Falling Skies - Season 3 Episode 6 - Recap - Be Silent and Come Out
Falling Skies - Season 3 Episode 6 - Recap - Be Silent and Come Out
After the bombshell dropped last episode on President Tom Mason (Noah Wyle) by his fellow alien apocalypse survivors, the action on TNT's Falling Skies picks right back up. Tom is ready to get guns up so he can find his lover Anne and their weird, somehow part-alien baby Alexis. Little do the survivors know, Tom's son Hal is recently a sleeper agent working for the alien enemy, in consort with the alien leader (in the human host body of Karen, former friend to the survivors). The alien-possessed Hal tips his hand by kidnapping President Mason, and Maggie blows his escape vehicle right off of its tires. Hal gets cornered in an abandoned building with Tom and this episode is off to a hell of a start.
The next time we see Tom and Hal, it's daylight again. 2nd Mass and Pope's men have surrounded their building, accompanied by Hal's girlfriend (Maggie) and Tom's other sons (young Matt and alien-powered teenager Ben). Negotiations go south, and after some misplaced gunfire, both sides are unharmed but no longer doing much communicating. Bad Hal demands another truck to get out of town, Colonel Weaver and company are not willing to comply. Tom orders them to work on it, and the standoff cools down.
Down on the ground, Colonel Weaver is trying to contain the anger of Pope, who is in favor of sniping Hal's brain right out of his head. The group ultimately decides to go with a compromise; Weaver will have a sniper trained on Hal while Maggie and the younger Masons go in to try talking the bad out of Hal. Tom gets Hal shaky by invoking Hal's dead mom and laying down some strong words about how proud she'd be to see the man Hal had become after the invasion. Maggie comes in, confusing Hal further and driving him to crazy tears. Matt comes in and Hal just cannot decide where to point his gun. This scene had a lot of tension, because I honestly expected (and wanted) the show to take the hard left turn of killing one of the people in this room. When Hal eventually points the gun at himself, I thought we had our victim, but a last minute assist by Ben knocks the gun off-kilter and Hal is just grazed by a bullet.
Pope's got another plan entirely; he's taking odds on the survival of each man. When one drunkard offers to lay money on both Masons dying then fix the odds (wink, smile, another wink), Pope warns him against it. After Hal's rescue, Colonel Weaver sees this little bookkeeping display and is in no way pleased. He promises to mount Pope's head on the wall if anyone tries affecting the odds (for example, by assassinating the infirm Hal). Pope sends a big beefy dude to go guard Hal's hospital room against any such skullduggery.
Back at the hospital, Tom Mason consults a rebel Skitter about how to remove the alien spy bug from Hal. Ultimately, the gross alien friend hands over a bioweapon that will destroy the bug, but if the bug has left, will kill Hal. Tom's stuck with yet another in a lifetime of hard choices. He goes for it, having to deal with Hal's pleading and begging, watching Hal's screaming, convulsing body as the tiny silver-black specks of alien cure invade his body. He's already survived a bunch of stuff this episode that would've made for a suitably dramatic death, so of course he also survives this.
The episode's big surprise is not a character death or a last-minute betrayal like one might expect, but instead that President Tom Mason is resigning his position as President so he can go off and rescue Anne. He leaves his trusted adviser Marina (a suspiciously new character, made more suspicious by next week's preview telling us that Hal wasn't the mole) in charge, and she's sworn in as President. This episode started out really strong and had a lot going for it, but it fails to deliver on the tension it built up so well. Were this Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead, the stand-off with Hal would've ended up with a character dead (or at least maimed). Falling Skies achieves a lot, especially on a network that hasn't got much else in the way of notable original programming, but it still seems strange in the context of similar shows that this harrowing tale of human survival in the face of insurmountable opposition has such a low main cast body-count. The show has just been renewed for a fourth season, so I'm sure there will be plenty of time to inject some heartbreak into this saga of Masons and bearded gun-shooters, should the creators choose to do so.
Check back here next week for another recap, and watch a preview of this episode below!