True Detective Season Four: Night Country 

I haven’t watched Jody Foster in a movie or series since perhaps Safe Room and certainly before that in Silence of the Lambs.

As part of the True Detective series, this time the story is set in a remote part of Alaska where it’s dark for an entire month during winter. It’s also in a small coastal town where many of the townsfolk represent First Peoples. When mystery and mayhem visit a group of researchers who sequester themselves in a nearby compound, Foster plays local law enforcement, and compares notes on the case with a native American woman, a state trooper.

At first, this  one reminded me strongly of Dark Winds, a series I reviewed that took place on reservation  land in the Southwest. This series, again like Dark Winds, did not take long to introduce mysticism and evidence that formed more around spiritual clues.

It was good to see Jody Foster tackle a complex case and character and succeed (in my view). Mostly well-made with the almost inevitable stretch of the imagination at times as I’ve lamented in earlier reviews of other series.

Masters of the Air

I’ve been watching this series and they’re almost at the finale. My dad was a second lieutenant in the army Air Force during World War II. He still had his hat and his flight jacket though he only flew gliders.

 Bomber crews were often thousands of feet above the battlefields, and seldom  got more than a glimpse of the enemy: mostly as they flew by in their fighters. They typically didn’t get close-up views of the effect of the bombs they dropped, but they knew real terror, too: they were flying larger, slower aircraft while anti-aircraft shells exploded on all sides. When the AA stopped, it was to allow fighter jets to swarm the squadrons as they approached their targets over Germany. 

This show was able to deliver some very realistic special effects of the missions or parts of them from the airbase in Britain. But it also covers the drama of the pilots and crew between the missions. The ultimate goal of a pilot or crew: to fly 25 missions and survive to go home.

The acting is good, and the history, the clothes, and the drama, all work to make a compelling watch. An interesting detail for me was that a focal cast member of MOA was also the focus character of The Boys in the Boat. I was also surprised to see a segment about pilots or crew who had been shot down and placed into prison camps–and there was a reference to an escape that may have been the source of the famous film, The Great Escape.

Tracker

The Continental