FALLING SKIES 1.01 & 1.02 — REVIEW

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Seriable’s Robert L. reviews the Falling Skies premiere “Live & Learn” and “The Armory”

When we sat down with my father-in-law and his family for a special Father’s Day dinner, I quickly let everyone know that we needed to get home by nine o’clock.

“For what?” he asked. “To watch Falling Skies?”

“You saw right through me on that one,” I sheepishly admitted.

He then proceeded to show me his iPhone and how watching the show was in his schedule. I’ve never known him to be excited about a TV show, but soon we were sitting through the last agonizing minutes of Transformers on TNT anxiously eying the countdown clock.

That’s when it dawned on me: there are so many high expectations for this show, how could it live up to them?

Those of you who watched the live broadcast on TNT will already know about the Falling Skies promos airing about once every other commercial break for the next segment. Viewer-retention is everything for a serialized show such as this, and they didn’t want to lose anyone. I think a lot of it was also wanting to keep the excitement going throughout the commercials, prompting people to watch it live, versus letting the DVR sit, enabling them to fast-forward through commercials.

But enough about the show’s marketing, the question everyone wants to know (and will ultimately have to decide for themselves) is on how well it delivered.

This review will be divided into two parts, just as the premiere was.

PART ONE – LIVE AND LEARN

I’d argue that Falling Skies was exactly what it was advertised to be. The only people who I’d expect to come out of this disappointed are those who were expecting something a little closer along the lines of The Walking Dead, since the two shows have been compared endlessly over the wait for this premiere.

The first scene opens with a bunch of hand-drawn pictures and a child narrating everything that had happened up to that point (regarding the alien invasion). This was a fun tool for the show to utilize, plucking away at an emotional string instantaneously, but it suffers the inevitable stiltedness of dialogue-based exposition. If I had been writing it, I probably would have opted for a more visual prologue like we had in Game of Thrones or a dream sequence like we had in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Even if they only had the promo footage to work with, it would have been nice to see something.

This is a minor qualm as we get to the action soon enough. This show still does a smart, bold thing – they’ve dropped us in the middle of an already established world, skipping over the slow world-building exposition and storytelling that destroyed shows like V.

The opening rag-tag combat seemed reminiscent of something one might see in an old Terminator movie. This is good, it puts the tension there within the first couple of minutes, which we’ve been sorely missing in TV shows.

We’re given a lot to absorb right at first, and the show never lets up. It’s undeniably smart writing. They do it with minimal dialogue, they don’t just say things outright (for example, in part two of this premiere, we’re lead to believe that the commanding officer may have had some kids of his own before the invasion), and they’re able to condense it down into a one-hour-minus-commercial-breaks format.

I’m also extremely grateful that the writers of Falling Skies have proven that a hero’s teenage son can be rebellious without being unbearably annoying (V‘s Tyler anyone?).

The spinal “harnesses” are a nice take on the classic mind-controlling head caps (or more recently, mind-controlling computer chips). Taking them off so far has meant death for the wearer, which adds further tension. They’re still a little foggy about the whole ordeal, but the promo for next week’s episode seems to be indicative that the harnesses will be the primary focus.

Speaking of focus, the big “set piece” of the pilot was the scene in the warehouse. It was suspenseful in all the right ways. They didn’t drag it out, play silly music, make the aliens hide and then pop out in ridiculous places after listening to twenty minutes of building string-instruments. They had fast action, with a fair amount of surprises. That’s how I like it done.

I might also add that while most of the music doesn’t bring anything new to the arena, the pieces invoking a piano are truly great. They’ve managed to find a winner for this one.

There’s a lot of hand-held cinematography, which is to be expected from the genre. There weren’t any apparent zooms, and no graininess. Surprisingly, that they seem to have run the images through a filter to make it appear softer (even my wife commented that the commercials they were playing had a better image quality than what we were getting in the episode itself).

PART TWO – THE ARMORY

Because the pilot episode was shot nearly a year before they made any further episodes, I thought there might be some production value changes for the second part of our premiere. Gratefully, I will admit that my worries were unfounded. Everything matches up perfectly.

In this second part, the show starts exploring religious, political, and psychological territory. I get the feeling that’s what they wanted to be writing about all along, but they had to establish the setting, the characters, the stakes, etc. before doing that.

The first thing addressed? The discontent of civilians with martial law.

I’m a little sick of movies showing military leaders as heartless jerks who actively loathe civilians and otherwise innocent people. This time it turns out to be a little balanced. After all, as the professor says, civilians are a “hindrance,” but also their “best motivation.” They still fall into the cliché nonetheless.

We’re given more interesting questions almost immediately – why do the mechs have only two legs? What does God want people in a situation like this to do?

Which name is dumber: “skitters” or “cooties?”

Our heroes run into a gang of sorts. It’s all quite reminiscent of The Walking Dead, which is something I was hoping to avoid. Even more concerning to me is how a handful of rednecks were winning until (SPOILER!) a rape victim decides to shoot her oppressors at the very end of the episode, when she had the capacity to do it much sooner.

Kudos, though, it was unexpected and I like that.

I also liked that there was no twenty-minute debate about whether or not to shoot the thieving rednecks afterward. It reminded me of the brutality that Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles embraced, and that Battlestar Galactica strayed away from.

After all the brutality, the episode needs to end on a high note, right? So this show has already created its own cliché – for Lost it was staring off into the sunset on the beach, for this show it’s a matter of getting some object for the kid to play with at the end. I hope they change it up in future episodes.

Final Thoughts: While it’s not an immediate addiction leaving me desperate for the next episode, it is something fascinating that I look forward to visiting. It has the capacity to enthrall me over time, and I expect it shall within the next three or four episodes.

Part One: 9/10

Part Two: 8/10

What do you think? Am I right? Wrong? Leave your comments for discussion down below!

In case you missed it, here’s the promo for the upcoming episodes:

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Tagged as: falling skies, live and learn, reviews, the armory