Falling Skies

The end of Season 2 for Falling Skies was a dramatic one. The 2nd Massachusetts had finally reached Charleston and thought found their home among the already established power of the city, only to find out that the governing body there was a bit, well, wimpy.

Instead of fighting back against the alien invasion the population, governed by Arthur Manchester (Terry O’Quinn; Lost, 666 Park Avenue), a former Professor of Tom’s, has chosen to lay low and let the aliens believe they have already conquered Charleston. Of course Tom and his band of freedom fighters can’t do that, which eventually leads them to trouble.

A coup begins, led by the general of the Charleston Army (Matt Frewer; Watchmen, Eureka), and Tom and his troops are given clemency. Things of course get complicated when Ben returns, bringing with him the red eye faction of the alien rebels, and, through Ben, Red Eye begins to tell Tom about a massive underground weapon being built which needs to be destroyed, and as a bonus the overlord for the alien army will also be there. Long story short, Tom and his army, with a few losses and some unexpected turns, win the day, destroying the weapon and killing off the overlord.

The end of season two finds the now united Charleston community experiencing what they believe to be an earthquake, only to find more spaceships landing on their front door. Is it friend, is it foe? All we see is the emergence of a new alien from the ship before the show fades to black.

I watched all of season 1 and half of season 2 before I gave up on the show. Give me sci-fi where kids are involved and you only end up having story arcs involving parents making stupid decisions on behalf of their children, neglecting the rest of the people they are with. Throw a romantic angle in there ands you can just forget about it. Falling Skies certainly had a lot of that. Still, I made an effort and watched the remainder of season 2 to prepare myself for the third season of the show. I was kind of left scratching my head.

Things are really not as we left them in season 2. There is an enormous gap in story that has thus far been unexplained. You don’t even find out until the second episode of season 3 that the gap is a 7 month long period in which new characters, that we have to accept without explanation, have popped up on screen, alien technology that has been integrated into the human world without any sort of origin story, and, oh yeah, that new alien at the end of season 2, they’ve already given him a nickname and let him stay in camp. What’s going on around here?

For a frantic hour and a half I scoured the internet wondering if maybe there was an episode that I missed, maybe Amazon Prime failed to include it in their season 2 collection, maybe there was a webisode deal going on that I needed to track down. Nothing. We just make this huge leap 7 months into the future where everyone has undergone massive story change ups. Tom for example has a new job (trust me, it’s a doozy), Hal is having complications resulting from his little kiss with Karen at the end of Season 2, and things haven’t quite been the same between Tom’s little army and the alien invaders. I think, and stop me if I’m wrong, but fans of the show will not be pleased.

Falling Skies season 3 feels almost like a completely different show with all the changes that have been made. While the show is still about a ragtag group of human survivors trying to fend off the alien invasion as well as keep it together in their own camp, the writers do try and add a few fresh idea’s into the mix. Will it be enough though and will fans of the show stick with the odd opening episodes that will leave even the most hardcore fans a bit in the dark? Time will tell.