The web video:
- Archive Panic: The main series alone consists of 225 episodes, spanning the nearly 5 full years in which the war was fought. If one includes episodes from the spin-offs, the number climbs significantly higher. Even taking into account most episodes are only roughly 10 minutes long, that still adds up to a long commitment to watch the series from start to finish.
- Anvilicious: No matter how gloriously heroic the deed, Indy never misses a chance to remind you how much the war just sucked for everybody, and especially in the first two years Indy ends almost every episode essentially saying You Bastard! to his audience. It can still get rather repetitive to hear the same sermon every week, especially when re-watching or binging to catch up. Thankfully, Indy gets more subtle and sparing with this starting around 1916.note
- Funny Moments: Few and far between due to the subject matter, but some examples include...
- In this video
covering the first use of tanks in warfare, Indy notes near the end that the tanks arrived at the front later than expected and in bad disrepair because the soldiers tasked with getting them to the front kept stopping along the way to show them off. Cue footage of a Mark 1 tank crushing an automobile. - In an episode entitled "Austro-Hungarian House of Cards", which highlights a bunch of backroom dealing and backstabbing that was going on, Indy ends by quipping that you might be tempted to think it is a House of Cards, but due to the severe death toll it's really a Game of Thrones.
- In the Time Ghost series The Cuban Missile Crisis, it is mentioned that JFK was reading a book called The Guns of August by historian Barbara W. Tuchman which detailed the opening of World War 1 and proposing that due to the confusion and bad communication that the Great War was started almost by accident. Cut to Indy sitting at his desk, he stares at the camera dubiously for several moments before resuming his narration.
- In this video
- Moment of Awesome: On a meta level, the dedication put into the series and its Real Time look at events. It literally could not have been done any earlier, and it is the closest thing for us in the modern day to see the war as it actually happened, and appreciate the sheer scale of it.
- Nightmare Fuel: Jesus Christ, almost everything from this show has some degree of this, especially the episodes about actual battles, as well as the one about Shell Shock (which, while it has hope spots due to how this planted the seeds of a good psychiatric approach, also showcased how some treatments had patients beaten) and the prosthetic faces.
- Squick: Beyond the sheer amount of deaths caused by shells and bullets, the show also dives into the more grotesque elements of trench warfare. Rotting corpses, dismembered corpses, mud, vermin, disease, and general lack of sanitation are all touched upon, primarily through quotes of first-hand accounts. One episode that touches on a ship overloaded with men suffering extreme dysentery is nasty enough for Indy to give a special warning to viewers about it. A few other episodes—for example, have also kicked off with warnings about the content being particularly more gruesome than is normally depicted.
- Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: The series explores in detail one of the most brutal and pointless conflicts in human history, and does not shy away from the atrocities, brutality, and tragedies of the war, and Indy treats it with appropriate gravity. It does not make for easy watching. This is very much a deliberate choice; Indy ends nearly every episode reminding viewers that the "Great War" was as pointless as it was brutal, and the only thing you can reliably count on with a new week is more people dying. Even the war's small acts of heroism and humanity are often deconstructed by putting them in perspective of the rest of the war raging around such acts.
- Wham Line: At the end of Week 101, Indy concludes the episode by reading a soldier's letter to his wife and daughter. He states that, while he does not fear death, he fears leaving them behind, and makes it clear just how much he loves them. Then...Indy: "Charles May, wife(sic) of Bessie and father of Pauline... was killed the following day."
