‘Falling Skies’ Started Slow and Picked Up Speed [Review]

I’ve been watching the show Falling Skies since it started early this summer and while it was derivative and formulaic there was enough going on to make it worth watching.

Every week I watched Falling Skies and every week I planned to write a review. Never happened. Finally the season is over so I’m going to give a review of the entire season: Good in spots, but nothing exciting.

Here’s the basic synopsis from Wikipedia:

Falling Skies is an American science fiction dramatic television series created and produced by Robert Rodat and Steven Spielberg.

The series picks up six months into a world devastated by an alien invasion. Tom Mason, a former Boston University history professor, becomes the second-in-command of the 2nd Massachusetts Militia Regiment, a group of civilians and fighters fleeing the destroyed post-invasion.

The aliens were interesting, but never scary. The characters were well-rounded, but never engaging. The plots were original, but rarely exciting.

The struggles between the military regimen being forced to “baby-sit” a group of civilians (“eaters” they called them) led to interesting storylines as they clashed. In one memoreable scene a family tries to leave the group stealing all the medication at gunpoint.

It was just an OK show. About the only thing that made the show worth watching was the subplot of the “harnessed” or mechanically enslaved children. Other than that it was pretty much every post-alien invasion show ever made. Thankfully, that subplot was gripping since I can only imagine what I would go through as a father.

Seeing the fathers stuggle with seeing the aliens forcing the children to do manual labor, attack the base and even communicate messages from the aliens made for some chilling scenes. When they started using surgery to remove the harnesses I literally held my breath that the children would survive. When Tom got his son Ben (Connor Jessup) back it was a huge relief.

Whenever they left that story and went into battle plans and mutinies, recon missions and survivalism it got boring.

Noah Wyle did an OK job as the lead, but its hard to make a history teacher interesting even with a “Most Interesting Man in the World” beard.

Moon Bloodgold, who played Dr. Anne Glass, was the best actor on the show. Unfortunately, she was stuck putting on Band-Aids for most of the season. The other actors never really caught my attention with the exception of Rick, the harnessed kid who was sympathetic to the aliens.

The season finale were the only episodes I could recommend watching and it had a great cliff-hanger for next season. Too bad the rest of the show was so weak.

See you next season Falling Skies.

Did you see the show? What did you think?

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