Perhaps even more so than Bastogne, this episode is a truly harrowing piece of television. The Breaking Point is a heart-breaking and unflinching look at the brutal toll the war took on this group of young men and continued to take on them for years to come afterwards. The centre for this episode is First Sargent Carwood Lipton (Donnie Wahlberg), who does his best to maintain morale amongst the men and to cover for the woefully inept Company XO Norman Dike. As the men prepare their foxholes in the forests outside of Foy, they’re hit by a severe bout of shelling. In the first barrage, Joe Toye is hit and loses a leg. After the shelling stops, his pal Guarnere hears his anguished cries and goes out to find him. As Lipton goes from foxhole to foxhole checking on his men, the second barrage begins and Guarnere is also hit. He and Toye lay there covered in blood, each missing a leg. The anguished cry for a medic that Buck Compton lets out when he finds them both in such a bad way is a truly powerful moment, the pain and distress clearly etched all over his face. We are told that Buck was never the same after seeing his friends in such a state, and after an exemplary service record in the war he was taken off the line, in theory for ‘trench foot’. However in reality, he was just too shaken up by what he had been through. We are reminded however that none of the other men thought any less of him for it. Amazingly after so many gut-punches, there’s still the attack on Foy itself to come and it’s this battle which seals Norman Dike’s fate. In the middle of the assault, he freezes up and his dallying costs the lives of several Easy men as he sends Lieutenant Foley (played by Battlestar Galactica’s own Jamie Bamber) on an ill-advised flanking mission. An incandescent Winters sends the enigmatic Speirs out to relieve him. This is where Speirs truly proves his worth as he surges the attack onwards and in an act of stunning bravery, sprints through the German lines to link up with another company, before astonishingly sprinting back as well. This act of cavalier heroism wins him the respect of every Easy man and ensures that he will unquestionably be given command of the Company instead of Dike. The episode has an extremely touching climax set in a local church where, as a local choir serenade the men, Lipton talks us through some of the men who have fallen. Director David Frankel depicts this wonderfully by having the fallen men being sat in the church alongside their brothers only to have them fade away as their name is read out. We are told that of the 145 men who went into Belgium with Easy, they left with only 63. The men who made it were forever affected by their experiences and credit to all the cast here who look genuinely shell-shocked and fatigued. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.
