Joseph Mazzello), who can't even enlist yet because of his heart murmur. We see Bob Leckie (James Badge Dale) chatting with old neighbor Vera (Caroline Dhavernas, whom some of you might remember as the lead on Fox's "Wonderfalls"), who will later be the subject of Leckie's letter home from Guadalcanal.

And in all three cases, we see the men deal with fathers not prepared to see their grown sons go off to war, possibly never to return. Parents aren't supposed to outlive their children, but millions of fathers and mothers had to brace themselves for this exact scenario over the course of WWII.

After the long homefront prologue, the focus of part one shifts largely to Leckie, though Basilone and his buddies briefly turn up at the end, and Sledge's buddy Sid Phillips (Ashton Holmes) reads one of Eugene's letters to Leckie.

Hanks, Spielberg and company somewhat reluctantly agreed to produce those little documentary pieces that come at the top of each episode and explain exactly what was happening during the period that hour will depict. Hanks complained at press tour that when HBO initially asked for the documentaries, "those of us on the producing team that felt that context was a waste of time and once we got involved in this story, the context would be obvious." Ultimately, though, I think they turned out to be very valuable, because it means the episodes themselves don't have to waste any time explaining, say the military value of Guadalcanal and instead just give us the jarhead's-eye-view of the campaign.

So even though Leckie and his buddies argue over why they're going to this island nobody's ever heard of before, we understand, and can therefore focus our mental energy on appreciating the experience of being on the ground in this terrifying, alien(*) place.

(*) Director Tim Van Patten and director of photography Remi Adefarasin really shot the jungle as if it were another world. At one point, I jotted down the phrase "it looks like Pandora" in my notes.

In the 12 years since "Saving Private Ryan," the Normandy beach scene has become so iconic that we automatically anticipate something similar as the small boats approach the Guadalcanal shores, and the actors certainly play it up as if they're expecting that kind of hell-on-earth. Instead, it turns out that the Japanese forces have already retreated into the jungle, leaving only other Marines waiting on the beach. It's a nice meta moment, but also the kind of unexpected tension-breaker that Spielberg is often fond of using.

And there's still plenty of action to come, with the episode's centerpiece being a recreation of the Battle of Tenaru (or, as the river's referred to here and in some other places, Alligator Creek). It's at night, and completely chaotic, but I felt only slightly more confused than Leckie himself must have during it. And, in the end, things turn out exactly as Leckie's pal Chuckler predicted, with the combination of American machine guns and poorly thought-out Japanese tactics giving men like Leckie and Chuckler a chance to wipe out dozens of advancing enemy combatants.

The casual racism of the Pacific theater - the way the Japanese were demonized and viewed as something other than human - is a running theme of "The Pacific" (and a big departure from "Band," where the soldiers ultimately came to respect the Germans as being like them), and nowhere in Part One is that more obvious than the morning after on Tenaru, as the Marines take great pleasure in taunting and wounding, but not killing, one of the few Japanese soldiers to survive the night. When Leckie takes out his sidearm and kills the guy, the look on Dale's face is ambiguous enough that you can either view it as a noble moment (Leckie isn't as savage as his comrades and just put the soldier out of his misery rather than letting him die slowly as a Marine plaything) or as a vengeful, cathartic one (after that terrifying night, Leckie just wants to be able to look an opponent in the eyes as he shoots him).

The specific battle is won, and reinforcements (including Basilone) arrive, but no one is still clear why they're there, who they're fighting, or how exactly they can win against men so committed to their cause that they'll hurl themselves at machine guns and commit suicide-by-grenade if they can take one or two Americans with them.

As the other Marines sing to belated birthday boy Sid, "How f--ked are you now?"

Some other thoughts on Part One:

• The miniseries has three leads, but it also has a sort of Very Special Guest star in William Sadler, who goes to town in the role of legendary Marine leader Lewis Burwell "Chesty" Puller. Sadler kicks off the miniseries in fine fashion with a stirring speech to Basilone and the other non-commissioned officers, in which he declares them the backbone of the campaign and looks forward to sailing with them "across God's vast ocean, where we will meet our enemy and kill them all." Another key difference between this and "Band" is the level of esprit de corps that the Marines have, as typified by their uniform love of Chesty, who has no problem bantering with the enlisted men when he gets to Guadalcanal. (The guys in Easy Company loved each other, but weren't crazy about the Army itself.)

• As with "Band," I could probably watch the main title sequence - featuring heavy pencil sketches of several key scenes and characters, as well as a simultaneously melancholy and stirring theme composed by Hans Zimmer, Geoff Zanelli and Blake Neely (all in place of the late "Band" composer Michael Kamen) - several times a day and not get bored.

• Leckie and Phillips did, indeed, serve in the same company, though because Leckie was a machine-gunner and Phillips a mortar man, some dramatic license was taken to show the two hanging out as much as they seem to here. Leckie's other friends - Chuckler (Josh Helman), Runner (Keith Nobbs) and Hoosier (Jacob Pitts, whom "Pacific" producer Graham Yost later hired for a supporting role on FX's "Justified," which debuts Tuesday) - were all very tight with him in real life.

• I'll admit it's a bit distracting to be spending a lot of time with Sledge this early in the miniseries when he's not even in uniform yet, but Bruce McKenna's script does a nice job of establishing Sledge and Leckie as kindred spirits, with Leckie quoting "The Iliad" on the ship as the guys discuss Guadalcanal, and Sid then reading a letter where Sledge quotes "Gunga Din."

Finally, a few words on how the No Spoiler policy is going to apply to this series. History on a big scale is not and should not be considered a spoiler. If you don't know the larger points of World War II and/or the Pacific campaign, then you and your high school history teacher need to have a chat. But the lives and military careers of Basilone, Leckie and Sledge, for our purposes, will be considered spoilers. So if you know more about one or more of them going in, or read up on them over the course of the miniseries, do not share any of that info in your comments, okay? We were able to get through the "Band of Brothers" reviews without giving away who lived, who died, who got promoted, transferred, etc., and I'm sure we can do that here as well. So until we get to the final episode in 10 weeks, no talking about anything that took place after the events depicted in a given episode - and that includes anything in the previews for upcoming episodes (or, at the end of this one, for the whole series). Okay?

Having said that, what did everybody else think?

HBO's 'The Pacific' behind-the-scenes: andreikirilenkotattoo on TV

As a follow-up to yesterday's review of "The Pacific," I have a behind-the-scenes feature with thoughts from many of the behind-the-scenes personnel:

Not long after HBO�s "Band of Brothers" debuted in 2001, "Band" writer Bruce McKenna was sharing a beer with Bill Guarnere, one of the World War II veterans whose story was depicted in the landmark miniseries. McKenna told the former paratrooper that he couldn�t believe what Guarnere and his Easy Company mates went through as they made their way across Europe.

"Bill said, �You think we had it rough? You should talk to those boys who served in the Pacific,�" McKenna recalls.

That quote was at one point going to lead off "The Pacific," a "Band" companion miniseries nearly a decade in the making. And it remains the guiding principal followed by McKenna, Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg and the rest of the team behind the new $250 million production.

"This is �Band of Brothers� goes to hell," says McKenna.

You can read the full "Pacific" feature here. I'll be attempting to write up each episode as it airs (making it a nice bookend to my "Band of Brothers" reviews from last summer), so check back Sunday night at 10.

'The Pacific' review: andreikirilenkotattoo on TV

In today's column, I review HBO's "The Pacific," which is going to be one of my big obsessions for this spring:

Midway through HBO�s 10-part World War II epic "The Pacific," a group of frightened Marines try to take their minds off of combat by talking about family vacations. One mentions that his father always said of the Grand Canyon, "You have to see it to understand." The family eventually went there, and, the private explains, "My dad was right. Pictures don�t show it. You have to be there, looking down into it."

Most viewers of "The Pacific" won�t have actually witnessed the brutal combat on small islands like Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. But the moving (in every sense of the word) pictures of the miniseries do an incredible job of making the viewer feel like they�re looking down into the real thing.

You can read "The Pacific" review here. I'll have a behind-the-scenes feature tomorrow, and then episode-by-episode reviews every Sunday night.