Spoilers.."The Breaking Point" concludes with a quote from Dick Winters about how the men who went through the battles depicted in this episode carried scars from them—even if they weren't wounded during them—and he expects that's why Easy members remained so close after returning home at war's end. What "The Breaking Point" depicts is the unending slog of this combat nightmare, a world where every other moment could rain death down from the sky or where two of your friends might disappear in a blaze of fire right in front of your eyes. It's a brutal, near brilliant episode of television. But it's also, crucially, frustratingly, an episode that doesn't trust its audience nearly enough to follow what's going on and how the characters' relationships are growing. The idea is that we've gotten to know all of these men well enough to really be shattered when some of them are brutally injured or killed. Those moments will have more impact than they would have even a couple of episodes ago. And by focusing on Donnie Wahlberg as Lipton, the episode finds the one character who can act as a kind of bridge between all of these men. In the depths of despair, Lipton is able to find exactly what each man needs to keep going, and then he finds a way to give that to each man. It's enormously emotionally draining, and you can hear it in the way Wahlberg's voice-over narration is so flat and affect less. This is a man who's had everything emptied out of him, and he sounds almost like a walking ghost. He's alive, but some part of him is still wandering the battlefields around Foy. Ultimately, "The Breaking Point" remains such a powerful episode and one that transcends its mild weaknesses because it finds the perfect intersection between all of the ideas it considers in that old, nearly universal idea that war is hell. The battle scenes are presented with the absolute minimum of tactics, instead suggesting a kind of unrelenting, unending black hole that more and more men keep getting sucked into. The deaths are often random and pointless, as when Hoobler accidentally shoots himself with the Luger he was so desperate to find. And when the episode comes to an end at the convent the men have reached after clearing out town after town after town, the beauty of the girls' voices mixes with the lost, grizzled faces of the men who seem all but shocked to have found themselves in a place where no one is trying to shell them. It, too, seems like a dream, but a much more pleasant one than the experience of combat.
Review of The Breaking Point
Deeply emotional, intense , brutal, epic, gripping and Incredibly acted episode..
4 May 2017
Warning: Spoilers