Monday, July 22, 2013

Falling Skies tried to pull off Inception and didn't quite succeed

Tom Mason just prior to jumping off a balcony and miraculously escaping
the alien overlords who tried to extract information from his subconscious mind.
The escape seemed daring at first, but far too easy. Why in the hell didn't they
chase after him? Maybe he's still dreaming. It seems possible.
So Sunday's episode of Falling Skies really had me thinking "you writers at TNT watched Inception, didn't you?" Only in the case of Falling Skies, it was not as well done as Christopher Nolan's brilliant film simply because they didn't employ the use of the totems (totems are a good thing for the audience because it keeps us from getting frustrated).

For those of you who haven't seen Christopher Nolan's Inception, a totem is a thing that you construct. You don't let anyone touch it because only you should know the balance and the weight. Ariadne's was a chess piece, Cobb's was a spinning top, and Arthur's was a weighted dice. The purpose of the totem was to implant this idea (when you saw it in action): your world is not real.

In the Falling Skies episode entitled "Strange Brew", Tom Mason is once again the guest of the alien overlords (having been caught in last week's episode during the last five seconds). Now to be fair, Tom has been a house guest of the alien overlords before. Last time they talked with him and ended up planting a bug or something inside him. So this time around, it had to be different, right? Plus the stakes are much higher due to interference from another alien race called the Volm.
Karen is like the Darth Vader of this show.
We have Karen (she's the main bad guy that replaced the alien overlord from last season) and she wants to find out which of four cities is going to be struck by the resistance. Is it going to be Jacksonville, Boston, New York, or Chicago? Rather than resort to torture which Karen says she knows Tom can resist (he is a college professor after all), they decide to try and extract it from his subconscious. Think dream within a dream within a dream only unlike Inception, I kind of got lost.

Part of the fun of an Inception-style plot is figuring out if the reality you are being shown is real or not. Sometimes it's blatantly obvious. For example, Tom Mason shot Karen in the head. This led me to say "There's no way they'd off Karen that easily. She's like the Darth Vader of this show and for them to just shoot her and be done...not buying it." And sure enough, it turned out to be a dream.

I'm really not sure if the whole "Inception" thing really worked out well for Falling Skies. It made for some awesome flashbacks and for us as an audience to become emotionally connected to Tom's first wife, but it also distanced us from Tom's second wife and his baby daughter in a weird way. We also saw Anne Glass and his daughter Alexi murdered off camera by the alien overlords. In fact, we didn't even get a good look at them at all. This makes me think that Tom is just in another dream. But is he? Because it sure as heck seems that (at the end of the episode) he's not really dreaming. I mean he got away from the alien overlords by simply jumping off a balcony. They didn't even chase him down. Who does that?

If this is really how they are going to play things, i.e. off Anne and Alexi like they were nothing and then just let Tom get away by jumping off a balcony, I'm very disappointed. There are only two episodes left in Falling Skies this season, and I'm hoping to get some clarity on the things we saw in "Strange Brew" that left me full of questions. That's the danger, I think, whenever someone wants to channel Christopher Nolan and the Inception plot. To clarify further, the idea of layering dreams on top of each other can be aggravating to the audience if not anchored and explained well. Hence, Falling Skies should have used totems.

Either that, or they should never have tried to duplicate Inception in a forty minute episode. It just doesn't work.

21 comments:

  1. Imitating Inception while naming the episode after the Bob and Doug McKenzie movie is an odd combination.

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  2. I loved Inception, so I'm sure I'd be highly critical if I'd watched this. And is that a bearded Noah in that pic? Wow, he looks different.

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  3. Ah, that you would be my TV/movie guide. I keep missing these shows.

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  4. Man, they did that in the V series back in the 80s where the main guy was captured and they tried to use some elaborate fantasy to make him give up information.

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  5. The only time you should imitate is if you can do it better. Sounds like Falling Skies didn't quite pull it off.

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  6. This is making me wary of watching Falling Skies. Usually stories about everything being a dream are seriously frustrating as heck. The only reason Inception worked so well was because the writing was top notch and they had things like the totems etc to keep the audience grounded.

    Jai

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  7. Every time i see a commercial for it, i wish i was still watching Falling Skies

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  8. NOOOOOOOOO! You weren't supposed to tell me anything about the episode--we're watching it tonight. That said, I'm now ready for the mind trip. *sigh* *angry face*

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  9. I've recorded this last episode and haven't seen it yet so I think I'll wait to read this until after I've seen it. Thanks.

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  10. Time travel and dream sequences in sci-fi tv shows rarely work because there are no real stakes. Whatever happens can be taken back at the end. It's annoying more than clever.

    mood

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  11. Just watched the last episode of DEFIANCE. Definitely not watching next season. Such a pointless ending of the season.

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  12. Inception was overrated and not actually as good as the 80s dream movies. To make it worse, the movie was just a vehicle for Nolan to say, "Look how clever I am."

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  13. Missed it last night but I hope I still enjoy it. Thanks for sharing Mike.

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  14. @Andrew: Have you actually listened to how bad the dialogue is in "The Empire Strikes Back?"

    I don't see how you can criticize Nolan when that is one of your all time favorite movies. It'd be like loving the old time Godzilla movies for the special effects and then criticizing Pacific Rim.

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  15. Falling Skies is still the best sci-fi on TV at the moment. I didn't think it was so bad. I think the point was they wanted us to be lost, like Tom.

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  16. I haven't been watching Falling Skies, but in a weird coincidence I happened to catch some of it last night AND a couple scenes from Inception on another channel. You're right about Inception being so very good and intelligent; I really enjoyed that flick.

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  17. I'm really disappointed in the direction this series is taking. I did watch Inception, and got totally lost in the storyline, but didn't connect it to this episode until this posting. I knew it was familiar, just couldn't put a name to it. Thanks.

    ......dhole

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  18. I couldn't watch the thing. Glad I wasn't the only one.

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  19. Haven't seen Inception, but am not enjoying this new direction at all.

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  20. With all the time you spend keeping up with the latest movies and TV shows, how do you have time to read? Which is part of my thing about ebooks-- I think people are moving away from reading altogether. I mean so many of them are yawners. There are just not that many exciting authors anymore thanks to the way publishing has gone.

    Have a nice rest of your week off!

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  21. I started watching INCEPTION once with my friends. We stopped it after about fifteen minutes and watched NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET INSTEAD. Don't really regret that decision.

    But! This does remind me of the DOCTOR WHO episode where that weird spore gets stuck in the TARDIS, causing the Doctor, Amy, and Rory to dream two of the same dreams.

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