A chance to save the kids wearing the harnesses has Tom hunting down his son in order to put the theory to practice.
What They Say:
Prisoner of War – Tom encounters an alien skitter during a rescue mission; a doctor may have a way to save harnessed children.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
After the two part opener that left a lot of things unclear as to how events really transpired, we got a lot of time spent with the main cast walking around from town to town trying to find food and moving towards a perceived safe location while fighting as a resistance. The big unanswered question at this point for me is that if ninety percent of the world’s population was wiped out, even if just in this particular country or state, you have to ask where all the bodies are. The opener asked a lot of questions and had an odd feel to it as it unfolded since it was hard to reconcile how these aliens could cause all this, but have a hell of a time just trying to take care of the rest that walk otuside pretty openly.
The survivors start questioning this as well in a way as they go through an observation mission and we see that the aliens are using the harnessed children to collect trash in essence. The whole harness issue is causing a lot of concern among the scientist side of the resistance that’s starting to network across the country, and they’ve got a theory they think will work to get them off. The attempts so far have left the kids dead within hours, if not minutes, but there’s always someone with a bright idea. Unfortunately, they want Tom to go out and get a kid and they want him to get his own kid, Ben. You can understand the reasoning behind it, but it’s hard to see Tom going with it so easily himself since his own son will be a guinea pig. There’s a connection that he has with the doctor that will be running the operation but also a bit of guilt that goes back to the actual invasion itself, but it all feels terribly sketchy.
Like any good operation, the whole thing goes badly in a lot of ways and the second half of the episode is all about picking up the pieces from it. There’s an interesting take where Tom ends up fighting hand to hand with one of the aliens in a corridor, and it allows him to blow off a pair of limbs and actually capture it so he can drag it back. What this does is to reinforce how little we know about the aliens in general, a common them even after six months of resistance, and it really does provide a drag on the show. The lack of understanding from a human perspective is definitely a problem, but watching how the aliens operate, their entire design and the strange combination of machinery such as the bipedal mecha, points to them being a race that has acquired this technology. They simply don’t come across as unique beings or advanced enough ones to pull all of this off. And you really hope that there’s a decent explanation about them when we get to it, because while it makes a certain amount of sense here, it feels like it’s very poorly thought through so far.
In Summary:
After the two hour premiere, it’s not a surprise to see the show go for a quieter and more thoughtful episode that lets some of the things sink in as well as letting the characters become a bit more human, not running all the time and actually doing things. It’s not bad in its overall structure and execution, but it’s pretty by the numbers here for the most part and you can map a lot of it out from the first few minutes. They do attempt to change things up, events you suspect should be unfolding in other cities as well, as an alien is captured and more clues are revealed about the harnesses. But there’s just such a disconnect between what the aliens have accomplished six months ago and what they do now, and their inability to deal with things caused by this ragtag group of resistance members, that it invalidates much of what they’ve done. There may be a detailed bible behind all of this for the series, but little of critically needed thought and information has made it to the screen itself.
Grade: C-
