Falling Skies - "Love and Other Acts of Courage"/"Homecoming"

Season 2, Episodes 5-6

“You can join us and survive, or fight alone and die.”

Let’s just get this out in the open: Falling Skies is far from an original show. Part of that comes from the fact that it works in an archetypal framework; alien invasion stories have a long history, and at this point coming up with new stories to tell within the genre has got to be difficult. But I also get the feeling that the writers and producers aren’t really aiming to take their show to new heights, and that they’re happy to tell those familiar comfortable stories. (And TNT and the audience are happy to receive them, so it’s not like they have any incentive to change things up.) But even by that low clearance bar, there are two marks that the show should be able clear, yet over the past couple of weeks has failed to do so: unpredictability and the ability to generate new story lines.

The reason that I skipped writing a full-length post about “Love and Other Acts of Courage" is because to my mind, only two real developments happened within the hour.

1. Two-Face got capture by the 2^nd Mass., and clued them into a rebellion some Skitters were planning against the Overlords (which is a fairly boring name for those Silver Alien Dudes, but whatever works).
2. Hal and Maggie shared a kiss, before she blew him off and ran away.

Sure, the 2^nd Mass ended the episode camped out at a hospital, and Ben claims that he will be leaving the company since most were weirded out by his post-harness nature. But the episode itself hinged on those two developments, and those alone, and as such it felt a little empty overall.

This isn’t to say that the episode felt empty solely because it only hinged on two main ideas. In fact, I praised the season premiere for having one simple idea and executing it in a way that it filled up the whole hour with fun adventure times. However, what made the premiere work was that while it was a simple idea, it was open enough that it allowed for the episode to go a number of places, and afforded several story beats to play out, instead of just going in one direction and stopping there.

Last week’s plotlines by comparison were both simple and short-lived – at least for now. Maggie and Hal kissed, and then she ended it – for now. Two-Face clued Tom and the others into the plan for the skitter rebellion, and that’s likely all we’ll here about it – for now. These are but steps along the way of long-gestating – but rarely seen – long-term plots for the show.

And that’s the main problem with both of those developments. Since these are developments that have been teased since season one – we saw the chemistry between Hal and Maggie early on, and it was made clear toward the end of last season that the Skitters weren’t working for the Overlords of their own volition – neither of these things come as a big surprise, even though we haven’t heard much about them in a while. Really, the fact that we haven’t heard much about them in the interim works against these moments even more; not only are they not surprising, but without any real build up, they don’t really mean anything either. Instead the just sort of limp past out eyes, filling time until the Next Important Development can happen.

And that Next Important Development occurred this week, as the show got back to the more solid One Interesting and Exploitable Idea formula. Unfortunately this week’s conceit – Karen is found de-harnessed, and everybody doesn’t know whether they can trust her – came with it’s own baggage, in this case it’s a lack of originality in the plotline. Sure, Karen’s return brings with it an interesting, knotty meeting of plotlines that includes the love triangle between Hal, Maggie, and Karen, as well as Ben’s own feelings of isolation from the rest of the 2^nd Mass. It was a beautiful way to bring some long-running tensions to the surface without bending over backwards, and on that level the story succeeded. But I can’t shake this feeling that we’ve been down they road before, mostly because we have.

In the first season, when Rick, Ben, and the other children were rescued from the Skitters and de-harnessed, a large through line for the rest of the season was discovering just what was wrong with the children, and weather they could be trusted, or if they had been corrupted by the Skitters. That’s still been has been an issue with Ben this season, and bringing in Karen with the same question attached her is meant to achieve some parallels between the two characters, which it did. However, since we’ve already seen others corrupted by Skitters/harnesses in the past, the fact that Karen was faking her human sympathies wasn’t all that surprising. The mere fact that Karen seemed perfectly normal at the outset was sort of a dead give away that she wasn’t, and no matter how much ambiguity Jesse Schram gave to her performance, the writing made this twist far too telegraphed.

In fact, I would say that Falling Skies seems to be having some problems coming up with new things for its characters to do each week, and for a show that’s only aired 16 episodes, that’s a bit of a problem. Obviously the humans are always going to face alien threat for the entirety of the series, but how those threats manifest themselves can differ greatly. All it takes is a little creativity on the writers’ part. And with TNT to renewing the show for a third season, and subsequent season also seem probable, and it’s about time the writers start letting the creativity shine through.

Other Thoughts:

I don’t have a whole lot to say about the other subplots, Weaver’s sudden infection and Tom and Anne’s budding relationship. With the former, it was another plotline that didn’t have enough build-up to it to really feel earned or charged, and it only seemed to exist as a reason to keep the 2^nd Mass. in the hospital for another episode. As to the latter, the show has been kind of playing it low key with the romance angle, letting it slowly build-up in the background, which was nice, but once again these sorts of things taking front stage don’t really work. For both, they were quickly resolved, so we can’t really pretend that the stakes were all that large in the first place.

Another recycled plot element, this one from “Other Acts of Courage”: Rick serving as translator for the Skitter, something that he had done as well during the first season.