What They Say:
Space Oddity – Lexi’s return complicates Tom’s mission; Lexi is forced to save her father’s life after a Beamer malfunction. the 2nd Mass fears an impending Espheni strike.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Falling Skies works towards its finale with a lot of things going on but also a lot of predictability. With Tom and the gang having largely unearthed the Beamer and putting into motion their plans to make their way to the moon in order to take down the power supply, there’s definitely a lot riding on the event. The 2nd Mass has been through a lot in the last few weeks and we see here at the start Pope making that clear with the amount of people they’ve lost and what’s at stake. But having an Espheni attack on the area arrive at the same time that Lexi returns – now clear with what kind of manipulation she was put through – definitely sets a lot of people on edge for natural reasons. Pope is ready to take her down but Lexi is offering herself as a weapon against the Espheni as she knows what she truly wants to do now. But Tom is hugely resistant to this for a number of reasons as there’s a whole lot of complications going into everything.
Pope’s attempt at killing Lexi isn’t a surprise considering the number of graves he’s dug recently related to what Lexi had done, but she makes it clear that she has the power to stop it. The kind of roller coaster ride of emotions going on within the family context is certainly interesting to watch as there’s a kind of flip going on in a way as Tom wants absolutely nothing to do with Lexi while Anne is hoping to try and reach through to Lexi and figure out if she’s truly back to her old self before she went in the cocoon. It’s a lot of stuff in a small amount of space and it’s just all over the map. The only thing that really resonates is Pope with the way he’s coping with having lost so many people now and caring in some form has made him intense. These are some of the few really honest moments from Pope and it’s hard to find fault with him considering all that happened. Even Matt and Hal and Ben aren’t all that enthused about her being there, yet it’s Tom that’s the one that basically lets her stay. But she has to stay away from him.
With that in the background, Tom is focusing on getting the Beamer going with the bombs inside and that has Cochise feeling very nervous. What Tom learns from this is not a good thing as Tom had hoped for some potential help from the greater Volm forces, but has now discovered that Cochise and his group are all there is on Earth as they parted on bad terms before. That doesn’t deter Tom of course and it has him more focused since he knows that what must be done is entirely in human hands at this point. Of course, what we also see with this is that when Anne and Lexi do talk, Lexi makes a pretty impassioned plea that she should be the one to pilot the Beamer as she can get through the signals and get everything up there that they need in order to destroy the power station. Understandably, there’s no real trust to be had with Lexi and both of her parents are really conflicted about everything. But it’s Dan that ends up trying to get them to see the sense of it, which he has some history with considering what he learned about his daughter this season and what she went through.
Naturally, things move quickly to change from Ben going with Tom to Lexi going as they realize she’s the best option. But they’re not letting her go without her knowing what they think of her, some in quite harsh terms. It’s definitely what you’d expect as there’s a lot of history going on there in a short amount of time with some very intense feelings. But as we see, Lexi really is the ideal one to pilot the Beamer as she’s unaffected by the gravity and pressure of going into space whereas Tom is nearly crushed by it. With a bit of time until they get to their destination, that leaves them time to talk, though Tom isn’t actually interested in doing that. He at least makes some small talk but starts to notice some very human things about Lexi, which he does his best to keep out of the picture. But it’s interesting that she notes that this is the first time they’ve actually really talked at any length since she was rediscovered. Not that it matters as they have to focus on the problems at hand, which is a fracture along the exterior of the ship that’s causing them to lose power and life support.
Forced problems are forced problems. There’s a lot of things happening quickly and difficult choices to make while providing for a lot of alien aspects of what’s going on, especially when she starts to craft a cocoon for Tom to reside in so they can survive the journey. There’s a lot of trust in what Tom has to do to go through this and LExi doesn’t exactly come across well with her personality as it gets intense, but you can see where she’s trying to go with it as well in the way she wants to correct the mistakes she’s made and truly take responsibility for it all. So her putting Tom out for the entirety of the mission doesn’t surprise at all and that we basically skip over, well, everything. When Tom wakes up from the cocoon, they’re back on Earth, the power core has been blown and the Espheni have run away from everything. Even more interesting is that the Espheni side of Lexi has been drained completely, essentially turning her human and normal.
Everything happens so fast and with so many changes that you keep waiting for the dream sequence to end.
So when the veil is finally pulled away, there’s no surprise at all with it. As Tom realized, it was all too pat and easy, though I wouldn’t be surprised if the producers actually took this route so as to cut short any big and expensive action sequences. With Tom inside the cocoon, he’s putting himself through all sorts of subconscious explorations of his issues, which is likely influenced by Lexi as well. with most of the primary cast questioning him, trying to get him to see that he’s gone too far in distrusting her, it’s a decent examination of internal issues with some obvious realizations, including how Tom never gave up on Ben after what he went through. There’s accusations against Tom as well for the way he wasn’t there for her and it all works through the kinds of things that help gets to the core of his problems with Lexi. The problem is that this season has been largely about LExi and she’s been a pretty uninteresting character overall, full of reworkings of so many familiar plot points from other series decades ago.
In Summary:
While the mission is the start of the episode, the bulk of it is about finding a way to get Tom to help Lexi to forgive herself for the things she’s done and to reconnect with her human family. There’s a lot of conflicts going within Lexi who hasn’t been close to humanity or her family there in a big way for a long time and that struggle is brought out in this kind of familiar way. Working through those issues is done in a plain and obvious way, though part of you wants it to be true because it’d at least advance the overall series and what events are going on. But in the end, the first half of the season finale is all about forgiveness and moving on from the mistakes that we’ve made. It’s honest and earnest from Tom’s perspective and you can see what it means to Lexi, but it keeps coming back to the same problem in that the entire Lexi storyline has largely been untinteresting and has had too much hinged on it to work well this season.
Grade: C-
This season was very disappointing to me, the Lexi storyline was very sloppy in my opinion, I hope the final season is better than this past one.