Scenes of homecoming are so essential to any war narrative that they're practically mandatory. This goes double for long, relentlessly intense war stories like The Pacific. After watching these marines slog through a seemingly endless hell of mud, terror and human degradation, I personally needed this final hour of family dinners and masquerade balls, as I suspect a lot of viewers did. Just like the first hour of The Pacific, Part Ten didn't really say anything that hasn't been said countless times about war and its effect on the people who live through it. Unlike Part One, this hour was still poignant and frequently beautiful.

I'd like to skip to the very end of the episode before I get into the meat of it. I always enjoy the end of true life stories because of the information we get about the real people in the epilogue. This time, something new struck me that didn't really occur to me when watching the likes of Band of Brothers. We viewers just spent ten grueling hours watching guys like Eugene Sledge and Bob Leckie fighting for their lives and doing incredible, difficult and even heroic things. And yet, we leave them with some of the most mundane language possible. I guess that's why the heroes from ancient stories rarely if ever made it out of the war alive. Nobody wants to read that Achilles was the greatest warrior among the Greeks, that he slayed the champion Hector and triumphed over Troy, then returned to his home town and opened up a small grocery store where he worked until his death of natural causes at an old age. But that's the truth of war heroes. Either they get the battleship-naming glory of John Basilone or they survive and try to fit back into society at peace time, living lives that are functionally identical to those they would have pursued had there not been a war.

Of course, some warriors have an easier time reintegrating than others. As the marines go their separate ways, they all experience the unease of returning to a homestead that, all told, hasn't changed that much since they left. After all, three years in Mobile, Alabama aren't the same as three years on the battlefield. For all of the marines in Part Ten there's this sense of disappointment that the whole of society hasn't transformed along with them. After all the fighting, Bob Leckie still has to go home and sleep in the same room he slept in as a kid. His mother still fusses with his stuff while he's trying to work and people are just as insufferable as they were before Pearl Harbor.

For most of the guys, the perceived reward for coming home alive is the guarantee of a wife and a job, which is kind of empty considering the likelihood of their achieving the same without any fighting at all. But that's the lesson, I suppose. Just like Sledge can unironically appreciate a daisy more than any young man who never had to go through hell, there's an added value to the simple elements of life that results from living through an experience in which they were all so far away.

Best Moment: I liked Sledge trying to register for classes at Alabama Polytechnic. It was funny and heavy at the same time.

Notes: Bob Leckie wrote 41 books in his lifetime. That's all I wanted to say. 41 whole books.

Episode Rating: 4.5/5- It wasn't amazing and I could have done without at least one or two of the cliches, but it was still a moving hour of television.

Series Rating: 4.5/5- The Pacific got off to a slow start and at times it threatened to miss the point entirely. That said, it still accomplished an incredible depiction of war at the individual level. The acting was frequently some of the best on television and I do believe that it will be a long time before a more stirring, visceral experience is conveyed so well in the medium.