What They Say:
The Eye – The Espheni reveal their plan to Tom; Weaver and Pop search for a way out of the Espehni prison; Matt struggles to hide his true allegiance at the youth camp.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Falling Skies advanced the timeline as one would expect between the seasons and while it wasn’t hard to catch up, you kind of hoped they’d do things in a way that felt like it wasn’t so jarring. Jumping into a new season always leaves you a little uncertain in most shows, but here they kind of like leaving you in a way that makes you unsteady. I’d be more than fine with it if the show actually worked better rather than seeming like they’re just throwing new things at the wall and viewers are left without the context to really connect with it and make it work. It also doesn’t help that the overworn idea of separating everyone for their own stories right from the start, or before the start, gets tiring all on its own.
Tom’s little adventures continue to have him mapping out the place to find its weaknesses while he plays the role of the “ghost” that helps out where he can, and this latest adventure in the outside has had him meeting someone taking up the same cause using the same outfit. That proves inspirational of course and you can see how the Espheni are watching it happen and they’re not exactly thrilled by it all since it doesn’t keep everyone peaceful. While they may be a superior species when it comes to space travel and weapons, they’re the same as most people in a way in that when dissent is out there, they go with making an impression and pushing back harder. That means putting everyone in the makeshift prison together in order to really make a show of things when it comes to Espheni superiority.
Thankfully, Tom doesn’t turn himself in and nobody else does either which lets him go forward in trying to figure out how to get everyone out of there before things go bad fast now that food rations have stopped. What’s amusing is that while Tom has been doing things from within his special ward by sneaking out, Hal has had to change the plan in general to compensate for what they’ve learned along the way. And that doesn’t go over well with Tom since he is a bit of a controller when it comes to plans and he can’t see his kids as knowing more than him, even if he has been missing some of the real on the ground aspects of what’s going on. It’s not an unfamiliar dynamic and we’ve seen Hal struggle with his place in his father’s shadow before, but he’s also been in a growing command position himself during this experience since being put into this prison camp.
Tom’s arc takes him into contact with a ma that has been in a few other Espheni prison camps after losing his wife in the original invasion and he brings a few good tidbits into play for them. He has a way of dealing with the fences, but it’s a single person kind of event with a Faraday suit. That has its uses though in the bigger effort to bring down the fence and then getting everyone out before it all goes south fast. Tom also has a bit of luck here in that he manages to get back in touch with Cochise that reveals that the Espheni are looking to get a new power grid online for a new plan that’s yet to come into view. Cochise also provides a clue as to where Matt may have been taken along with some food news which definitely provides him with some rare hope amid a dangerous situation.
It also reinforces the obvious angle that he’d take of revealing that he’s the Ghost to the Espheni in order to get closer to them and find out what’s going on while also playing at distraction. With him back on board, with a new Espheni leader to deal with, the show once again throws us into something larger without really feeling like it’s working. When Tom makes it clear that he and the Volm are allies, they talk instead about a far greater danger that is coming. And that one of the reasons they’re working with the kids, even as awkward as they are through various means, they’re looking to build a kind of loyal and malleable soldier to deal with the new threat. An obvious choice is put in front of Tom, one that you know that even if he accepts he’ll reject, but there’s a lot to like and hate with all of this. Making the Espheni less of a black and white villain isn’t a surprise, but the addition of another potential bad alien race out there just complicates things in a way that just has you questioning how badly the Espheni have botched things here since the start if this was really their larger goal.
Ben and Lexi’s story is another piece of the puzzle that has its own issues with the way it gives us a kind of safe haven that can’t be all that it seems. While Lexi has her own agenda and is playing as a kind of spiritualist of peace, we also know that things can’t be right with her since she’s barely a year old but looks like she’s twenty-one instead. And that has the good doc there that whisked her away trying to find a way to get Ben to put some real truth into Lexi’s head so she can understand what’s going on, with the place and with herself. Lexi has ended up with some real followers behind her that, while they come across as peaceful, you can sense some real danger coming from them. Particularly with Lourdes as she was always looking for something to find comfort and salvation in.
Lourdes time here definitely makes it clear that there is a strong controlling nature to things, though some of it is self delusion, a need to believe in something. With Dr. Kadar having put the right bug in Ben’s ear, he makes a decent play to try and talk with Lexi and get her to see the dangers out there. But it’s clear that Lexi is pretty oblivious to things and is just enjoying the role she’s playing. That discussion also clues us in a bit to the other side of her personality which shows that she’s pretty dangerous herself and that her ignoring the world at large is difficult. But the two of them are coming from different places, with Ben remembering the world before the invasion and Lexi only knowing the last year, and even then only a percentage of it since she as a newborn, even a heightened hybrid newborn.
Matt’s story is just as awkward as what Ben is going through as we get the whole youth group thing, which had its horrible teasers over the spring before a lot of theatrical movies I saw as part of a pre-show. It’s all so forced, especially with the Hitler Youth outfits and hairstyles that the guys sport that it’s impossible to take seriously, especially amid everything that the Espheni are doing. They’ve worked the kids over for some time, since the start really with the harnesses, but there’s something here that just doesn’t click right in really making it feel like it belongs in the series even as we do understand the larger goal as revealed by the Skitter that Anne ends up torturing for information elsewhere about how hybrids are part of the goal that Tom discovered with the malleable army they need for the new alien threat.
In Summary:
Falling Skies once again has a lot going on since it’s trying to run several story arcs at once that all connect together and it handles it a bit better than I think it would have a year or two ago. Not that I’m thrilled by it since the show needs something to really draw together in a good way and I’m still having a hard time rallying behind it. With this episode, we get a number of reveals that are both good and bad and in the end just make everything more complicated. And I’m still not convinced Falling Skies handles complicated well since it’s working with such basic and uncomplicated characters. This story isn’t an unfamiliar one in a lot of ways as I can see plenty of shades of various science fiction novels I’ve read over my life, but each season continues to feel like they’re just adding another layer on that is pushing down harder on the foundations of it that makes me wonder when it’s all going to collapse.
Grade: C
