Falling Skies: Grace
Anne and Dr. Harris try to communicate with the alien captive.
“Falling Skies” continues to move forward slowly again this week. Without some sort of “the aliens are allergic to water” style revelation I’m not sure I believe that our group of humans will ever stand a chance at beating them though.
Weaver sends Tom and a team out in search of bikes with Pope as their guide. They discover a group of sleeping aliens that Pope seems intent to destroy but Tom insists they move on. At the bike shop Pope takes out his “guard” with a blow to the head and makes his escape, blowing up the aliens on his way by. Alerted to the presence of people they send in MECs and child soldiers to stop Tom’s group knowing that they’ll be hesitant to shoot children. After killing the alien in control they manage to escape with their lives but can’t help the children left behind. Back in the school Anne and Dr. Harris have different methods of trying to communicate with the alien but both yield few results. With everyone out of the room Rick awakens and puts his harness back on before trying to free the alien. Static on the radio alerts the others to the problem and they get back just in time to stop him. Dr. Harris realizes that he is speaking to the alien through Rick but Mike is unable to take the stress of knowing his child put the harness back on himself and he removes it before any valuable information can be obtained.
Though “Falling Skies” does a good job of portraying how difficult it might actually be for survivors of an alien attack on the planet what it doesn’t do is convince the audience that there is any hope they could win. The characters have managed to do their fair share of damage to the aliens so far but that’s usually when there are several humans facing off against one alien. I’m not sure how they’d manage to do any real damage if they moved into the city where the aliens seem to have focused their forces.
Moving on from the general hopelessness, there were certainly a lot of less than intelligent decisions being made this week. Taking Pope on a mission was obviously risky and thus there should always be at least a few people keeping an eye on him just in case he decides to make his escape, which of course he did. It seems like a terrible decision to leave him in a room alone with someone especially when it’s filled with objects he could use to hit someone. Guns aren’t the only weapons out there.
At the school, leaving Rick alone with his former harness was a terrible idea. It would have been easy to lock it up somewhere (after all they don’t really have any knowledge about how it works and, since it does seem to be partly organic, maybe it would have had the ability to move on its own) and then the whole issue could have been prevented. After Rick and the alien awakened simultaneously last week it was quite obvious that he (or any child connected to a harness) would be the key to communicating with the alien. Unfortunately the conversation didn’t last long after Mike removed the harness himself.
It seems as though the radio transmissions the aliens emit could be something important in the future. Maybe the group can create radio signals to confuse the aliens or jam them in some way. That at least could be the start of the humans having a fighting chance against these creatures.
Andrea
