* There could be some spoilers contained within and Volm and Espheni and maybe even a Skitter-ised Partridge in a Pear Tree*
Taking a line from an Emily Dickinson poem that muses on the fragile nature of hope, as both its title and inspiration, this week’s episode of Falling Skies, “A Thing With Feathers”, dealt with the messy aftermath of last week’s Espheni attack on the 2nd Mass., which left many of the more anonymous members dead, and the familiar faces sheltering underground or trapped in the rubble.
It was a slightly odd episode that pirouetted between the sort of schmaltzy Spielberg-ian fare of seasons past where there was nothing that couldn’t be solved by some alien tech (in this case the Volm’s; although Cochise did was give advice with barely a gadget to be seen) and the rougher, grittier fare of this season where the reality is that people die, the aliens often win and humanity feels like it’s on the losing end of history.
There’s nothing wrong with balancing darkness and light in any show of course.
Too much darkness and viewers wonder why they are putting themselves through the sort of masochistic, nihilistic hell when real life does a pretty good job at that on a day to day basis just outside their doors; too little and the apocalypse can simply seem like bad day at the office and not a life and death struggle for humanity’s soul.
By and large, Falling Skies has found that balance this season, giving us the sort of dark-as-hell storylines you’d expect if aliens came romping in to the atmosphere and shot the planet to bits, while leavening them with the sort of hope and inspiration you’d need to survive a galactically-sourced end of the world.
It’s not that “A Thing Called Feathers” veered wildly off this carefully-calibrated course this week, with both writer Ryan Mottesheard and director David Solomon keeping things both celebrational and hopeful – though seriously 2nd Mass., what is with all the loud parties, yelling and fires all the time? In your case the neighbours don’t just complain, they blow you to kingdom come – and yet laced with grim possibility (Would Maggie (Sarah Carter) or Ben (Connor Jessup) die? Would Tom (Noah Wylie) and Dingaan (Trev Etienne) escape the rubble? What will Lexi’s (Scarlett Byrne) training lead to?).
But there were times when the ease with which Maggie was healed and Tom found a way into the Beamer that it all seemed a tad too easy, too apt to use the narrative equivalent of “Get out of Jail free” card, and the apocalypse seemed just a little more manageable in a way that shows like The Walking Dead and Defiance wouldn’t necessarily countenance.
Still, for the most part, the choices that the major characters faced were reasonably grim and challenging, and drew out some insights into what makes them tick too.
Way down below street level, Tom was trapped in the sort of claustrophobic narrow tunnels of rubble that would put most people into therapy for months.
Unfortunately therapists are rather thin on the ground, as are rescue personnel – although Matt (Maxim Knight) and Weaver (Will Patton) did a rather sterling job of digging through the debris of the Espheni attack, and in Matt’s case decking Pope (Colin Cunningham) when he rather prat-ishly suggested that no one survived the attack – so Tom did what he needed to do and found a way out of his tomb of blown-up buildings, in the course of which he came across Dingaan caught under an almighty big slab of concrete.
Quite frankly how it didn’t squash him like some roadkill by the side of the interstate I will never know, since he leapt out from under it, with Tom’s help, like a gazelle escaping a snapping crocodile in a National Geographic wildlife documentary.
This lucky escape though didn’t do much to improve Dingaan’s frame of mind which vacillated wildly between “Let’s get the hell out here now!” to “We’re going to die! We’re all going to die!”, with the latter mindset mostly prevailing.
It’s all very understandable since the man has been through a lot – he shared the real story of how his wife and son died while he and Tom were trapped down below; suffice to say it didn’t involve the Espheni raining on his domestic happy-ever-after bliss as he’d previously told Tom – but it did make it a tad hard for the two men to find a way out.
Tom for the most part kept his cool, only losing it when Dingaan’s parlous state of mind threatened to make finding a way back to the survivors on the surface a thousand different kinds of challenging, prompting the Indestructible Mason to make it clear to Dingaan that the hope he held onto was fictitious at best but that if he didn’t hang onto it, all was lost.
It was the first time we’d heard Tom admit the hope he kept spruiking to others was based on a wish and a prayer more than anything else, but it makes sense since the Espheni seem to keep finding a way to keep the upper hand.
Back up top, a paralysed from the neck down Maggie was found in the rubble by Hal (Drew Roy), who spent his time searching for the woman with whom he is about to be in a love triangle with brother Ben (Keeping Up With the Masons could be a catchy Kardashians-esque spinoff), at the top of his lungs – apparently the Espheni in the area were having a day off or had been deafened by the explosions of the day before – and was immediately carried back to get some doctor-ly attention from Anne (Moon Bloodgood) who, despite everything, is convinced crazy hybrid Lexi is still good deep down.
Anne’s mushroom-induced hallucinatory delusions aside – are you sure there are no therapists left alive anywhere? Anne needs one BAD – Maggie was pretty much a goner and Hal was crying like a baby when someone wondered, as they are wont to do in Falling Skies, whether the Volm or the spikes on Ben or Denny (Megan Danso) could be transplanted onto Maggie and voila, she would be walking, and dancing again like there was no tomorrow (which as Tom finally admitted there may not be; way to be a downer Tom).
While the operations were by no means a slam dunk and there was a real possibility Maggie could die, it was all a little bit too easy, with Cochise popping up, like a demented Google doctor, to offer advice and one, count ’em, one paltry device to aid in removing and transferring the spikes.
Still there was enough tension involved to make more than watchable, and the scenes gave a chance for the snarking between Ben and Hal to begin in earnest, which hopefully won’t be a distraction what with weird blue lights shining from the moon, Lexi thinking that transforming humanity into mindless mudcaked drones is the best thing since Espheni-sliced bread, and humanity not exactly in an victorious overcoming position.
Oh, and Pope – whose character is being pulled back and forth between nobility of spirit, and redneck stupidity in such a way that he risks looks like he’s schizophrenic – and Sarah (Mira Sorvino) FINALLY kissed in one of the more tender, heartfelt scenes of the episode where Bennett was buried and Sarah admitted she found the battle all a little too much, even if it did remind her that looking after No. 1 isn’t as satisfying as being part of a team.
Judging by the way “A Thing With Feathers” ended, this episode was the calm before the inevitable storm of the final four episodes with things looking suitably ominous for the 2nd Mass., both within and without.
Behold the trailer for next week’s unsettlingly-titled episode “Till Death Us Do Part” …