February 16

“Replacements”

“Replacements” details the events for Easy Company undergoing Operation Market Garden in Holland, which was a failure. The high-risk operation saw Easy Company retreat from the fight with the Krauts and showed how dangerous this situation could be.

It also featured a group of replacements to the company and how they were accepted (or hazed as the case may be) into a group of men who had been together for going on two years.

We had a return from David Schwimmer’s Captain Sobel, now as the newly appointed Regimental S-4. His facial expressions told more than any lines of dialogue could have from this returning character.

The story was told from the perspective of Sgt. Denver “Bull” Randleman. He gets wounded by some tank shrapnel and winds up spending the night in a barn with Germans all around him. He received help from a Dutch farmer and his daughter in a tense moment. Bull had to fight a German soldier hand-to-hand to keep his presence hidden.

There was also a cool scene where Private Webster gave a Dutch child a chocolate bar. The child had been with his father in an air raid shelter and came out when the Americans went past. The father had said the boy had never had chocolate before and the joy on the boy’s face after tasting the chocolate was a wonderful bit of life included within the horrors surrounding everything.

Horrors such as the Dutch people, who were greeting Easy Company as “liberators,” taking women and cutting their hair and drawing swastikas on their faces. These were women who had slept with German soldiers and were now facing consequences from an angry mob. This was a disturbing scene and you could tell that the soldiers were bothered by it as well.

This show does a really good job of these smaller moments tucked inside the overall dramatics and violence of the war scenes.