fallingskies501

Review: Falling Skies Season 5 Premiere – Find Your Tom Mason

By: Robert Prentice
Falling Skies

Recap

At the end of season 4 the 2nd mass had destroyed the power core on the moon. However, there were losses in order to obtain that win, including Lexi and a now lost in space Tom Mason who has met our mysterious third race of aliens that both the Espheni and Volm fear.

The season begins with the obligatory Tom Mason lost scene but this time he is hallucinating his wife (who is dead) and their home, as the alien speaks to him in his head. Then the room floods and we find Tom on a beach, crawling out of the water from a crashed alien ship. Tom was back on earth.

Back at the 2nd mass, Anne takes a leadership role and does a speech explaining the mass exodus of Espheni ships after the fall of their power core, but the fight isn’t over. As far as the 2nd mass is concerned, Tom is dead, along with Lexi. Tom starts his long walk back to the 2nd mass and runs into a flying skitter and lets his rage on killing and beheading the beast. Just as he reaches the 2nd mass he meets Pope (again) who finds it a bit ridiculous that Tom has yet again survived.

Anne and his family are pleased to see him and Anne goes through the motions of checking Tom for any types of trackers or eye worms as he explains his experience with the third alien race. In a speech to the 2nd mass Tom calls for everyone to find their rage, the find their warrior and take the fight to the aliens with every bit of hate they have.

The tensions between Hal and Ben are still evident and Hal tells Ben the bad news that Maggie is going with him and not with Ben on the next mission. So much for sticking together Hal. In the forest they run into skitters, large numbers of them that seem to be starving and acting far more unorganized and aggressive then usual.

Tom’s vision of a former presidents bust in his home lead him to go to a school nearby where they felt an overlord might be hiding. They ran into an ambush of skitters and Denny was killed in the process. Anthony witnessed it and let his rage out on the rest of the skitters. Down in the basement Tom finds Ben under the control of an overlord who tells Tom that he is unarmed and unafraid of him. Tom wastes no time shooting and killing the overlord.

Review

Falling Skies has started its fifth and final season with some of the feeling it had in season 1 and 2, with the 2nd mass on the defense. With the power grid down and the Espheni without a power source, many of the overlords are scattered and stunned at the moment unable to gather the overwhelming force they once did. The skitters are starving and have reverted to a feral state going after whatever they can find. Tom’s new alien friends have given him at least 1 vision which has proven to help find an overlord who was in hiding but we still have to wonder just what their end game is. Whose side are they really one and why are there here only now so many years after the war and invasion on earth began.

The love triangle story has shifted a bit as Ben attempts to distance himself from Maggie only to find his brother still being a bit hypocritical with him when it comes to ‘sticking together’. Apparently sticking together means Hal and Maggie on team A and Ben on team B.

Tom Mason, or Where’s Waldo, has yet again found his way back. It must be a running joke that at the start of each season Tom is lost and then finds his way back. I would say its getting old and has to stop but this is the final season so we won’t be seeing that again. In season 2 Tom tried to convince an angry Ben who was going down a dark path that Hate was not the answer, and now Tom is preaching hate and rage. Perhaps that is with good cause considering everything they have gone through so far, but its a bit out of character for Tom.

The 2nd mass is back to basics, bringing the ground fight back to the aliens as much as possible. We got skitter action and overlord scenes in the premiere which in previous years they didn’t spend the budget on showing both as much as they did this time. We setup the story for season 5 with the new alien race running Tom’s decisions and ended the episode with a bug of some  kind which will end up playing a role down the road. We also made more use of the Volm’s tech to find and destroy Espheni tech. This episode was not light on action, and its good that the season started hitting the ground running.

I do find issue with the easy at which the 2nd mass was able to kill the group of skitters that surrounded them with standard weapons. Back in seasons 1 and 2, a skitter had to be killed with a knife to the throat and upclose. It took several people to kill 1 and now suddenly they can kill them with standard weapons? At the school they suddenly go back to Volm weapons. I guess to be fair they were not expecting a fight the last time but still.

After Denny’s death, Maggie is the only other spike bearing person around Ben anymore. However, she has no real understanding of the horror Ben went through being harnessed and that he has nobody left who understands that. The basement scene continues an ongoing issue I have with Falling Skies and the back and forth they go through with the mythology behind the the harnesses and the Espheni. Tom’s threat against the overlord only giving Ben a headache points out another flaw that the writers missed after a scene from season 4 in which Ben was hurt any time the overlord was hurt. I explore that in the link below.

The shows shortcomings that resulted from a yearly change in show runners has begun to show. To be fair it began to show back in season 3 but the ripple effect of that is most evident in this premiere. I still love the show and always will but as we begin the final season, there are some story plots that were started in season 1 and 2 that need to be addressed in the final season. Check out our retrospective on Falling Skies: The Shift Away From The Mythology.

Questions going into season 5

The premiere did give us a few questions going into the season that we hope can be answered. Overall I would give the premiere a 3/5. It setup everything like you would expect, without any major revelations or shocking moments. The death of Denny was rather muted overall, without so much as a speech or a whole lot of emotion from Ben. Time will tell how things progress through the season. The short 17 second previews they have been releasing clearly show a lot scenes we didn’t see tonight so they are later in the season but the image below has us wondering if the writers and show runner finally grew a pair and might actually kill off a major character. With Ben, Hal and Anne lined up for the firing squad, who will survive? It is clear both Ben and Hal have been roughed up as well.

Screen Shot 2015-06-27 at 9.08.50 AM

Who is this new alien race and what is their end game?

Will the Volm help in this fight or is Cochise on his own?

What is the bug that stings Tom at the end of the episode?

Will we learn anything more about the harness effects and why Ben was so different?

Will Ben, without Denny and distancing himself from Maggie feel isolated again?

 

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