TV GUIDE: Weekend TV Playlist: Falling Skies, Thrones Finale, Tonys
Jun 7, 2013
by Matt Roush
There's a lot of catching up to do as the third season of TNT's alien-invasion sci-fi action series Falling Skies gets underway Sunday, with a two-hour opener (9/8c) understandably if regrettably heavy on exposition in between the elaborate battle scenes. As reported in TV Guide Magazine's current Sci-Fi Preview issue, and emphasized for what seems at least a dozen times during the premiere, seven months have passed since last season's surprise ending, when a new alien force introduced itself to the human rebels.
These are the Volm, the good aliens, represented by an upstanding talking lizard known as Cochise (what, Tonto was taken?), who advises the soldiers of the 2nd Mass — now based in Charleston — on battle tactics, though not everyone is as trusting as now-President Tom Mason (Noah Wyle, stolid and Lincoln-esque). The bad aliens from the first invasion are now identified as the Esphemi, who've developed a Mega version of their robotic Mechs, but are losing ground lately to the humans with their Volm-supplied future-tech weaponry. Please take all of this seriously. Everyone else seems to.
TNT helpfully supplied a glossary about all of this with the new-season screeners, as well as a chart of the various cardboard characters who populate this war-torn world. Falling Skies isn't a terrible show, unlike the recently wrapped first season of NBC's Stephen King-lite Revolution. But it can be terribly ordinary, especially when there's a pause in the combat. It probably won't surprise you to learn that there's suspicion of a mole within the military ranks. But even so, you may be dismayed to witness a scene out of a third-rank CBS procedural from maybe 20 years ago, when a major peripheral character looks up as an intruder enters, and says, "So it's you?" before being killed. And the maudlin family drama involving President Mason's sons hits a new low when little Matt plays hooky from his schooling to experiment with explosives, and after being disciplined by his dad's new baby mama, yells at her, "You're not my mother!" He later apologizes, but there's no forgiving a B-story from a bad sitcom slowing down the pace like this. You may start wishing for another invasion by those creepy "skitters" — or maybe a bag of Skittles, because even that would be less sickeningly sweet.
On the plus side, House's Robert Sean Leonard does terrific character work in the second hour as a disheveled, twitchy scientific genius who lives underground to help keep the lights on. "I never go topside," he insists. "Nothing good happens up there." (At least we know someone is reading the scripts.) And because every society needs new blood, let's hope for great things from Tom and Anne's new Mason baby, Alexis, who's barely out of the womb before she's crawling around and saying "Momma." Now that's freaky in the best way...
CLICK HERE TO VIEW A VIDEO FEATURETTE RECAP OF FALLING SKIES' SEASONS 1 & 2
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