#Buck compton breaking series

There's no let-up as morale goes from bad to worse under Lt. We're there as the trees explode, as some men are killed for stupid reasons (Hoobler shooting himself with the Luger) and others are horribly wounded for noble ones (Guarnere gets out of his foxhole to drag his buddy Toye to safety), and as some die simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time (Muck and Penkala had the deepest foxhole in the company and were killed by a direct hit). Where 'Bastogne' was following Doc Roe, and therefore cut away from the battle whenever he was focusing on saving a wounded soldier, 'The Breaking Point' offers no respite from combat. What an amazing 69 minutes of storytelling by Yost, director David Frankel, and everyone else involved. There isn't a similarly jarring note for me in, say, 'Bastogne.'īut beyond those two points. But having Speirs say, 'Hell, it was you, 1st Sergeant!' is just too much, a really false, forced moment that drives me crazy every time I watch it. I could almost live with Speirs' speech about the one man Easy could count on at Bastogne if the scene ended with Speirs realizing that Lipton is so selfless he doesn't understand whom Speirs is describing.

'Boomtown' (at least, the first season) had its ardent supporters, but I often found it guilty of telling rather than showing, and thought that most of its appeal came from the actors and the production values.Īll of which brings me to my second issue with 'The Breaking Point,' which is the closing scene with Speirs and Lipton at the church, where again Yost has to put into words an idea - the amazing job Lipton did holding Easy together during its lowest point of the war - that any viewer who's been watching the preceding hour-plus should understand by now. That was also a problem I had with 'Boomtown,' the show Yost created directly after this, co-starring Wahlberg and Neal McDonough. There are also moments where the voiceover feels unnecessary, as if writer Graham Yost didn't trust the audience to grasp certain things (say, Lipton's mistrust of Lt. But it was Wahlberg, and compared to Damian Lewis in 'Points,' or even Eion Bailey in 'The Last Patrol,' something always feels lacking in the voiceover to me. The first time I watched this episode, on an HBO review screener (it was a videotape, I believe, which is how long ago this was), I thought for several minutes that it was a temp track recorded quickly and without emotion by a production assistant. But while Wahlberg is a terrifically expressive actor who says so much with a simple look, he (like his brother) has a fairly flat, thin speaking voice that doesn't hold up under such prolonged scrutiny. It's probably necessary to help fill in the gaps of an episode where so much is happening, and to help underline certain points, like how the men didn't hold Buck's departure against him. (Still, I'd probably put it at least third, after 'Bastogne' and maybe 'Why We Fight.') I want to get those out of the way so we can talk about all the brilliance. Lipton, the man holding the company together while the officers are flaking out.īut I had two fundamental issues with the episode back in '01, and I still have them now, that keep me from ranking it quite as highly as most of you do. And it has a superb central performance by Donnie Wahlberg as 1st Sgt.

#Buck compton breaking series

It features both one of the lowest points of the series (Buck losing it as he stares at Toye and Guarnere's broken bodies), and one of the highest (Speirs running to Easy's rescue during the attack on Foy). It combines the point-of-view storytelling, which makes the second half of the series so much more intense than the first, with the amazing spectacle that we so often got in the first half of the series. SpeirsBecause I just never get tired of that moment, do I?Īs I said when I reviewed 'Bastogne,' 'The Breaking Point' seems to be the consensus favorite episode of the series, and I can certainly understand why. When it's gone I want 1st to go straight in. 'Alright, I want mortars and grenade launchers on that building till it's gone. In the home stretch now on 'Band of Brothers.' Spoilers for the seventh episode, 'The Breaking Point,' coming up just as soon as I link up with I Company.