CATCHING UP: Falling Skies (Season One, Episode Three – “Prisoner of War”)

Hello, and welcome to Catching Up! Over the course of the next few weeks, we’re going to take a look at a few shows that will be beginning their new seasons soon. By the end, we should be all caught up and ready for current episodes. It’ll be a fun ride, one you won’t soon forget! Enjoy!

—The Editor

First aired June 26th, 2011.

Falling Skies‘ latest episode is built around the theme that good things and bad things come hand in hand. Every moment where something good happens within the 2^nd Massachusetts unit it is almost immediately followed by something tragic.

Tom manages to catch a live Skitter and bring it back to the humans to study, apparently the first time it’s ever been done. Victory is short lived when it manages to use some kind of telepathy to control a child recently thought to be released from a mind control device known as a “harness.” There’s newfound hope when Tom’s group manages to rescue said child from a group of enslaved kids—until Tom’s eldest son, Hal (played by Drew Roy), is forced to watch a firing squad gun down (off-screen) half a dozen of these very children.

The scene wherein Hal is forced to relay the information to his father is a powerful one. Having to witness children being executed is obviously traumatic and we now know a new level of ruthlessness the Skitters are capable of. The message is clear: don’t try to rescue your kids or we will cut our losses and kill them all. However, having the killings occur off-screen lessens the emotional impact of their deaths, as we’ve seen in movies like The Hunger Games.

Equally moving is the scene where Tom faces Doctor Harris (played by Steven Weber), who left his wife to die in an attack before the beginning of the series. Tom realizes that he is partly at fault because he should have been there but she volunteered to go for him. He also comes to terms with the fact that because Harris lived he managed to find a way to possibly help children fitted with harnesses, including Tom’s other son Ben.

“Prisoner of War” is full of its emotional ups and downs, but demonstrates how people never give up hope, even at their lowest points. The danger of the Skitters killing enslaved children whenever some escape adds another dramatic element that makes rescue attempts more engrossing. Now it’s not as simple as saving a few and coming back later for the rest as they may be dead by then. It makes the choice of who will be saved that much more challenging and by extension more interesting to watch.

However, because the main cast is so large (12 actors are named as series regulars) not every main character is developed as well as others. Take for example Lourdes (played by Seychelle Gabriel), a character we know nothing about other than “she has a crush on Hal” and “she is religious.” That’s all gleamed from the roughly 2-3 scenes she’s had for each episode so far. The show needs to do a better job expanding on characters other than the Mason family.

Quotes/Thoughts

Pope is not only a thug but also a chef able to make apocalypse food into gourmet cooking. That’s pretty awesome.

“How was the food?” “When I could stomach eating with a bunch of degenerate psychos, the food wasn’t bad.”

The harnessed kids look like sad-eyed zombies.

“We’re not conquered unless we give up.”

If you enjoyed Manny’s article and would like to read others like it, you can read the rest of his work HERE. You can also follow him on Twitter @KN_Manny.

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