Falling Skies Shows Why Drugs Are Bad

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The two-hour season finale of Falling Skies was made up of two episodes, “Mutiny” and “Eight Hours.” They both work as stand alone episodes, but because they deal with preparing for a massive attack on the aliens’ home base, they’re best seen back-to-back. The first hour, “Mutiny” has almost nothing to do with the aliens (in fact we see none whatsoever), instead focusing on the relationship between Tom and Weaver.

After last week revealed cracks in Weaver’s ability to lead, this week straight up smashed it to pieces. We get a kind of meh explanation that he’s been taking uppers and downers for weeks and they were likely the cause for his suicidal trip. It’s a pretty straightforward tale. Tom has to step in and show Weaver he’s not fit for command, although he does it in a way that brings Weaver back to the land of the sane. Because all of this just sort of happened with no real build-up throughout the season, it feels a little off. It works for the episode, but for the series… I don’t know. It’s off; let’s just leave it at that.

For the second hour, “Eight Hours,” we get a much more interesting story. After such a long build up, we finally get some pay off with Rick’s “I HEART SKITTERS” attitude, and there’s a surprising outcome to it. The little harnessed girl Rick found in the forest was freaking creepy. The way her skin was turning into Skitter hide was just perfectly off-putting. I actually felt bad for Rick. The aliens just used Rick for information and then left him behind, which makes me think the tall silver aliens are lying to Tom when they tell him they plan to take Ben back.

In terms of action, we got a butt -ton of mechs and a great shot of the alien structure as ships fly in for docking (and one of them exploding, courtesy of Tom’s rocket launcher). But as cool as all that was, I was hoping for a bigger showdown for the season finale. This is a war, after all, yet when the mechs showed up at the school there was just a brief firefight and then they were driven back by the jammed radio wave. I couldn’t help but want more.

As we go in to Season 2, there are a lot of cool directions the show could go from here. I’m interested in learning more about the tall silver aliens and what they want from the freshly abducted Tom. Will Hal ever rescue Karen? This has been a fun show, if at times veering to the sappy side. The mythology has been intriguing. Some characters were handled poorly at first, but Falling Skies has fixed some of those character problems, or at least tried to. When Season 2 starts up next summer, I’ll be here happily waiting to see what happens to the 2^nd Massachusetts.