TV Review: Falling Skies Season IV Revisited

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Falling Skies has again come to a close with their season four finale, Shoot the Moon. Looking back on the season I find that it’s been a hard road to continue to be engaged with the series in the same way that we were during the amazing first two seasons.

It’s fallen into the same refrain that’s been the bane of global catastrophe television series since War of the Worlds. Earth is thrashed to the point of restoration of civilization is pretty much an imaginary fantasy at best, and the antagonist/aliens are beaten back to the point that they can’t win, and can’t really leave. So the stalemate rolls along. If a resolution happens where everything turns out roses it’s a cop out, and as of yet there hasn’t been a series brave enough to finish off the humans entirely. So we plod along, trying to keep track of which aliens are fighting which and who had most recently betrayed the 2^nd Massachusetts.

Rather than working on keeping some handle on the larger picture of the ruined world, the opening episodes effectively detached the characters from the army and settled into following along the soap opera of the Mason family.

When we first stumbled across Falling Skies early in it’s first season, it was a wonderful and exciting series. Rather a breath of fresh air and a great roller coaster. Following not entirely differing threads from Walking Dead, which also started out as a series not to be missed. Both series regrettably wound up following down the same untenable paths (including some parallels including the entirety of the mad Governor/Woodbury and President/Charleston storylines).

A shout out has to be made to the wonderful work done by Doug Jones in the role of the Volm commander Cochise.  Written with a greater breadth than most of the other characters, it’s regrettable that his own storylines have always remained only explored insomuch as it applies directly to Tom.

The latest season finale took more than a page or two from Independence Day. At least there was a pilot and a cockpit for the return flight in ID4, now Tom had to blindly pull at the alien ship’s wiring in order to return to Earth.

Now we wait for the final 10 episodes to see if we’ll step back to worrying about the rest of humanity, or if it’ll resign itself to go out with a whimper while remaining focused solely on the dozen or so characters that have become the extent of the scope.

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