What I’m Watching: Falling Skies

Falling Skies: Season 3, Episode 3 “Badlands” (C)

After last week’s promising start, this episode is a stern reminder of just how much this show can miss the mark. I watched a portion of the episode and then took a break for a few hours, only to realize that I wasn’t even a third of the way in, despite the fact that Grace’s demise and the rest of the episode’s events already felt impossibly endless. Grace getting her head impaled by a stake was treated as an awfully minor and simple injury by an unconvincingly caring Pope, and her ultimate death was far from surprising given the extent of her wound. Most disappointingly, this episode didn’t feature a single appearance by the new alien allies we met last episode, and instead only offered glimpses of Tom and Ann’s most definitely alien baby and an unexpected human enemy who turned out to be quite gruff. The notion of the President being alive is an enticing one – and not dissimilar from another sci-fi show which just aired its season finale – yet I assume it will take far too long for Benjamin Hathaway to surface. This predictable attack is sure to get in the way of Hal’s misguided admission of unknowing guilt which will surely get him ostracized from the camp, though ideally they’ll feed him false information to get Karen on the wrong track. The idea of that memorial tree is a good one, but this show doesn’t have the dramatic impact it needs to make that kind of emotional plotline work. I'm not sure I'll have the patience to finish the next episode.