Fall of Eagles: End Game

The final part of Fall of Eagles is all about the last days of World War 1, as the German army is losing to the Americans and Germany is threatened from within by Bolshevik revolutionaries - the very forces Kaiser Wilhelm unleashed in The Secret War to try and win the war have come back to nom him.

At a meeting with his senior generals and new Chancellor (Erik Chitty, Engin in The Deadly Assassin), it becomes clear that the best the Kaiser can hope for is to save his dynasty from sharing the fate of the Romanovs in Russia - not to win the war, just to lose it as little as possible. The episode becomes a character piece, focusing on Wilhelm's slow acceptance of just how bad the situation is, and how much of it is his fault.

A young Colin Baker appears here as the Kaiser's son, "Little Willie" (lol). Yes, he is even credited as that on-screen.

Little Willie is shown to take after his father, and is if anything even more useless - we see him sneak away from a staff meeting to take a telephone call from his mistress, and he is completely indecisive when it comes to military decisions. So much for the future of the Hohenzollerns.

In the key scene for the episode, Kaiser Wilhelm is left alone by a fire to decide what to do. He makes a self-pitying speech in which he flip-flops between fighting to the end and running away, before eventually deciding to abdicate and flee to safety in Holland. Barry Foster has been superb as Wilhelm throughout the series, but this may be his finest moment because he is carrying the emotional scene single-handed.

With the decision made and the Kaiser gone, it is left to Field Marshal Hindenburg (Marius Goring, Maxtible in Evil of the Daleks) to sort out the mess Wilhelm has abdicated left behind. He telephones the Social Democrats in Berlin and the army teams up with them to stop the Bolsheviks from taking control.

There is a lot of telephoning between characters in this episode. The Germans aren't nearly as scared of it as Franz Josef was back in Indian Summer of an Emperor. There is a line of ironic foreshadowing for beyond the end of the series as Hindenburg says to the leader of the Democrats

"Yes, we must hope for favourable terms at the peace treaty."

With its end date in 1918, this 100-year anniversary seemed an appropriate time to look back on Fall of Eagles (since mannys like multiples of ten for some reason). It is one of the forgotten classic BBC historical drama series, with comparatively little written about it on the internets. This seems a shame to me, as it holds up well today, and I would definitely recommend it to anyone with an interest in classic BBC historical drama series... which I presume includes most mannys, and all cats.