Check out our interview with Connor Jessup about the rest of the season
Recap
The 2nd mass finds a military base on their way to DC and it turns out the person running it is an old flame of Weaver’s, Capt Marshall. The base has everything they could need to take the fight to the Espheni in D.C. including armed vehicles, weapons and dozens of trained soldiers. As everyone settles in, Tom quickly starts to explain what they need in order to take the fight to the enemy but it doesn’t seem like the military are all that interested in going out there to fight.
Weaver catches up with his old flame learning that they recently took on enemy fire a few weeks ago while on patrol and lost some men. She also talked about having to find and deal with human collaborators. As Tom and Hal showed them the maps from the Volm, they all seemed a bit shocked and concerned that Tom and the 2nd mass were working with aliens. While getting their first good meal in awhile Maggie and Hal have their first real conversation and it doesn’t go very well. Clearly Maggie knows that Isabella is a threat and she also feels she made a lot of mistakes herself but neither of them are backing down.
At the end of the night several soldiers sit down to drink with Hal, Isabella, Maggie and Ben and the soldiers seem very interested in Ben’s spikes, even wanting to feel them. Ben allows it and fakes them out when he touches it. The solider gives him the nickname Superfreak, though I have to admit the attempt seemed more liking a fishing expedition then friendly curiosity. Later 3 soldiers find Ben in the locker room and ask that he come with them, guns drawn. Ben knows something isn’t right and refuses to go with them. He easily breaks their weapons and tosses two of them into the mirror and lockers. However someone comes up from behind him and tases him, it was the solider who called him Superfreak.
Hal and Tom talk with the Lt Wolf confused as to why all he is doing is listening and not communicating with all the militia groups out there. He explains that he is under orders to listen only and determine if any of the groups are compromised by the Espheni, which as Hal pointed out is a little paranoid. Weaver decides to have breakfast with the Captain, as they revisit old times. Anne continues to be helpful in the infirmary helping a solider with an infection.
Ben is then seen strapped down to a gurney and the ‘super freak’ solider grabs him by the hair and starts to interrogate him. Apparently he is under orders to extract intel out of Ben, as they feel he is an Espheni spy. Of course Ben doesn’t have anything to say and tries to explain he is able to control his spikes but the solider doesn’t care. Capt Marshall approaches Tom asking why he is giving orders to her men. Tom wants to know why they are not contacting other militias and that they are all supposed to be on the same side. However she seems dead set on focusing on human collaborators and not major offensives.
Back to Ben being interrogated, it quickly escalates to torture as the solider uses a pair of pliers to forcibly remove one of Bens spikes. Ben screams out in pain as its yanked out and goes into a seizure. The spike decides to attach the solider who then steps on it and kills it. As soon as the spike was killed, Ben blacks out. Tom finds out Ben hasn’t been seen since last night and starts to raise hell asking where he is and the solider refuse to tell him. He ends up getting himself arrested and then all of the 2nd mass ends up getting rounded up. Matt manages to stay hidden while Weaver goes to Capt Marshall asking what the hell is going on.
She has an entire investigation on them and feels that Tom’s story of flying to the moon and the fact that Ben has spikes that they are all collaborators and she is setting up a court-martial to determine the truth. Weaver finds Matt and helps him disguise himself as a solider to escape the base and get to Cochise and Dingaan for help. Isabella is nearly assaulted by the same ass-hat who tortured Ben, but Maggie arrives in time to kick his ass. Maggie says they should stick together and says the issues with Hal were her and his mistakes not hers.
The court-martial begins and Ben is dragged in barely able to walk or think straight, and Tom and Weaver both find out he was tortured. Weaver is shocked and Tom is pissed but she continues to move forward with the trial. She went through each and every case in which Tom was captured and found his way back without explanation and she just can’t believe any of its true. When Tom begins to berate her about the entire thing being a farce she stares out into nothing and her wound begins to bleed again and she closes the file on Tom, Ben and Hal and declares them traitors and charges them with Treason. The sentence of which is death.
Review
This episode had a lot more substance then the last but the overall plot hasn’t moved a lot with it either. However, I do feel that they setup a great cliffhanger and a possible death that would lead to an interesting final 3 episodes. This episode was about treason and traitors and while we have seen human collaborators in the past, this was a bit different. In season 1 it was humans capturing kids for the skitters. In season 2 it was rounding up the 2nd mass because nobody trusted them, especially not Ben when he came back with a group of rebel skitters. This time, the show was willing to go to that darker place and we are happy about that.
So we have had squirmy scenes before be it eye worms or harness factories or human-skitter hybrids but this time we went with old fashion torture . But wait a minute, not just torture, we have a solider kidnapping and torturing a 15(16ish) year old kid! Yep thats right, Falling Skies showed us on screen a solider kidnapping and torturing a kid on screen. Granted we all think of Ben as an adult now and a fighting solider but he is only 15-16 years old and watching the spike fight back as he screamed was a squirmy scene. We think its worse than the eye worms because its a 16 year old kid being tortured, which makes it even more uncomfortable to watch. However, as we approach the end of the series, we have to get serious and dark and I am glad they went there. We spoke with Connor Jessup, who plays Ben Mason, about this episode and the next 2 episodes which are large arcs for Ben’s character as he puts his life on the line in more than 1 way. In fact, as shown below we will see Ben, Anne and Hal lined up in front of a firing squad, for reasons we only partially now so far. Why Tom isn’t in that line up but Anne is, is a question we won’t find out until next week.
Capt Marshall clearly isn’t in her right mind. The clues were laid out for us fairly obviously in several areas when they focused on the wound on her neck. In fact, the foreshadowing is more of dropping a moon on us then dropping a clue. Every time Tom questions her or she is put in a tough spot it bleeds and she zones out. Something happen when her and her team were ambushed several weeks ago and my guess from the Overlord shown at the end of the episode is that she is under the influence of the overlord. And my guess is he has a very simple goal: Use the humans to kill Tom Mason and Ben Mason, the two biggest threats to the Espheni.
I don’t even know the name of the ‘super freak’ solider and I don’t want to remember it, one of the issues with bringing in so many new characters this late in the game is you have no time to get invested. And honestly I expect them to die soon anyways once Tom gets his hands on him for torturing his son Ben. The Dingaan and Cochise scenes would have been better in the previous episode. They felt extremely out of place and out of pace with the rest of the episode and just didn’t fit the suspense they were trying to go for at the base.
Also I can’t be the only person who felt annoyed at Maggie’s lack of response to hearing about Ben’s torture. The ‘super freak’ solider who was attacking Isabella boasts to Maggie about pulling a spike out of Ben as he screamed and while it caught her off guard she didn’t bother to question the guy where Ben was or to go after him. I get she was trying to keep her distance with Ben after everything that happen but seriously? I don’t know if it was just lazy writing and they didn’t want to get into it and she did go to look for him or was it intentional as she is only looking out for herself now.
Check out our interview with Connor Jessup about the rest of the season
