Falling Skies - Season 3 Episode 5 - Recap - Search and Recover

Falling Skies - Season 3 Episode 5 - Recap - Search and Recover

This week's episode of TNT's Falling Skies picks right up where last week's ended, with Tom Mason (Noah Wyle) and his antagonistic ally Pope having just survived a plane crash into a forest crawling with the series' main bad guy aliens, lovingly nicknamed skitters. Despite some clashing demeanor Odd Couple difficulties, the two eventually connect on a new level: as fathers. The movement on their relationship is good, sold by the actors' performances. Unfortunately, the tender moment is ruined by a fast cut to the next morning, with Pope playing a prank on Mason, Mason overreacting, and the two getting in a serious fist fight over it. Their stupid macho nonsense (luckily) gets interrupted by a small battalion of skitters coming out of the deeper woods. The dynamic duo escapes into river rapids, but Mason twists his ankle (not until after washing ashore and continuing to yell at Pope, of course). Mason berates Pope for not just leaving, which seems like a bad plan, because Pope then leaves. Tom has some hallucinations, and when he's ambushed by skitters, Pope comes back (of course; we saw this scene in the preview). Mason and Pope make it back to civilization, and when Tom wakes up two days later, there's a real awkward moment of Tom saying "Where's Anne?" and the people around his bed just kind of staring at him. He's caught up by Weaver.

Meanwhile, Hal (who is, based on his behavior in the episode, still bad from last week) is awoken (well, he wasn't sleeping) to the leaders of the human settlement, Charleston, discovering the disappearance of Anne and her baby Alexis (who were taken by Karen and Bad Hal and some skitters last week). Colonel Weaver wants to lead a search team, but not everyone agrees; the fear is that the population in town won't react well to the knowledge that Anne's baby is an alien hybrid (a fun fact revealed by this season's recurring mad scientist, Dr. Roger Kadar). Regardless, Weaver takes a team that includes all five thousand Mason sons, some nameless allies, and Maggie. They come across a body of a woman who is dramatically revealed to be not Anne, and they take some time to dig her a proper grave. The crew speculates on who this woman might've been, going hard into melodrama in their imaginings. The Mason boys (the ones not currently possessed by an evil alien) have some sad mom remembrance, but the search party ultimately comes up empty-handed.

While the search crew is out, Dr. Kadar examines some pictures of a large device that he's been tasked with identifying. The device is the Volm weapon Mason has been hiding from everyone, but Dr. Kadar theorizes that it's drawing more power than it needs, more power than it could possibly use. I'm sure this plot will get more attention later in this season, but it got hardly anything this week. It was also disappointing not to see any of Anne and/or Alexis, but the trade-off was seeing the show's two best actors spend a lot of time becoming pals and sharing sad memories. Next week's preview makes it look like another week without Anne turning up, but we'll just have to wait and see. In the meantime, check out the video preview of this week's episode!