• 07 Dec, 2025 *

I finally watched The Pacific, the second in the loose three part series that also contains Masters of the Air, which I wrote about here. I think my opinion on Masters of the Air is basically that it was "Fine", I can see why people really did lose their minds about The Pacific.

The Pacific is not a feel-good show. I think the popular understanding of Band of Brothers is the rah-rah stuff, and I’d gladly argue that the show wasn’t entirely that, it was overall more celebratory in tone than The Pacific is at basically any point.

I thought it was a fascinating companion piece. There are generally fewer American war mythos tv shows about the Pacific Theatre in WW2, for a number of reasons probably mostly related to the post-war posture of the United States and Japan. It’s a lot harder to tell a rah-rah story about defeating the Japanese Empire when they quickly became the USA’s postwar ally against the Communists.

So where Band Of Brothers can understandably take some glory in the antifascist action of the American thrust into Europe, The Pacific is… notably murkier. It more or less acknowledges this directly in an early episode, where an American Military Guy explains that while the rest of the army is going into Europe, it would be the job of the Marines to secure the various tiny islands that served as airbases for defense against Japan.

I kept thinking about the American Midcentury Fascination with the Pacific Islands after this. Obviously that did exist prior to WW2, but there is probably something in the fact that for many Americans, this war effort was the first time that they experience the various islands in the area that we now call Oceania. I guess you could consider the abhorrent fetishizing of "island natives" with coconut bras and hula skirts is some sort of twisted American coping mechanism.

This is a nasty show! It’s a very good show, but I mean in the sense of how it depicts the war. There is basically no glory in any of this. All the "battlefields" are midnight jungles with almost no direct visuals of the enemy. American GIs lugging outdating machine guns onto muddy hillsides and just shooting indiscriminately into the treeline.

The few times that you do see Japanese soldiers, it’s more pathetic than terrifying, and not even in the sense of the Japanese soldiers being pathetic. Just in the sense that the entire endeavor feels pathetic. They’re also not supposed to be here! No one is supposed to be here!

I wouldn’t say this is an anti-war series overall, if that makes sense — it still suffers from the kind of impossible paradox of trying to depict war while not endorsing war — but it’s certainly much, much more critical of war and of the American imperialism into Asia than Band of Brothers is.

Because I’m me, I couldn’t help but think about it in the greater context of American post-war military adventures — as usual with WW2 stories, many of the individuals that The Pacific portrays went on to continue their service into the Korean War, which somewhat dulls any sympathy I have for them (other than in the basic "well you must have got really fucked up mentally from WW2" way).

I must say it is notable that the two American soldiers whose memoirs most inspired The Pacific both did not return to military service after WW2 — unlike Buck and Bucky from Masters of the Air, who I guess wanted to get right on back to killin’.

I am unfortunately still a mark for WW2 series, even when they make me Feel Emotionally bad! I recommend The Pacific if you’re wanting that sort of thing. Also notable: The Pacific has a look. It’s very high-contrast, very grimy. They clearly were going for a specific aesthetic and I think they really nailed it here.

#television [#the pacific](https://blog.dante.cool/blog/?q=the pacific)