Falling Skies - "Compass"

Season 2, Episode 3

I love possibilities. Give me a show with a strong start, and I will follow it for a long time, long past the point where I should have given up on it. (I’m looking at you, Smash.) Simply knowing that a show could be good, seeing that it has the basic elements to make a quality program, is enough to entrance me, if only for a short time. That’s what got me interested in Falling Skies in the first place, and what made me like the apparent retooling of last week’s premiere. However, it now appears that the path won’t be as smooth as it first appeared, and that the show has some more growing pains to get through.

One of the biggest problems with making a show that only has 10-episode seasons – and more important, airing said seasons over 8 weeks – is that the show looses some valuable time. Sure, the shortened order allows a show to be feet-footed about how it rolls out its plot, and that can be a positive, but it also leaves the characters short-shifted. That was the main problem with Jimmy’s death, an event that I’m sure was meant to be moving, but mostly just fell flat. Jimmy’s been given so little screen time over the past 13 episodes that it was damn near impossible to make any sort of emotional connection with the character, and thus his loss doesn’t mean as much to the audience as it does to the characters. (Incidentally, I’m pretty sure “so little screen time” is reason that the actor left the show. I mean, I wouldn’t blame him for wanting more work elsewhere.)

Jimmy’s death, or that of any minor character, doesn’t have to all the problematic, because there were other things going on in the hour, enough that they could have made up for the dead stretches of screen time. However, Jimmy’s death sent shockwaves through the camp, for reasons that make sense logically – of course the loss of somebody you’ve spent months (years?) surviving alongside of would effect you – but aren’t really supported by on-screen evidence. We’ve seen Weaver wax on at length about what a good soldier Jimmy is, but the two were rarely on screen together – and that was the strongest character connection Jimmy ever had on the show. It thus becomes very difficult to buy that so many people would be so affected by one death, especially when they’re surrounded by it every day. (I mean, did you see the size of the group when they were gathered for Jimmy’s funeral? They can’t all have known him intimately.)

The problem with having Jimmy’s death be so far-reaching is that it affected the other storylines, storylines that were all well and good on their own, and didn’t need Jimmy’s death to serve as any sort of justification for further action. Let’s start with the most remote one, which was Tom’s continues reintegration into the 2^nd Mass. following his abduction. Like I said last week, I’m interested in seeing the group begin to crack from the inside, and this episode continued to deliver on that, showing how distrust of Tom was slowly destroying group cohesion. However, the big cracks within group dynamic that we saw tonight seemed to be caused, or at least egged on, by Jimmy’s death. It was his death that led the Berserkers to go out to the dead Skitters, which led to Tom’s order to let the Skitter collect their dead in peace. And it was the search for Jimmy’s compass that led to the knockdown drag-out between Tom and Pope.

And it’s sad that this had to happen this way, because I can think of a dozen different ways that Tom and Pope could get into argument that wouldn’t be centered on somebody’s death. The 2^nd Mass. spent so much of the first season mostly working together to achieve their goals that it was inevitable that those little tensions would bubble over in such a manner that they did tonight. If the show had just let them happen more organically, then it wouldn’t have felt as forced or as if they were serving some other bit of storytelling besides itself. In truth, Pope striking out on his own (with Anthony) feels like the kick in the pants that the show needs, because having the 2^nd Mass face not one but two antagonistic forces is solid way to increase the pressure on the main characters.

Another new development was the introduction of the Continental Congress, the new human government that has sprung up in Charleston. (Between calling it the Continental Congress, and new character Avery likening herself to Paul Revere, this episode leaned way too hard on the American Revolution metaphor.) Though there have always been certain quest or goals that individual characters have pursued, the 2^nd Mass. has been a fairly aimless mob, just going from place to place with the vague goal of staying alive. Giving them a specific place that holds specific value to them – better organized civilization, greater hope of survival – fixes that, and now the episodic trails of the group will have a point, will feel like they are leading somewhere.

However, for this decision to be made because Weaver wants to honor the memory of Jimmy, along with everybody else who died, doesn’t necessarily connect. The reason that Weaver originally wanted to go to the Catskills was to survive, and the reason he decided that Charleston would be a better place to honor Jimmy is because their they could…survive? It doesn’t really track, and it becomes clear that the only really reason that Weaver made that choice was because the story required him to do so.

The development that was the closest to Jimmy’s death (at least in terms of proximity) was the continuing insinuations of Ben’s half-Skitter nature, which in this case meant that we saw two (TWO!) instances of his spikes glowing upon close contact with another Skitter. (In this case, it was Two-Face, though I don’t know if the particular Skitter really matters.) Again, this is the sort of thing that could have happened at any time, and really didn’t need Jimmy’s death to spur it on, though I will agree that having it be a source of guilt for Ben was a nice touch. This is obviously one of the long games that the show is playing for the season, and it’s good that they’re keeping track of it, but I’m not sure how it adds anything to what we already know.

So that makes for three developments worthy of exploring tonight, all of which were brought down by the circumstances surrounding them. Without Jimmy’s death, this would have been a much stronger episode overall, and I hope it means that we can have such episodes in the future that don’t revolve around such unbelievable histrionics.

Other Thoughts:

As a minor character, Jimmy’s death proves my point last week about the show’s need to be willing to kill off a major character. It’s hard to raise the stakes if the only people who die are those that we don’t care about.

Speaking of Pope, he’s become an even bigger antagonist than he was last season, but not in the fun way. The character lost a lot of his moral ambiguity tonight, and that makes him a lot less easy to enjoy.

Boy, everything else went to shit when the aliens invaded, but at least the 2^nd Mass. can scrounge up a nice outfit to bury Jimmy in, huh?