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.

Falling Skies is back and the effects are cooler than ever

There are not any real spoilers in this post.

This is the poster that's been online for a month. At right is the Volm. At left is the
new mech/robot that's super destructive and looks rather awesome. The Volm
look cool, don't you think?

Last night one of my favorite series aired its two hour season premiere. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. If you like science fiction, you really should be watching Falling Skies. That being said, I've got one bone to pick, and it's that I don't like the nine month gap in time from last season to this season. At the end of last season, a new alien showed up and none of us who were watching the show could tell if they were friend or foe. Well for now, they seem to be a friend, and that's a good thing because the resistance had its hands full in dealing with the aliens that originally attacked them.

Noah Wyle on a horse makes everything else irrelevant.

The new ones (called the Volm) are really cool looking. They kind of remind me of Guillermo del Toro's Abe Sapien in the Hellboy movies (for the record, I liked Abe Sapien). So that being said, is Falling Skies on your watch list? Is Noah Wyle not enough to lure you to the screen? Is a dystopian post-apocalyptic world where three alien races are currently at war with each other on the surface of the Earth not cool enough to warrant one hour of your time every Sunday?

I hope some of you out there will start watching this show so that we can have discussions about the episodes in the comments!

Why are you not watching Falling Skies?

I think that I was both grossed out and intrigued by Sunday's episode of "Falling Skies" (Season 2 Episode 7). To explain, my own novel SLIPSTREAM has spiders in it. However, nothing quite as graphic as this (but in the same vein--my spiders drill holes in people's heads):

Poor Jamil became a spider bag. He had dozens
 of these guys inside him while still alive. Horrific.

The doctor, Lourdes, and Matt came across Jamil (Lourdes' boyfriend) who looked like he'd been attacked by something (all bloody and stuff). He was barely conscious and wouldn't let them open a door that had scratching on the other side. Thinking they'd get him upstairs to tend to his wounds, he suddenly started to deflate and spiders just poured out of his mouth. It was the creepiest thing I'd seen outside of an "Alien" movie or for that matter, outside that horrible Stephen King movie "The Mist".

Ben on Falling Skies. He's a brooding,
emotional teenager that blames himself
for everything bad that happens.

So why were alien spiders attacking the Second Mass holed up in a hospital? Well in the first five minutes of the show, they captured one of the fish heads. An influential one that Karen and Ben refer to as "The Overlord". And the aliens weren't screwing around. They didn't really bargain. They executed a human right in front of the Second Mass barricade, sicked their robots at them from the other side, and then in came the spiders. Meanwhile Ben, who has both super strength and telepathy due to former alien implants, verified that the Overlord was terrified of the human rebellion.

I'm disappointed that Ben left the Second Mass at the end of the show to hoof it on the open road because I like Ben SO MUCH. However, it was an incredibly tender moment as Noah Wylie (who plays Tom) almost cried hugging his son. I love scenes like that. And Tom is an awesome father. In one crucial scene, the Overlord dropped Ben by inducing a kind of stroke in him and Tom pulled out his gun and shot The Overlord without hesitation (despite them needing this powerful alien to get information or to trade for their freedom as they were surrounded). I was like, "F*ck Yeah!" I hope that they follow Ben's journey and devote at least ten to fifteen minutes an episode to him until the season finale. Otherwise, they may use him as a deus ex machina to have him ride in and save the day on some alien technology when all seems lost.

Tom defending his middle son Ben and shooting the Overlord
for screwing with his son. THAT'S being a badass dad. Go Tom!

I really think that "Falling Skies" is approaching the high water mark of excellence. I'm so glad that this show didn't get canceled in the first season. It has become a regular Sunday night, summertime edge-of-your-seat drama thriller set in an apocalyptic world that entertains me as much as "Breaking Bad"...and that says a lot.

So if you're a fan of science-fiction, why are you NOT watching "Falling Skies?"