Band of Brothers rewind, episode 7: "The Breaking Point"

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...

"Alright, I want mortars and grenade launchers on that building till it's gone. When it's gone I want 1st to go straight in. Forget going around. Everybody else, follow me." -Lt. Speirs

Because I just never get tired of that moment, do I?

As 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. 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. 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). And it has a superb central performance by Donnie Wahlberg as 1st Sgt. Lipton, the man holding the company together while the officers are flaking out.

But 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. (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.

My first issue is with the narration. 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. 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. 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 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.

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. Dike) without spelling it out for them. That was also a problem I had with "Boomtown," the show Yost created directly after this, co-starring Wahlberg and Neal McDonough. "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.

All 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. 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. 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. There isn't a similarly jarring note for me in, say, "Bastogne."

But beyond those two points... holy cow. What an amazing 69 minutes of storytelling by Yost, director David Frankel, and everyone else involved.

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. 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). There's no let-up as morale goes from bad to worse under Lt. Dike, as Compton and Malarkey suffer differing levels of combat fatigue (Malarkey can stay with the men, while Buck... can't, and can you blame him?) and the attack on Foy begins to go awry because Dike freezes up.

But amid all the spectacle and horror and dread is a pretty inspiring story of leadership, and of the different kinds of it that served Easy over the years.

Dick Winters led by example -- by being the best at everything, and filling the men with such confidence in him that they would follow him into Hell if need be.

Lipton is also a fine soldier, but his approach is as much about understanding the individual needs of the men as inspiring them as a whole. He knows, for instance, that Malarkey needs some time away from the line, and that maybe he can make some good out of Hoobler's death by giving Malarkey the Luger. He knows that Luz's Dike impression is just going to increase the panic level, but he makes sure to compliment George on the quality of it before asking him to stop. And he knows that Winters really isn't in a position to remove Dike until something more egregious happens, but he knows that his old CO will at least listen.

Dike, of course, is an utter failure as a leader. He doesn't make decisions, doesn't make himself available when needed, and even his attempts to connect with the men are half-hearted, as we see when he disappears as Lipton is in the middle of telling him his life story.

Ronald Speirs, on the other hand, is a killer. Whatever the truth is about the German POWs and the cigarettes, or about the man he killed in his own platoon(*), he does not suffer from indecision. His mind and body work as one as he marks a course of action -- just watch the way Matthew Settle moves without a trace of hesitation when Winters sends Speirs into Foy, or how the words fly out of his mouth as he's telling Lipton what to do to take out the sniper -- and while he may lack for warmth or conscience, his decisiveness is an asset Easy desperately needs at this moment in the war.

(*) This episode is as close as we're ever going to get in the miniseries to answering the question about either incident, as we find out that Speirs is too pleased with the power those stories give him to confirm or deny them. The book "Beyond Band of Brothers" gives a more concrete explanation for the one about shooting his own man, and says that Speirs did it because the man was refusing to take orders in the middle of combat -- which is as justifiable a reason for execution as any in the military.

Again, I think "The Breaking Point" has some flaws, but for the most part it works brilliantly, and features one jaw-dropping moment after another. Even though I disagree that it's the best episode of the series, I'm not going to argue the point very strongly with those of you who do, because so much of it is so great.

Some other thoughts on "The Breaking Point":

• This is Wahlberg's episode, but it's not hard to see why Yost also wanted to hire McDonough for "Boomtown." His portrayal of Compton's breaking point, and the empty shell he is after it, is superb.

• For that matter, Rick Gomez is mostly comic relief as Luz, but he's wonderful in the sequence where Muck and Penkala are calling for Luz to join them, only for the shell to hit their foxhole before he could get there. How do you keep going on after something like that? I know I'd pull a Buck Compton if I was in that position.

• This will, not surprisingly, be the last we'll see in the miniseries of Kirk Acevedo as Toye and Frank John Hughes as Guarnere. Their presence (both the soldiers and the actors playing them) will be missed in the upcoming chapters. Though both lost their legs, Toye would live until 1995, and Guarnere is still with us. (His grandson maintains WildBillGuarnere.com, a good message board to talk about "Band of Brothers." One word of warning, for the spoiler-phobic: a key member of Easy Company died last week, and there's a post near the top of that site about it.)

• I also love that Guarnere is able to crack a joke about getting back home ahead of Toye. Though he doesn't get his own spotlight episode, he still makes one of the biggest impressions of any character in the series.

• Jamie Bamber, aka Apollo from "Battlestar Galactica," makes his first appearance of the series as Lt. Foley, whose most notable moment here is yelling at Dike to make a decision as they're stuck behind the haystack. If you're watching for the first time, don't expect to see much more of Bamber in upcoming episodes, as Foley is a fairly minor character in the scheme of the miniseries.

• Shifty Powers is only slightly more prominent than Foley, though "The Breaking Point" gets to show off the man's amazing marksmanship when he takes out the sniper at Foy. As Popeye Wynn said of his friend, "It just doesn't pay to be shootin' at Shifty when he's got a rifle."

• I haven't talked much about the opening sequences with the surviving members of Easy Company, in part because I'm trying to stick by the who lives/who dies no-spoiler rule. (Though I should warn you that I'm going to break it very early in my review of "The Last Patrol.") So if you're somehow not to the end of the miniseries yet, I won't say who the man is who breaks down at the thought of seeing his buddies all torn up, but it's an incredibly affecting moment -- especially since you can tell these are the type of men who rarely opened up like that in the half-century since the war.

• This is TV, so a few moments get exaggerated for dramatic purposes, but not by much. In real life, Winters stopped himself from running across the field at Foy, rather than needing Colonel Sink to stop him. And some of the surviving members of Easy said that Speirs' dash to hook up with I Company wasn't quite as superheroic as Frankel makes it look. But as Lipton puts it when describing the moment, "Damn that's impressive."

Coming up next (probably on Thursday): "The Last Patrol," in which Private Webster returns from the hospital to find Easy Company much changed after its time in Bastogne.

What did everybody else think?