In 2011, TNT released Falling Skies, a sharply written and well-acted sci-fi series about a group of survivors struggling to restore humanity in the wake of an extraterrestrial invasion of Earth. Now in 2014, that same series has become a flat-out disaster that does nothing but disappoint faithful viewers who have followed it from the beginning.
As with numerous other shows that have made this same mistake, the failure of season four can be attributed to a change in direction from a new writer, which contradicts that of the original creator.
In season one, the show had a simple but direct premise made all the better by its interesting characters. Much like its zombie apocalypse cousin The Walking Dead, Falling Skies benefitted from focusing on how normal people would behave and interact with one another in a post-apocalyptic environment.
The show’s protagonist, Tom Mason (Noah Wyle), was a history teacher before the invasion and is the father of three boys. After his wife is killed early on in the war, his primary motivation for fighting the Espheni, the members of the alien race, is to protect his sons, Hal (Drew Roy), Ben (Connor Jessup) and Matt (Maxim Knight). Other key characters include Tom’s girlfriend, Anne Glass (Moon Bloodgood), his right-hand man Captain Weaver (Will Patton), and my personal favorite John Pope (Colin Cunningham), the group’s reckless gunslinger with no loyalties.
Early on, creator Robert Rodat, known for Saving Private Ryan, provided just enough elements of science fiction to make the series engaging, but always kept the focus on this group of people and how they developed over time. His successor, Remi Aubuchon, also did a nice job with this in seasons two and three, following the group members as they aligned themselves with an Espheni resistance to aid the humans in their fight for freedom.
However, the story elements introduced by Aubuchon ultimately paved the way for David Eick, the newest show-runner and Battlestar Galactica veteran, to ruin the series completely.
In the season four premiere, Eick threw out so many new elements that it made it nearly impossible for viewers to fully absorb it all. Several months after the group is ambushed, we see Matt in a human concentration camp of sorts where they are forced to recognize the Espheni as deities who are here to govern humanity in a just way.
We then turn to Ben, who wakes up from a coma in some part of Tokyo, where the humans there are brainwashed into thinking the Espheni are no longer a threat. Not only that, but they also treat Tom and Anne’s half human/half alien daughter, Lexi (Scarlett Byrne), as a god.
When Lexi’s character was initially introduced at the tail-end of season three, I thought the concept of her growing at an exponential rate and developing superhuman abilities was a dumb idea to begin with. It added an unnecessary element of the fantastical that further complicated the overarching narrative. Now, what Eick and the other writers have done with the Lexi storyline is just plain BS. The scenes with her feel more like a poorly executed version of Avatar: The Last Airbender than a subplot of Falling Skies.
And if that’s not enough, we learn early on in this season from Maison’s extra-terrestrial ally, Cochise (Doug Jones), that there is yet another alien race making its way into the human/Espheni war. The more story arcs Eick crams into the series, the less attention there is to its characters.
With the amount of clichés and over-the-top plot elements the show is currently suffering from, it’s almost a blessing that it will conclude next summer with its fifth and final season. Simply put, a change in creative direction and excess of new ideas has caused Falling Skies to lose the heart of what it was when it began.
