Falling Skies Season One-ART3MiS

Falling Skies Season One [S01E01-10]

About Falling Skies

Aliens have attacked, leaving humanity to scramble together and find a way not only to survive opposing forces, but as a species as well.

Here’s an easy comparison to make about TNT’s new big series Falling Skies. Its part War of the Worlds. Part Walking Dead. Part Terminator. Part Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I’d wager that people who only watch the TV ads could figure that out. Not saying this is a bad thing, but it’s pretty obvious that’s where the comparisons will come from.
Especially WOW and Walking Dead. Worlds because of the Spielberg connection and the Alien invasion and all. Walking Dead because it’s the hot new genre show. Fair or unfair to compare, they’re both series about mankind’s survival against unusual invading forces, forces they cannot not understand. They can either band together or kill themselves in the process.
Now what made Walking Dead great is its simplicity. It didn’t overwhelm viewers with characters or bog the story down with weighty and unnecessary back-story. You have your main characters and you move forward, killing zombies and all. It has a hopelessness which is rare.

Falling Skies isn’t much different…except for one major difference: Spielberg. With his name attached as a producer, certain known elements come with it. A motherless child who finds himself in danger. A dad who doesn’t have everything not quite figured out. People staring at things. Great discoveries of unknown things. Ok, that’s not a 100% accurate because Noah Wyle, who I only know from those Librarian TV movies (and ER?), stars as Tom Mason, and he isn’t much like Tom Cruise’s aimless father in WOW. Instead, Noah is a bit of a know-it-all, a history professor (focus is military strategy of course) who always knows the right thing to do in a nutty world where Aliens have taken over.
In spite of all his smarts, he isn’t in charge. He’s secondary to Will Patton, who really plays the white trash leader quite well. Along with them is Moon Bloodgood and Steven Weber among others, each making up a different part of society where moral dilemmas are just as important as wacky aliens bent on world domination.

Now the big question. Is this show worth watching? Without really spoiling anything, I’d say yes! It has very little of the grit or terror of the Walking Dead. But it isn’t a horror series. It’s a survival series that has great effects in terms of the aliens, and creates a whole new lexicon of alien stuff and the future world. However, my one problem with the series is that it leans towards the dull side at times. Things don’t move or twist or turn quite quick enough. The world of the alien invasion is a little stale, which seems impossible, but the characters aren’t wholly original or interesting. It would have been nice if the producers had taken a few notes from Lost (or Walking Dead) to keep the story moving.