Episode Title: “Search and Recovery”
Writer: Jordan Rosenberg
Director: Sergio Mimica-Gezzan
Previously on “Falling Skies”:
“Falling Skies” is the Two-Face of television. Equal parts bad and good smashed together and it’s never clear which side is going to be dominant from week to week.
There are some terrific moments of drama scattered throughout this week’s episode, “Search and Recovery.” There are also some howlingly bad scenes, including an impromptu knife fight! It’s hard not to walk away with the feeling that the creative team behind this show just don’t understand what’s working and what isn’t. It’s not a coherent story as much as it’s a loosely assembled narrative in which pre-established personalities and common sense go out the proverbial window for the sake of some forced drama.
Full spoilers lie ahead for this week’s episode of “Falling Skies,” so skip this review if you aren’t up to date or else Pope will put a snake on your back.
Last week, the Espheni shot two planes out of the sky. One of the planes had President Benjamin Hathaway (Stephen Collins) and the Volm known as Cochise (Doug Jones) among their passengers. The other plane had Tom Mason (Noah Wyle), John Pope (Colin Cunningham) and Max Expendable, aka General Bressler (Matt Frewer). As predicted, Bressler didn’t make it out of the crash alive. From now on, whenever a pilot is fatally impaled during or after a crash, it should be called ‘Getting Wash-ed.”
Bressler was the obvious choice to die out of the trio, but his character was also the least developed. It was all but forgotten that Bressler was behind the massacre of the rebel Skitters in the second season finale. “Falling Skies” never dealt with the implications of that and it may never come up again.
It’s hard to argue with the way that Tom and Pope were brought together for this story. Putting two rivals into a desperate situation with each other is a classic trope that almost always works. The early part of the episode featured some great writing as Tom disclosed that his childhood was less than idyllic and Pope revealed that he accidentally killed a man in front of his son. Another fantastic moment came immediately after that story as Tom picked up a gun and Pope briefly freaked out as if he thought that Tom was going to attack him.
Unfortunately, that was soon followed by a series of WTF?! moments, beginning when Pope put a harmless snake on a sleeping Tom that quickly grew into a knife fight. It was wildly out of character for Tom to let it go so far, especially when he and Pope needed each other to survive. I liked the moment when Tom actually called Pope an a**hole. The scene could have ended right there, but it’s almost as if the creative team was afraid that the audience would get bored if Tom and Pope didn’t start punching each other.
After Tom and Pope escape from their Skitter pursuers, they once again fight each other and almost bring their rivalry to a fatal conclusion. Considering what they went through, that just felt silly. The chase through the forest was really exciting and one of the most effective Skitter portrayals in a long time. Seeing all of those Skitter legs climb the trees and jumping towards Tom and Pope made the aliens seem scary again.
It was refreshing that Tom didn’t emerge from his desperation dive without badly injuring his ankle. And although Tom’s angry words to Pope were over-the-top, it still seemed as if Tom was just trying to get Pope to leave him behind in order to give Pope a better shot at survival. Pope’s eventual return was predictable, but it was still a good moment. Later, Pope stays by Tom’s bedside for two days just to say that they are even and to maintain status quo between them. But if you truly hate someone, you generally don’t wait by their bedside for two days. Just sayin’…
Back in Charleston, everyone is now aware that Dr. Anne Glass (Moon Bloodgood) fled the city with her part alien baby. Although Vice President Marina Perlata (Gloria Reuben) tries to prevent a search for Anne, Captain Weaver (Will Patton) insists upon bringing a small rescue party out, including Ben Mason (Connor Jessup), Maggie (Sarah Sanguin Carter), Hal Mason (Drew Roy) and inexplicably, Matt Mason (Maxim Knight)… the worst character on this show. To reiterate what I said last week, if Knight can be as well spoken as he is on the aftershow, “2nd Watch,” then it’s the writers’ fault for giving Matt such a weak character.
Another big WTF moment occurs in this storyline when the rescue party comes across the body of a woman who resembles Anne… and Matt insists that they bury her! Because that’s more important than finding Anne or her alien baby?! The one aspect of that scene that nearly redeems it is that the assembled rescue party projects characteristics of their own mothers on to the woman that they are burying. That was pretty good, but it didn’t make that plot necessary in any way.
Eventually, the rescue party calls off the search for Anne in favor of getting info from the Rebel Skitters. So, the whole exercise was basically a waste of time. Regarding Hal, it’s not clear if Evil Hal is still in the driver’s seat of if his confused, human personality is back in control.
Getting back to Charleston, Perlata approached Dr. Roger Kadar (Robert Sean Leonard) about the machine that the alien Volm are building… because that’s not suspicious at all! I already had Perlata pegged as the mole in Charleston, so that wasn’t a huge surprise. I was more surprised when she let Kadar live after getting his analysis of the device… which he claims is wrong in a way that suggests that the Volm are hiding their agenda. Another reason that Perlata looks bad here is that she is barely interested to learn if any of the other babies have alien DNA in them.
One of the more intriguing ideas put forth in this episode is that Anne’s baby represents a new step in the Espheni conquest: alien and human hybrids. It’s not fully explored, but hopefully that’s a plotline that will be revisited in the remaining five episodes of the season.
If this episode was a cancer patient, I’d recommend cutting out the tumors and keeping the healthy tissue. But since this episode can only be judged as a whole, it’s only slightly above average.
