“Nobody puts paprika on chicken! What are you? Hungarian?!” – Pope
If there is one thing you should know about me, it’s this: I love pizza. I can’t get enough of it, it’s my favorite food. In any given week, I probably eat pizza at least four times. A couple of weeks ago I went to Costco and found a box of frozen pizzas that I hadn’t tried yet. I bought the box and when I got home and heated it up, I discovered that frozen pizza is absolutely delicious.
The reason I bring this story up is because summertime television is often like frozen pizza. Sure, frozen pizza gets the job done — especially when it’s 2:30 AM and you’re drunk — but ultimately it just leaves you fantasizing about a fresh, oven baked pie from your favorite local carry-out joint. Summer TV is the same way. Yeah, reality shows and reruns can give you a temporary boob-tube fix, but they are no substitute for the array of great programming options that await viewers in the fall. However, every once and awhile you stumble across something like the frozen Costco pizzas that make you forget that it was heated up in a microwave and not a brick oven.
Falling Skies, TNT’s new alien invasion drama produced by Steven Spielberg, is the Costco frozen pizza I have been raving about. It’s a show that is good enough to make you forget that it’s on in the summer. That isn’t to say Falling Skies is a great show, because it isn’t. What I’m talking about is really an issue of expectations and competition. I expected Falling Skies to be just sort of “blah” (a Tombstone pizza, if you will), but my expectations have been greatly exceeded. And since there is very little competition from other hour-long dramas at the moment, Falling Skies SEEMS like a great show in comparison to something like Combat Hospital – the same way this frozen Costco pizza SEEMS delicious when compared with, say, Totino’s.
One of the things I like most about Falling Skies is that it doesn’t play “hard to get” with the aliens. The show isn’t like Signs or Cloverfield or Super 8, where the audience is constantly teased by a fleeting glimpse of a tentacle or a quick frame of the wing of an escape pod. You see the aliens. A lot. And you don’t have to wait until the very end of the episode. The budget for Falling Skies isn’t huge, but they make smart use of what they have. The special effects aren’t groundbreaking, but they’re certainly serviceable. The aliens are pretty lifelike and their ships/structures look very cool.
Last weekend’s two-hour pilot starts off some time after the alien invasion (a couple of weeks? months? I can’t really remember) and introduces us to some of the survivors who we will (hopefully) grow to know and love. There’s Tom (Noah Wyle), a history professor turned leader of a group of resistance fighters. With Tom are his sons Hal (Drew Roy) and Matt (Maxim Knight, what a name!). Tom’s third son Ben has been captured by aliens (or Skidders, as they are referred to by the survivors). There’s Karen (Jessy Schram), Hal’s girlfriend and fighting partner, and Anne Glass (Moon Bloodgood, another great name!), the survivor camp’s resident doctor and (probably) Tom’s future love interest. We’ve got Captain Weaver (Will Patton), an a-hole Army officer who is always contradicting Tom and Dr. Anne, and Colonel Porter (Dale Dye), a military commander who seems to have the civilians’ best interests in mind. Finally, there’s Pope (Colin Cunningham) a sociopathic outlaw who may or may not have a heart of gold and/or the taste buds of a culinary master.
The second episode begins where the pilot left off, with Tom and his crew leaving camp on a mission to find and rescue Ben. They find Ben, along with a group of other harnessed kids, salvaging scrap metal. Without the man/firepower to save the kids, Tom and company return to camp.
Waiting for them is a new arrival in camp: Dr. Harris (Steven Weber), who Tom knows from his pre-invasion life. Apparently, Harris was with Tom’s wife during the first wave of alien attacks, but abandoned her when s— really hit the fan in order to save his own life. Needless to say, Tom is hesitant to trust Harris, but he recognizes that the doctor offers the survivors their best hope to save the children from a zombie-like existence of slave labor. Or does he?
When Tom and his fighters return to where the harnessed kids are working, the mission goes awry and he is unable to rescue Ben. Eventually the group is able to make it back to camp with a different harnessed child as well as a Skidder POW. Dr. Harris is able to successfully remove the harness and keep the boy alive. However, the episode’s final scene suggests that although the harness is gone, the aliens could possibly still have some kind of control over/connection to the kid.
For a relatively campy show about fighting a war against six-legged creatures from outer space, Falling Skies makes (or at least attempts to make) some pretty deep and poignant observations about the formation of societies and the nature of humanity. An ongoing theme of the show is the power struggle between the military and the civilians they have sworn to protect. Tom is in an interesting position in this argument, straddling the fence separating his old life in the private sector and his new life leading a group of guerrilla warriors. He understands that allowances have to be made for the soldiers to be able to do their job, but he’s also sensitive to the erosion of civil rights when those allowances are abused. His background as a professor of military conflict allows him to put the current battle against the Skidders into historical context.
Dr. Harris suggests to Tom that the invasion served as a mechanism with which the wheat of humanity could be separated from the chaff. It’s sort of a Darwinian philosophy: the weak people were wiped out by the Skidders, leaving only the strongest to carry on and form a new society. Tom, understanding the degree with which sheer luck factors into who has survived and who hasn’t, disagrees on principle. “Maybe we owe it to the people that didn’t survive to become the best of mankind,” he says – a pretty profound statement, especially from a summertime TNT show.
This review originally appeared on TV Geek Army.