MASTERS OF THE AIR CONCLUDES: I Just Watched the Masters of the Air Series Finale, and These 12 Words Mattered Most:

[Band of Brothers, The Pacific and Masters of the Air are all] epic productions. Masters of the Air had a $250 million budget. And yet, there’s a single scene from the series finale that I can describe without giving anything away, and that almost any leader in any context should consider.

It comes as one of the main characters begins to believe he might actually survive the war and make it home to his wife and child. Neither he nor his colleagues has any qualms about killing Nazis, but he does worry about what it might have done to his psyche.

“It reminds me of this quote I read in college from Nietzsche,” the character, Major Harry Crosby, says. “He said, ‘Whoever fights monsters should take care not to become a monster himself. Because if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes right back at you.’ ”

While the based-on-real-life characters in Masters of the Air were battling real-life monsters (again: Nazis), I think this quote also applies in less-dire circumstances.

• Consider the technology business leader who ultimately winds up a virtual slave to his or her devices.
• Or else, the CEO who is committed to shareholder value but gets so focused on the short-term that they neglect things that make a business grow over the long run.
• Or, just to show that I can see myself in this: Imagine a writer who values the written word and who then finds himself staying up late crafting an article after watching a TV show.

Honestly, it might turn out to be the most important lesson in leadership. Don’t let the thing you set out to control wind up controlling you.

Look, I’m going to be a critic here for a minute. I think Masters of the Air is the Return of the Jedi of this three-series series; it’s definitely worth watching if you’re into this kind of thing, but it’s not as good as the two before it.

Which is a fair point. As I said previously, too many episodes of Masters of the Air felt like the old 1960s TV series 12 O’Clock High, but with ILM-produced digital special effects instead of grainy black and white newsreel footage.  But time may change how the new series is perceived. Band of Brothers and The Pacific were recently added to the Netflix roster, and for those tuning in to those series for the first time, they can now identify many of the actors from the big screen and TV roles they went on to do. Look, there’s Ron Livingston from Office Space! There’s David Schwimmer from Friends! There’s Tom Hardy from The Dark Knight Rises! There’s Rami Malek from Bohemian Rhapsody and Die Another Day! 20 years from now, after the young Masters of the Air cast go on to make their share of hit movies, that may change dramatically how new viewers appreciate the series.

But for those who watched the last episode Thursday night or yesterday, I don’t think I’m giving away a major spoiler to note that one of the operations featured near the end of the episode was the subject of a Mark Felton video from the fall of 2020 on using the Americans’ B-17s as “food bombers.” (Which neatly answers the Nietzsche quote above about “not becoming a monster himself.”) As Felton wrote on his video’s YouTube page, “By 1945, the German-occupied Western Netherlands was starving. Concluding a secret truce with the Nazi leader of the Netherlands, the Allies undertook dangerous behind-the-lines missions to feed 3 million people. This is the story of [Operations] Manna, Chowhound and Faust:”