* Watch out there are spoilers! And aliens … don’t forget the aliens *
After re-imagining, re-booting and all but completely re-tooling itself in the season 4 opener “Ghost in the Machine”, Falling Skies went on in episode 2 “The Eye” with all the gritty, dirty (literally in the case of Tom and his ghetto cohorts; clearly the Espheni are not big on their prisoners having access to washing machines … or food for that matter) grim determination it could muster, reminding us once again that humanity is under the thumb of its would-be alien overlords.
Of course if you’re Matt Mason (Maxim Knight), trapped in the grimly white and khaki sterility of the Espheni re-education camp, with a team leader (Dakota Daulby) that resembles Rolfe from The Sound of Music, both in personality and dogged adherence to the collaborationist cause, you could be forgiven for thinking that Earth’s inhabitants had already lost the fight so overwhelming is the insidiously smooth triumphalist propaganda he and his fellow teenage captives, um, students, are forced to memorise and regurgitate.
Matt, of course, being a Mason is simply going through the motions as is his new girlfriend of sorts, Mira (Desiree Ross) and two of his classmates, one of whom though disappears in mysterious circumstances this week, the only evidence he was ever there a faded note under his dorm bed.
While Mira manages to escape the dorm and thus scrutiny in the nick of time, Matt is not so lucky with their freakily composed Aryan team leader Kent making it clear, ever so obliquely and in weasel words worthy of Goebbels and the Nazi elite, that the youngest Mason boy has “potential” and that “I’m keeping my eye on you.”
Shiver and shudder with revulsion Matt and then run!
Or you could wait for Cochise and his team to rescue you who are handily close by, and at Tom’s request – thanks to the magic of a shortwave radio set that newly-made ghetto friend Dingaan Botha (Treva Etienne) has stashed away – zeroing in on the creepy camp which is using brainwashing techniques instead of the hatefully physically invasive harnesses of old.
However chilling their new techniques are – and we found out this week they include a plan to send out brainwashed “graduated” teenagers to find their insurgent parents, “join” the rebel cause and then dob them into their new “Fishhead” friends, in order to “save” them – they are look reasonably sane to the hippie-chickie wackos populating Lexi’s Compound o’ Peace and Mech-Free Harmony out in yonder leafy Chinatown.
To be fair, the real power behind the throne is Lourdes (Seychelle Gabriel) who is proving to be that rare individual who is even wackier without alien motes scrambling her brain than she is with them.
She even managed to source a long flowing rainbow-coloured robe from somewhere – Apocalyptic Cult Supplies R Us perhaps? You should see this season’s enslavement wear, they’re to lose your mind for – standing like some sort of demented toll collector, controlling who could and couldn’t enter to Lexi (Scarlett Byrne), who’s proving to have a rather kinetically-energetic predisposition to temper tantrums, holding court.
Lourdes hasn’t simply drunk the Kool-Aid, she got it on an intravenous drip going in by the giga-gallon, classing everyone not in favour of chugga-lugging it down as “non-believers”, a screwed up mindset that Ben is determined won’t get in the way of getting close to his sister who Dr Kadar (Robert Sean Leonard) says is dying thanks to her rapid, unnatural growth.
Kadar naturally is in awe of the hybrid model that Lexi represents, marvelling at the miracle of nature taking 1 and 1 and getting 3 – clearly nature’s math isn’t what it used to be post-invasion – and while the blood sample he finally gets from Lexi via Ben is destroyed during a cat fight with Lourdes before it can even be analysed, it is in his hands long enough for him to note how frantically and boisterously alive it is in the test tube, almost like it’s boiling, a sign that Lexi ain’t a normal young lady.
But we knew that already didn’t we?
That ain’t the most unsettling thing though as Ben discovered when, stalking, I mean keeping an eye on his sister, he saw her having a lovely “Kumbaya” sit down chat with an Espheni overlord out in the gardens, confirming that some sort of deal has been done and not the kind that is likely to be nailed to the village noticeboard so all can see.
Quite whether she’s a turncoat isn’t made clear but it’s an unsettling, if not wholly unexpected, development no matter how you slice it.
What both Matt’s cosy brainwashing summer camp and Lexi’s cult o’ love and mung beans have in common is the new dark as the pit of the abyss sensibility that Falling Skies has embraced with so much gusto this season.
Gone is the idea that humanity is all on the same page, that the war can be won by fiercely united determination and grit, and that given enough time the aliens will be seen off.
What we have instead is exactly what has happened in countless wars down the millennia but most particularly in World War Two, which is a splintering of loyalties and allegiances, a divide-and-conquer mentality by the invader that takes into account that not all members of the conquered peoples will stay strong under pressure, that some will place craven self-interest ahead of the greater good.
We have seen snippets of it in the past but this is the first time that Falling Skies has stopped being a PR machine for an idealised version of humanity – Pope (Colin Cunningham), selfish though he is still fell into line fairly easily with the resistance cause – and is instead telling it like it is.
Under pressure, humanity splinters into all sorts of grubby and noble pieces, meaning that the war just got a million times more complicated, its victory that little bit more difficult to obtain since the good people of the insurgency aren’t just fighting the Espheni now, they’re having to effectively fight each other too, which is of course what the Espheni want and why they’ve switched tactics like they have.
It doesn’t make the war impossible to win as the Allies demonstrated in World War Two – though humanity brings nothing like that kind of power and military might to the table – but it does make it way more difficult, and out of such adversity does great drama come.
Drama like the kind that consumed both Tom Mason (Noah Wylie) and Anne Bloodgood this week in their respective spheres.
While Anne essentially spent her time demonstrating why she is the Worst Leader Ever, running her troops into the ground with exhaustion and starvation and killing Skitters before they can fully explain why Lexi the hybrid, who resides “in the West”, freaks them out so, Tom was in full swing as the Ghost, the headcloth-swathed motorcycling-riding Robin Hood of the Espheni ghetto.
His Scarlet Pimpernel routine whereby he’d dash out of solitary confinement, stick it to the Espheni, stand up for the poor and dispossessed (which is everyone now) and do some “Where in the world is Wally … I mean … the Skitters?” spying before going back into his room was kind of ruined when the Espheni released everyone from the prison block, threw them out into the ghetto and threatened them all with oblivion if they didn’t give up the Ghost.
As Tom sagely noted “something has changed” but what wasn’t made clear till he got himself spirited up into Giant Crustacean-Shaped Dirigible to get a bird’s eye view of the camp while the ghetto inmates below staged a mock revolt, exposing where the Skitters were running out from every time anyone so much as sneezed an anti-Esphei slogan.
Mission accomplished in that regard but it was what Tom heard while he was up there that really put the narrative cat among the pigeons as the Espheni Overlord announced they would begin “transforming” chosen members of the human race, the best and the brightest adults, into free will-stripped compliant members of the new so-called Human/Espheni Coalition.
Anyone who didn’t drink this particular flavour of compliant Cool-Aid would find themselves serving the Espheni, rather ominously, in a “less conscious form”, with Tom’s family being among them if he didn’t cooperate in some way.
Such extreme measures were necessitated apparently by a fearful new enemy that even the Espheni fear, a force so vast and powerful that it had sent this seemingly invincible alien power on the run across the galaxy, stripping planets and moons of all their resources, including the sentient beings unlucky enough to be in the way, in order to be able to defend themselves in some form.
Humanity is just the latest in a long line of people and planets unfortunate to be ground up in the Espheni war machine.
What was interesting was the extra shading it gave mankind’s invading enemy, the sense that for all their power and might, that there is even something they fear (not that it makes anything any better for us; in fact, it all just got much worse assuming what the Espheni say is true of course).
So in one short conversation, we discovered that the Espheni are eschewing blitzkrieg and genocide in favour of propaganda and genetic manipulation to create a freewill-starved slave race all so they can have the Earth all nice and ready to face off against an even more fearsome enemy.
The war just got really real y’all, which is frankly how it should have been all along.
It’s encouraging that Falling Skies finally got the memo and are employing all the classic tropes of war in their storytelling, reminding us all that conflict, be it alien or human-derived, is a messy, complicated, nasty business in which there are plenty of greys and very little in the way of black and whites.
Humanity is in a whole lot of shit up to their necks and digging its way is going to be the stuff of the sort of gritty, compelling drama that has made, and is making, shows like Battlestar Galactica and The Walking Dead, such unmissable viewing.
Keep up this new realpolitik, war is a god forsaken hellhole of fractured loyalties and one step forward, eight steps back sensibility Falling Skies, and you might just have a chance of joining their ranks.
*Here’s the promo for next week’s episode “Exodus” …