What They Say:
Saturday Night Massacre – Lexi emerges with more power; Tom and the 2nd Mass must work with the Volm to hold off the invading Espheni forces.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
While I’ve had problems with Falling Skies across its first three seasons, especially in its structure and slow progress that I can at least acknowledge being a part of a low budget cable show, this season has been hard to really get behind in any meaningful way. And I’ve seen a lot of friends feeling the same way that were far more into the show than I am. And sadly, mostly of them tend to cite the whole Lexi storyline as the biggest of reasons for it. With the previous episode focusing on her as she entered her cocoon stage and then the struggle outside with those deciding her fate, things got tense in expected ways while they waited to see what she would be like when she came out. The surreal of alien involvement isn’t unexpected and it can lead to some neat things, but all of this is just so awkwardly done that watching her, and the weak acting and dialogue, pretty much makes it comical.
Lexi’s return to the world outside of the cocoon is not one that goes well as she realizes that her time there with everyone has come to an end. She’s intent on returning to her other family, the Espheni, as the human side of things keeps falling to violence and hatred in their hearts and she can’t be around that anymore. So what does she try to do, even as her parents and Lourdes try to convince her to give them more time and understand? She just stalks off through the crowd of those that are eager to kill her as they view her a threat. Lourdes makes the most impassioned of pleas in order to get her to stay as she’s been a truly faithful follower, but when Lexi provides her a touching moment to help her with the pain she feels, she ends up killing her. Which, of course, paints a bad picture of what Lexi is likely to feel all of humanity probably needs because of our cumulative pain.
With Lexi gone, the situation between Tom and Anne does get tense, especially since Tom finds himself more in the camp of having to deal with her as promised, but Anne is edging him just enough through her passion to try and do right by Lexi since she is their daughter. Thankfully, they don’t go through a full on schism here and find a middle ground while also reinforcing that they don’t want to give up on each other because of what they’re facing. Anne continues to be a bit more focused on the alien side with how the Espheni have warped her, and getting through to her that there may be something else may not play well. Anne’s parental approach is no surprise though and while Tom is keeping relatively quiet during all the talk with Roger about what he may be able to do after watching her all this time, you know he’s weighing his options and thinking about what he may have to do in the end if there is no other option.
But before any of that can be dealt with, there’s the problem of the Espheni themselves. With the one that Tom had burned before, they’ve now set up across the river with plans to roll across and destroy all of the people there. It’s a personal thing based on Tom’s past with him and now that Lexi is gone, the one thing that was protecting them isn’t able to hold them back. With Cochise having come back to help and filling them in on what’s out there, the whole thing turns into plans for a street by street fight and defense, Stalingrad style, in order to make it as personal as the Espheni want to make it. The whole situation gives everyone a lot of purpose and focus and it offers a good distraction from everything else that was going on. Not that there isn’t time for a few smaller and personal nods going on here and there as well as everyone has things to say while prepping for a big fight.
While the prep goes on, we also get another subplot kicking out of it as Ben has decided that the best thing he can do instead of fighting it out alongside everyone is going to find Lexi. This actually does make sense since she could help bring a stop to things in a couple of different ways and Ben is one of the few people that might be able to get through to her, both by actually being her brother and related to her but also because he’s Not Quite Human himself with what he went through back in the first season. His simple and casual confidence continues to be amusing but it fits well with the hopelessness of the situation and it keeps him busy instead of fighting alongside Maggie and getting way too distracted by protecting her instead of doing what needs doing. His romantic subplot in regards to her this season has been minimal overall but it’s definitely had its moments and made for some cute and awkward pauses from his point of view when dealing with her.
The fight has a decent start, first with some human losses as Lexi’s followers try for the peaceful approach only to get hunned down, and then some pushback from the resistance with their plans. But it gets more complicated when a gas main is hit and it all turns to a much larger explosion that causes a lot more trouble. There’s some decent stuff to it, but it’s a kind of forced bit of emotion as we see how Sarah has a hard time coping with what she’s seen as the whole experience is proving to be more for her than she expected. What it does allow though is for Pope to be a real shoulder to lean on and he actually manages to settle into that role better than one might have expected, giving you the possibility that he might really care about someone other than himself for once.
Things get increasingly desperate as it all goes on though and while there were a hundred people at the start, they’re down to thirty and most are wounded. Falling back into the fallout shelter before the next wave arrives makes the most sense, but as the losses pile up, Tom just ends up snapping in the end and is intent on facing the Espheni and putting an end to this particular personal part of the war. An emotion you can understand completely considering all that he’s lost. This play of events does make for some good tension in the final minutes as the handful of survivors, missing friends at the time, huddle in the fallout shelter hoping not to be noticed. And while Tom is distracted, an attempt on the Volm’s life is put into play, but it doesn’t go as one would hope since the key players weren’t involved. It’s a little anti-climactic in a way, but it has a nice twist that factors into it to keep it moving. But we don’t get any real progress on the real grudge match here.
In Summary:
If there’s a disappointment here, it’s that more of the main cast didn’t get killed off. We had a lot of supporting characters get taken down this time around and the threat of main characters getting whacked, but it won’t happen at this stage. Instead, it’s being drawn out a bit more as you’d expect. There’s some decent action to be had here with the first wave of the Espheni coming in and the meager group of resistance fighters doing what they can, but the whole thing has just such a layer and air of hopelessness that it does feel like the darkest before the dawn, but there will be no dawn. While I can see simple and goofy paths out of things to a kind of potential future to be had here, both with this season and the next, it’s just not going to make a lot of sense of flow smoothly. Episodes like this reinforce that unfortunately.
Grade: C-
