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arcadianambivalence · 6 months

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World on Fire, Season 2, Episode 3 - What is the Value of a Life?

Directed by: Meenu Gaur

Written by: Matt Jones

The Egyptian Storyline

Harry and Lois

Last episode, Stan had a moment where he asked Harry if they were in Egypt or Libya. Well, now we’re in Libya–and on the retreat back towards Tobruk, a city near the border with Egypt and the Mediterranean. A city that would switch hands repeatedly for the first half of the war. In the past, characters have encountered sandstorms, landmines, and Italian troops. Now they have to get past the arrival of German forces (Rommel is even name dropped because, let’s face it, he’s the only major German officer most of the audience recognizes). This means it must be around March 1941, so a few months have passed between the end of last episode and the beginning of this one.

In those months, Lois’s mental and physical health seems to have improved with the Auxiliary Territorial Service. Stationed in Cairo as an ambulance driver, she is throwing herself into her work, quickly fixing the engine and getting along with her coworker (whom the PBS transcript calls Pearl). But still, she’s throwing herself into work and brushing off the chance to eat anything. Food isn’t normally talked about in this show, so I’m concerned whether this is a sign of something else going on. Maybe she’s not doing as well as she looks. But this newfound resolve is put to the test when she finds Harry’s name among the papers of incoming wounded. (What are the odds, am I right?)

While Lois has improved, Harry certainly hasn’t. That old wound in his leg that reopened last episode? It’s infected. (Just like I said it would be. Listen to the medic, Harry!) His papers say diphtheria. At the beginning of the episode, Harry had time to help a wounded soldier into a medic tent before collapsing himself. The two men were sent to a hospital in Cairo, where they’d be further from the front, to recuperate. We don’t see any of Harry’s treatment, but it presumably helps because the next thing we know, he’s awake enough to recognize Lois, who can’t help but catch a peek at him.

They have a sweet talk, where Lois confesses that yes, she spoke with such finality the last time she saw Harry because she wanted it to be the last time she saw anyone. But now she’s better, she rushes to add. (And while I’m glad that at least one character with PTSD is recovering, I’m selfish and want to see characters go through that journey on screen! Could we at least have a scene of her arriving in Cairo and getting the light back in her eyes?)

Kasia, Jan, and Grzegorz are fine too, Lois says. It was Kasia who convinced her to fight.

Lois: That's the difference between us, Harry. You've got somebody to miss. Somebody waiting. Harry: In that case, maybe you and I could swap uniforms, and I could take the next ship out, disguised as you. Lois: Nice try, but you haven't got the legs for it.

He takes everything very well, and he’s already a very empathetic guy, but one has to wonder how much of his dazed speech is from morphine. She takes his hand. He talks about how they’re part of each other because they had a kid together. You can’t change the past, ya di ya-da. He brings up Kasia, and Lois drops his hand. And we’re back on this again.

Lois, you were doing so well! Let him go so you can grow as a character!

But she makes a point to Harry that he shouldn’t be fighting the war because he thinks it’s some chivalrous or idealist thing for protecting women and children and whatever. He should have his own reason to fight, just as Lois does, just as Kasia does, just as everyone else. That leaves him with something to ponder, something that goes back to Rajib’s theme. What is he doing here?

The British Storyline - Part 1

Kasia and James

Similarly, Kasia is struggling to know who she can be if she isn’t a soldier/member of the resistance. As members of the audience, we know that something is up with James (is this is first or last name?), that her suspicion of him is worthwhile, but take that away and you have another character experiencing symptoms of PTSD:

Feelings of detachment, even from family and friends (her feelings towards Harry, never leaving the Chase residence, apparently)

Numbness, trouble accepting positive emotions (the happiest we’ve seen her this season is embracing her brothers and joking about war with Jan)

Vigilance and preparing for danger (patrolling the house at night and overhearing James on the radio, sneaking into his bedroom to dig through his suitcase)

Difficulty sleeping (Sir James knows Kasia has nightmares)

Then there are signs of Complex PTSD:

Sense of shame, guilt, and/or worthlessness (calling herself the woman Harry “got stuck with”)

Difficulty with regulating emotions (punching the man in episode 1)

Trouble connecting with others (she hasn’t made a single friend despite being in England for months)

Difficulty keeping close relationships (not just with Robina…I mean, that’s obvious, but even with Jan, and her instant distrust of James)

And that’s just from the few scenes we’ve had with her over three episodes!

But she does correctly deduce that he is part of military intelligence and asks if he can send her back to Poland. He refuses, to her dismay, but there are ways she can contribute from England.

During their first conversation, the Warsaw Ghetto is mentioned. Kasia says she already knows about it, a reference to Tomasz from season 1. Will she ever have someone to confide in again, who won’t turn around and leave like Harry keeps having to do? I wonder if the show will take characters back to Poland for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943.

PTSD symptoms from the Mayo Clinic

C-PTSD symptoms from the NHS

Quick notes:

I forgot to mention this last episode, but Jan was reading The Hobbit!

James seems angry Kasia figured out his secret job instead of impressed with her intelligence. There's quite a difference between his terseness with Kasia versus the charm he puts on with Robina.

James diffuses a situation between Robina and Joyce, then says that he hopes he didn’t overstep the mark. The mark, eh? Another dual meaning for intelligence/spycraft.

Robina references the Jarrow March, a major protest against poverty and unemployment in the industrial city of Jarrow in 1936.

James continues to walk the line between flirting and friendliness with Robina, referring to himself as a bachelor and fun uncle. There’s more sexist talk of maternal instincts and Kasia’s apparent lack of them (Vera isn’t her child. Where is this talk about Harry’s paternal instincts? Or your grandmaternal instincts?)

Robina admits that her first marriage wasn’t for love, but out of obligation.

And speaking of obligation over choice….

The German Storyline

Marga finally arrives at the Lebensborn, a palace (?) in Brandenburg with lush gardens and vibrant green grass. A troop of young women exercise on the front lawn as a recording of the Nazi anthem, the Horst Wessel Song, plays. Their movements are slow and graceful, like they’re underwater, like this is a dream. But very quickly, the dream begins to unravel.

The young women are told that they will only be referred to as “Mother,” not by their own names. They have no family, no past, only no future. After a medical exam, they’ll be allowed to congregate with a “partner” for three days before switching. Like a fucked up square dance.

Marga is given an invasive examination by a male gynecologist, and for the first time, she starts to feel used. Next, her skull is measured, her period dates charted, and she is made to sign away any rights to her potential child(ren). I haven’t found a ton of resources on the Lebensborn program, so I can’t say if these inspections would be part of the official program, but all of these things go back to the Nazi obsession with the concept of “race” and “purity.” She’s treated like a datasource (or, more broadly, a source of a future baby) instead of a person. Her personhood, opinions, and feelings do not matter.

Then she confesses that her mother hasn’t explained what sex is to her.

So that would be one of the reasons why she was so keen to do this. Add that to the long list of reasons why mandatory sex education is necessary for young people. Someone (I’m not sure what her job is, but she seems like the equivalent of a headmistress or prison warden) gives her a book on the subject. Marga is disgusted, but she still tries to make the most of the situation.

She wears her hair down for the first time and dons a flowery pink dress, which she may think makes her look older, but really just emphasizes to the audience how young she is. This is a girl who still signs her name with a flower at the end. She’s a sixteen year old who just learned the details of sex, and now she’s potentially “partnering” with a man in his late 20s to early 30s. At first, she makes eyes with a younger guy (still several years older than her), then the young man is physically eclipsed by a much taller, older officer. Not just any army officer, though. He’s a Sturmbannfuhrer, a paramilitary officer who took part in the invasion of France. It’s like watching a little fish being approached by a shark.

The officer bluntly schedules coitus for 10 o’clock that night, if she agrees. Looking uncomfortable, she accepts. Remember Robina’s conversation with James about consent and obligation? That conversation was there to thematically set up this scene. At 10 o’clock that night, he enters her bedroom. There is no conversation, just the loud silence that falls around every piece of clothing removed, then a cut to Marga holding in her tears until he shuts the door behind him.

(It's also one of the few scenes that isn't dripping with flags and deathsheads.)

The next morning, they sit together as others look on and whisper about his rank. This time, there are no more girly pinks and floral dresses. She wears a simple blue sweater. While she picks at her food, he gorges on steak and eggs. She stares at his mouth, as if she’s the one being served on a platter. The moment makes me think of that scene in the Return of the King that cuts from a battle to Denethor’s mouth running red with tomato juice.

Before I move on, I want to take a moment to praise Meenu Gaur’s direction for this episode. When I first saw this episode, I remember thinking “This must be directed by a woman” when the episode focused on Marga’s discomfort before the sex scene. The situation was handled with a kind of discretion and sensitivity I’ve unfortunately come to not expect out of any TV drama’s portrayal of young women and sexuality. (Isn’t it sad that a scene that’s been built up as something horrific and cuts on the implication feels like it’s out of the norm for me? Maybe I need a break from television dramas.) Anyway, Gaur directed episode 5 of this season, so I’m looking forward to that.

The French Storyline

Luc and Albert

Albert and Luc’s location is finally revealed: Romainville, Paris, which means they are in Fort de Romainville.

Albert gives Luc the bottle smuggled into the camp last episode. Luc thanks him and warns him that there are no black people left in Paris. Germans have taken away all of them, of Algerian and French nationalities. Albert hides how this news troubles him and instead says he knows how to make himself invisible.

When Luc and Albert drink the liquid in the bottle, they become violently ill and are taken to the camp hospital. Miles, a fellow prisoner, dryly jokes that he’ll miss the lunch. If anyone out there has an aversion to vomit scenes, you’d best close your eyes and put the scene on mute. It goes on for a few minutes.

That night, they climb out of their beds and wait for Henriette’s sister. To pass the time, they talk about what they’ve missed the most about the outside world. Albert reminisces about his flat in Paris, his work at the nightclub, and (in flashback) his relationship with Webster. This last part, he can’t risk saying out loud, even to Luc. Parker Sawyers gives a really moving performance during this scene. His eyes are full of wistfulness and pain as he whispers about a safe and accepting world that has now been wiped from existence.

Perhaps because of this realization, that there is no place for him to truly hide as a black, gay French African man with no identity papers and no real escape waiting for him on the outside, that when the time comes for Albert to follow Luc out the hospital window, he refuses, slamming the window shut.

Henriette

Things are not safe for Henriette, either. A group of German officers confront her about missing supplies, to which she cooly lies about trading morphine for sulfonamide with a local university to treat venereal diseases in the occupying soldiers. Later, they return to the hospital and ransack some of the supply rooms while they look for her. Henriette barely escapes with the help of other members of a resistance cell. At the end of the episode, she wears civilian clothes as she emerges from the back of a truck parked at the edge of a forest.

On Fort de Romainville

A book about Eddie Chapman (Agent Zigzag) held there

An archive for people from the Channel Islands who were imprisoned during WW2

The British Storyline - Part 2

David

David has moved from Manchester to Kent, the coastal county that’s spitting distance from the French coast. Much of the aerial conflict over Britain occurred in this area (covered by No. 16 Group), as the German planes would cross over the county to bomb London and major air stations like Biggin Hill.

He jokes to a fitter (the guy in charge of preparing the plane) that the reason he’s been transferred to Kent is because “The RAF’s been trying to kill me for years. Every time I survive, they give me a more dangerous job.” His new mission is to fly across the English Channel (nicknamed “the drink” by pilots) and figure out where the Germans are stationed by drawing their fire and recording the location. There are a few things working against him:

Fuel - the plane’s tank has room for only so much fuel for the trip to France and back, so all flights have to be timed around this limitation. Given that he’s going over water, it’s crucial for him to return to English soil before he runs out.

Weather - it’s late winter/early spring, so he has to contend with cloud cover, which would be good for hiding from the Luftwaffe, but on the other hand, it diminishes visibility when flying over the kind of base he’s looking for.

Then there’s the fact that succeeding in his mission means getting shot at. Which he does.

Not-so-fun fact: To get out of some aircraft models at the beginning of the war, British pilots would literally have to flip the plane belly-up, open the canopy and drop out of the moving plane before they could pull their parachute.

If the cylinders plane’s engine were shot, the engine would catch fire and quickly spread to the cockpit where the pilot would be sitting. A pilot would have roughly eight seconds after the ignition of the fire to shift the plane into a safe downward angle towards a crash-landing site, undo the release clip tethering him to his seatbelt, and bail out. All while reeling at the fact that he’s going to die in the next breath if he doesn’t.

Luckily for David, the engine isn’t on fire (yet), so he has a little more time to react as the plane hurdles towards a forest in enemy territory. He is able to bail out, but that’s the last of his luck. Even with a parachute slowing his fall, he crashes through treetops, coming to consciousness covered in blood and badly injured. He’s able to clip himself free of the parachute and drag himself behind a bush before a group of German soldiers, drawn by the obvious British plane and bright white parachute, can find him.

What was it Henriette said last episode about rescuing downed British pilots? I think we found someone in need of her expertise…if the Germans don’t capture him first.

Kent in WW2

Biggin Hill

RAF Ground Crew

Life in the Ground Crew

The Libya Storyline

Rajib and Stan

I saved the best for last.

While Harry is being whisked away from the medic station, Stan is left behind in the retreat to Tobruk. In a reversal of the first episode this season, only Rajib is around to offer him a ride. With a big grin on his face, Rajib welcomes Stan to the British Indian Army.

Stan soon learns that they aren’t headed toward Tobruk with the rest of the retreating forces, but the Axis-occupied Msus. Their journey is cut short, however, when Germans start to fire on their truck. In the confusion, Stan and Rajib get separated from the rest of the group and run out of bullets to fight back. As Rajib is the highest ranking officer, Stan automatically defers to him in all matters–but not without complaining. When Rajib plans to steal a German truck, he theatrically checks his empty pockets for ammo.

(Grand Theft Auto: Desert Edition)

What follows is classic buddy comedy stuff: Banter over their next move. Steal a jeep. Get lost in the desert. Play chicken with a German motorcyclist and take him prisoner. Rely on each other to survive without losing themselves. Nearly die of thirst. Just guy things.

To keep their (very young) prisoner of war from trying to escape, Rajib orders the German soldier to remove his uniform as Stan balks. He can’t get far without clothes, Rajib reasons.

Stan: You're as bad as Harry. Rajib: Because I won't let a man starve? Stan: He's the enemy. Rajib: He's a boy. Letting him live will not alter the outcome of the war. Stan: Like I said, just like Harry. It's not even your war. Rajib: Now you sound like my brother. Stan: Yeah, well, they ain't dropping bombs on Delhi, are they? Rajib: If Britain loses this war, then Germany isn't going to turn India down, is it? They won't need to bomb Delhi. They just need Britain to lose.

Other than the strip down to underwear, Rajib tries to treat the soldier (Bruno) as well as he can. He splits what provisions they can find among the three men and, when Bruno falls out of the jeep, demands that Stan turn the truck around to find him.

Rajib: Turn the vehicle around. Stan: We are running on fumes as it is. Do you even know how far Tobruk is from here? Rajib: That's an order, Sergeant. Stan: We're at war! With them! Rajib: And if we behave like them, what will we be if we win? Stan: Alive, that's what!

Then Rajib makes Stan confront his own biases, challenging his subconscious xenophobia.

Rajib: You refused once before accepting my invitation to evacuate.Didn't want to travel with brown-skinned men? Stan: I'm not like that. Don't make me out to be like that. Rajib: Then why did you refuse?

Finally, Rajib gives what I consider to be the best line of dialogue from the episode, if not the entire show:

“The value of a life is the value of a life is the value of a life!”

Reluctantly, Stan turns the jeep around to find Bruno, and from here on, David Lean has his fingerprints all over the cinematography. They track down Bruno with the last of the jeep’s fuel, then proceed to walk through the desert in broad daylight with no food or water left. The sun beats down on them as they stumble through a landscape that grows ever bigger with every new shot.

At last, they arrive at a British posting. Recognizing Stan as a British officer, the guards rush to provide him and Bruno water, brushing off Rajib. Dehydrated and on the verge of losing consciousness, Rajib collapses.

In an interview with Jace Lacob for the Masterpiece Studio podcast, Meenu Gaur describes the scene as this:

“It’s this sort of almost desperate belief he has about the goodness and the equality and all the great values that he fights for, we fight for as human beings. And in that one moment, [...] you see his heart break, he knows that it’s not true. The value of a life is not the value of a life.”

Stan sees this and desperately begins to shout “He’s a British officer. You should go to him!” He has, at least, learned from Rajib. In the final moments of the episode, the music swells as Rajib is given a flask and struggles to lift it to his mouth, so close, and yet so far.

#world on fire #world on fire pbs #world on fire spoilers

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