Falling Skies

On the whim of the moment, I recently bought the fifth season of Falling Skies on DVD.  I was looking for entertainment and this series was on my list.  It was only last year that I came upon Falling Skies and in a few weeks watched the four seasons that was available in a very short time.  Yes, I am a binge watcher.

Science Fiction TV series is in short supply, mainly due to the popularity of the much cheaper to produce reality shows.  Something that I was exposed to disturbing dangerous levels of during a week long hospital stay a few months ago.  The hospital did not have a wide variety of channels to watch, only sport channels, one movie channel, a kids tv channel, and a bombardment of reality shows.  This was torture. 

Falling Skies is a Steven Spielberg-produced show, although I do not think he had much more input than opening his bank account.  But somehow I feel that Mr. Spielberg’s influence was felt in the series with recycled ideas, such as an alien-human hybrid female child (from Taken) and the alien Espheni (Super 8), and the Skitters (War of the Worlds). 

Except for the recycled ideas, I did enjoy the series, and will not bury it somewhere in a box, or later give it to my brother.  I will watch it again at some time, maybe before the end of the year.

Noah Wyle was a good choice to play Tom Mason, and the characters background made him an ideal character.  The character’s knowledge of military history made him a good military commander, but too much emphasis was placed on the character as the saviour of mankind.  That should have been toned down.  Maybe it would have been better if someone like Roland Emmerich (Stargate, Independence Day, 10 000 BC) produced the series.  But then we would have been overflooded with Ancient Aliens ideas.

The Ancient Aliens idea was not lost in Falling Skies, as there was a link between the Espheni and the Nazca lines of Peru.

The hive-mind mentality is a bit overplayed in Science Fiction today.  A lot of movies has played with the idea.  This includes the Alien series, Star Trek First: Contact, War of the Worlds, Ender’s Game, Starship Troopers and many others more.  Maybe some new type of alien invader is needed.

One character that I liked, but was portrayed in a shallow fashion is Dingaan Botha (Treva Etienne), a South African with electronic expertise.  It seems this character was somewhat of a replacement for Dr. Roger Kadar (Robert Sean Leonard) from seasons three and four.  A South African native would have better portrayed Botha.  This was mostly evident when Botha said: “Kan iemand my hoor” (Afrikaans for: Can anyone hear me), when testing a ham radio.  The accent was clearly American and not South African.

A character that could have had more screentime was Cochise, the Volm warrior who aided the 2 Mas in their fight against the Espheni invaders.  Not much of Volm culture is revealed, and for most part, they seemed to be pre-occupied with their own issues.  Making us wonder why they are there in the first place.

Overall, the series was good.  I am currently trying to convince my brother to watch it.