Falling Skies marked a pretty big departure from TNT’s typical TV fare of capers, cops, lawyers, and doctors. Even now, in its fourth season, it is more the exception than the rule for the network, with only new series The Last Ship in a comparable genre. (The upcoming development slate does appear to be branching out more.) So how is TNT’s sci-fi series doing?
Like with any genre show, Falling Skies has its hits and misses. In truth, I have few complaints about this Steven Spielberg-produced series, which turned out to be much more compelling than I expected it to be. (I was very pleased to hear it would be getting another season, even if the fifth would be its last.) The series, which follows a group of humans struggling to survive and fight back against the aliens that have destroyed most of the Earth’s population and infrastructure, has all the requisite gross out moments, cool aliens, and fight scenes.
At the series’ heart is the Mason family. We meet the family as a unit of men–father and three sons, a twenty-year-old, a teen, and a pre-teen, who have lost their mother in the initial alien attack. It is their struggles, with love, with family, with survival, that ground the series. Who are the Mason men?
Tom- Noah Wyle may have been sweet Doctor Carter in E.R., but in Falling Skies he is a tough, gun-wielding history teacher who is not afraid to risk his life, make hard decisions, and sacrifice to keep his family safe. I wouldn’t have imagined him as a rebel soldier, but somehow it suits him. The boys who play his sons are a little more hit or miss.
Matt- Matt, the youngest, spends the first half of the show mostly being the cute innocent, though he is a little too old to be treated so young. Finally, after a lot of push and shove, he is taught how to use a gun and becomes a little bit more interesting. This season he is at his best, still young and sweet but also grim and determined, knowing when it is necessary to fight and when it is necessary to keep his cool. Being away from his family was good for him, allowing him to grow.
Hal– The eldest brother is in someways the toughest and in other ways the wimpiest if the bunch. He carries a gun and loads of responsibility, but at the same time, he is the puppy dog who gets his heart broken in one way or another.
Ben– Perhaps the most interesting Mason, Ben was kidnapped by the aliens and changed dramatically by them, making him someone both incredibly valuable and unbelievably unique. He’s more soldier than whiner, though he seems to be developing a bit of a crush on his older brother’s girl, so we’ll see where that goes.
And then there are the Mason women, who are late additions to the family:
Anne– A doctor who lost her family in the alien invasion and slowly grew close to the Mason family. Moon Bloodgood, who plays Anne, sounds like she was born to be a sic-fi/fantasy actress, but this character has never quite clicked for me. She can be a little earnest in her mothering, which is not unexpected, but is still irritating.
Lexi- Here’s perhaps my least favorite alien story trope–the half-human, half-alien baby. She’s got mysterious powers. No one quite understands how she exists. She may be good, she may be evil. She’s sort of Tom’s daughter, but sort of not. She grows at an unnatural rate. I don’t know if the writers had always planned for her character to come into being, but this felt to me more like the show’s poor attempt at one upping itself.
I am hopefully that the show will stop trying to outdo itself. Lexi took the show from a sci-fi, post-apocalyptic thriller and made it feel more fantasy and magic. I like fantasy, but this feels out of place for Falling Skies. I would much prefer new aliens or strange technology, if it needs to get bigger, but the truth is, the show has a solid, deep foundation of its mythology. There is no reason to try to top itself. Instead, it should use what it has already established to do what shows like this do best: focus on the humanity of the people that remain.
Falling Skies can learn a lot from another apocalyptic show, The Walking Dead. The Walking Dead is certainly not perfect, but when it is at its best, it is jaw-dropping. The best moments on that show are not the zombies–they sure are cool but they’re not the best part. The most memorable moments are the more terrifying ones, SPOILER ALERT like when Herschel’s head was cut off in front of his daughters, when Carol killed Lizzy after Lizzy killed her little sister in an attempt to help her, when Andrea has to put a bullet in the head of the sister she only just reconnected with, when Carl has to shoot his mother to keep her from turning into a zombie, when the gang discovers that the little they have spent weeks searching for was dead all along… The zombie apocalypse pushes the people to their extremes, revealing who they truly are in times of stress and danger. It is the actions they take and the bonds they forge that make the show interesting.
This season of Falling Skies marked the first time the family was truly scattered, allowing them to step out of each other’s shadow for once. They were no longer people in relation to each other, rather people who must rely on their own skill sets to survive. Now that they have come together once again, I hope they can maintain the strengths that they portrayed when they weren’t together. If Matt gets relegated to little boy again, I will not be happy. If, on the other hand, the family is forced to kill Lexi, its youngest member, to protect the human race, I will not complain.
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