Falling Skies - "Molon Labe"/"Death March"

Season 2, Episodes 7-8

I’ve written before about how Falling Skies is a show divided against itself – it’s very good at providing the action and sci-fi thrills (and sometimes chills), but doesn’t have quite the same level of skill when it comes to the other elements of the show, mostly the character-building and pathos. It often seems as if the show is begrudgingly doing the latter time as a way to bide time until and save money for the former, and the filler status would probably explain why it never feels as affecting as the action set-pieces. This contrast becomes even more apparent with “Molon Labe” and “Death March”, episodes that tackle only action and character building, respectively, to disorienting effect.

I really don’t have much to say about “Molon Labe”, which was a straightforward, action packed hour, something that worked to the show’s benefit. By shedding all of the draggy moments of pathos and characters wining about their state of a post-apocalyptic universe, and having them instead actually, physically fight back against the alien threat that surrounds them. I don’t want to make it sound as if the characters haven’t acted with agency in the past – they’ve always had goals and missions, and haven’t been afraid to kill aliens in the past – but there was something about the type of action on display in that episode – Tom shooting the Overlord in the head, Ann creating a flame-thrower to fight off the spider-things – that resounded more since it showed that character taking up new levels of activity. It also helped that the threat against them was more direct and concrete, which not only caused the characters to fight like they did, but also noticeably raised the stakes.

“Death March” is almost the complete opposite, an hour that asks us to spend time with characters that we supposedly care about, as it starts to deliver to us more details about them. This episode was obviously one of those saddled with cost-cutting measures, if all the time that the cast was stuck in the car sets with the horrendous green-screen is any indication, but this alone isn’t a deal-breaker for the episode. Indeed, the episode takes the form of one of my favorite types of episodes, the bottle episode. It’s not a true bottle episode as there are multiple sets and guest stars at play, but it does effectively strand the characters in a limited space – in this case, the road, with very little around to distract them – and use that stranding as an opportunity to get at some real pathos for the characters.

Where the episode seems to fail is that there isn’t really enough established character work built up for this episode to play off of. The best bottle episodes tend to be those that take what we already know about a character and the play off of that, either digging deeper into one aspect of their personality, or to reveal something new and deep about them that’s been hiding under the surface. You could argue that this is what the episode was trying to do with both Tector and Maggie, and technically that is correct. The problem is that there’s not really that much for these new revelations to stick to. Maggie and Tector have both been cyphers for the majority of their screen time – Maggie only recently got fleshed out with her cancer backstory, which doesn’t actually tell us a lot about her – that these revelations feel as if they were randomly tossed off, without much thought into whether they really make sense.

I say that with full recognition that Maggie’s backstory caused drama in her relationship with Hal, which I think just makes me even madder. Maggie’s backstory – with the drugs, and the pregnancy, and the jail time – is just so intense that it feels calculated, like the writers dumped every bad thing they could think of on Maggie just so we would believe Hall being scared off. None of this really feels like it makes much difference how we few Maggie – who acts most of the time like this baggage doesn’t weigh her down in the day-to-day – that I doubt it’s really going to come up again. At least Tector’s army-based regrets have ac actual effect on his current life, and this is something that could be built off of later, even if it doesn’t mean all that much now.

Let’s not even talk about Matt’s story with the harnessed kid Jennie, which really only sought to remind us that Matt can still be compassioned and open-minded, which of course, because HE’S A FUCKING CHILD.

Anyways, what undermines all of this shoddy character building even further is how the episode ends. While I’ve been relatively happy with the creation of Charleston as a small, attainable goal for the 2^nd Mass (and the show) to aim for, the fact that this episode ends with them reaching the new human capital feels both unearned and as if it cut the rest of the hour off at the knees. Seeing as how the 2^nd Mass took off for Charleston at the end of “Molon Labe” and arrived at the end of the next hour, combined with the fact that “Molon Labe” and the episode before that took place at one location, makes it feel like the trip their didn’t take as long as the show seems to want us to believe. To that end, all of the character work of the hour feels as if it was created because the writers needed a low-budget way to kill time until Charleston was reached. That this comes at the end of two ridiculous and pointless fake-outs that also seemed designed to pad out the hour – Hal et. al.’s capture/rescue by Porter, and the 2^nd Mass believing that Charleston held no human settlement – only served to further push the pointlessness of it all.