YMMV / Masada

• Applicability: Some striking parallels to post-2001 Middle Eastern politics (including The War on Terror and the Arab–Israeli Conflict) can be drawn from Silva and Eleazar's last conversation: a powerful empire struggles to come to grips with Middle Eastern religious zealots. Rome is blinded by its hypocrisy and arrogance: it claims to represent civilization and order, and any examples which would indicate otherwise are dismissed as exceptions or mistakes, even as such examples continue to pile up. Meanwhile the religious zealots claim to fight for a noble cause, even as they burn and destroy everything around them - eventually even themselves.
• Awesome Music: Jerry Goldsmith's theme and his scores for parts one and two. Because of the miniseries's Troubled Production and his commitment to Inchon (which was itself troubled), his friend Morton Stevens scored the other two parts. Both composers received well deserved Emmy nominations for their work, and Goldsmith won.
• Love to Hate: Pomponius Falco embodies the worst of corrupt Roman politics and sends Jewish slaves to their death with a catapult expecting Masada to surrender. He's also played with delightful gusto by David Warner, no wonder he walked out with an Emmy Award.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The final scene of the miniseries is the swearing in of an Israeli military squadron on the grounds of Masada in the 1980s, with the oath that the fortress won't fall again. Israeli Defense Forces oath swearings stopped being done in Masada in the 1990s after the higher-ups thought it over and decided that an oath to be Defiant to the End in a place where there was a mass suicide gave off mixed signals, to put it nicely.

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