"Falling Skies" Hits Bottom Fast

Luckily, it only took one night to realize that this one was a complete waste of time, unlike "The Event", which required two nights. Thankfully, "Falling Skies" ran episode one and two, back-to-back on one night, which saved the trouble of spending the week thinking "maybe it will get better." Where did it go wrong? Glad you asked.

In the movie "Signs", a family finds themselves in the midst of an alien invasion. In the series "Lost", a group of plane crash survivors find themselves on a magical island. At the end of "Signs", we don't know why the aliens invaded Earth. At the "Lost", we don't know why the island is magical. In both cases, the story worked, because the mystery was just below the context of the story.

In "Falling Skies", 99% of the Earth's population has been wiped out in seven months. The greater Boston area, the total head count is about 3,000. The surviving human's commander decides to split into groups of 300 people, 100 fighters, and 200 civilians. And so, off they go, in broad daylight, walking down the street, driving cars, trucks, and motorcycles, in full sight of the alien mothership.

How is this possible? Its a mystery! Yeah that's it... a mystery. It makes you want to watch more!

Or maybe its that the aliens are nocturnal: they are incapable of operating in Earth's harsh sunlight. Makes sense: They can build intergalactic space craft, robotic combat units, but can't build the opposite of a starlight scope. Wow, its too bad the US military didn't survive long enough to realize that the aliens were most vulnerable, while humans were at their strongest.

But after seven months, we've learned that we can road march a retreat with complete impunity, since the aliens are helpless in the daylight. So when do we attack the food warehouse? At night. Yep. Every combat sequence was a night.

As much as would like to spend hours and hours and hours going on about all the completely ignorant things that were wrong with this show, I think I'll stop here. Its sad enough I wasted this much time on this.