Band of Brothers (TV series)/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Crowning Music of Awesome - The opening credits, the choral scene in episode 7, the Beethoven piece that was extended into a leitmotif throughout episode 9, and the denouement in episode 10.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse - Doc Roe for sure. Also Speirs memetic (and actual) Badass.
  • Harsher in Hindsight - The opening interviews in the very first episode, "Currahee," feature one of the men saying "Well, our country was attacked. It's different--it wasn't like Korea or Vietnam; we was attacked. And, you know, it was a feeling that, uh, maybe we're just dumb country people, where I come from, but a lot of us volunteered." The day that episode premiered? 9 September 2001. Er...
    • Promos were actually pulled post 9/11 due to the combat violence shown and how it might upset people.
  • Memetic Badass: Speirs. The stories about just how many Germans he gunned down after giving them cigarettes and various other exploits get more fantastical with each telling.
  • Nightmare Fuel - Frequent in this brutally realistic depiction of war, but the absolute worst has to be the concentration camp.
  • Tear Jerker:
    • Episode 6, "Bastogne," for obvious reasons.
    • The aptly-titled seventh episode, "The Breaking Point," sees characters the viewers have become emotionally invested in horrifically injured, killed, or suffer nervous breakdowns, made all the worse because it all really happened.
      • Special attention to the real Malarkey starting to cry in the introduction to "The Breaking Point," the only time that happens in the interviews. Picture the quote below with obvious visual tics at every comma or verbal pause. Then obvious distress. The interview ended as he was starting to break down.

Malarkey: You don't have a chance, when you're friends go down, to really take care of 'em as you might, especially if you're in an attack, moving, whatever, and uh, uh, ... I withstood it well, but I had a lotta trouble in later life, uh, because, uh, those events would ... come back, and ... you never forget 'em.

    • Episode nine, "Why We Fight," with the discovery of a (brutally accurate) concentration camp.

Prisoner: [When asked who was kept in the camp] Juden...Juden...Juden... (Jews...Jews...Jews...)

  • The Woobie: YMMV, of course, but most fans can agree on Malarky, particularly during and after episode 7, when two of his best friends lose limbs during an artillery barrage, two more are killed in another barrage, and a fifth suffers a nervous breakdown as a result. Doc Roe is also a common woobie for the fans after seeing Episode 6, which brutally depicts what a combat medic would have gone through in the war.
    • Sobel could be considered one in Real Life, according to The Other Wiki. He eventually tried to commit suicide by shooting himself in the temple. The bullet severed both optic nerves, permanently blinding him before exiting the other temple, and he lived for another twenty years.
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