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." -SnafuI 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?