Falling Skies, Search and Recover, Review
Noah Wyle's beard is still a thing of beauty, the alien baby is still creepy, there's still a Volm mole running around, and Season 3, Episode 6 of Falling Skies just kind of meanders a bit.
Falling Skies continued their “to be continued” episode from last week, picking right up in the crash-landed plane to reveal that General Bressler is dead and Noah Wyle has to carry Pope out of a potentially exploding plane to run stranded into the middle of forest. It’s Into The Wild, Wyle style!Then of course, since we can’t continue action sequentially (must have mini-cliffhangers) we cut to evil Hal looking evil before he’s summoned to an “Anne and Alexis are missing” meeting. It’s revealed that Alexis is a demon…I mean alien baby and Anne probably freaked about it. No shit, Sherlocks!Honestly, not much happens in “Search and Recover” other than dwelling on plot points for an hour long episode. Does anything much progress that was not already expected/seen? No.Take, for instance, the whole Anne-Alexis storyline. Do we get to know what happens to her after she’s confronted by evil Hal and the skitter cadre? Naturally not. Instead we get a long, drawn out B plot of Captain Weaver leading a bunch of people to search for them. They don’t find them. Instead they find a body of a dead woman and bury it, which pretty much just serves two purposes: a) make everyone say something emotional and b) indicate to other people there’s something wrong with Hal. Cuz he’s, like, evil and all and so doesn’t care about random dead people and missing people and really just any stuff at all.Oh, also we find out that the VP has the hots for Weaver and has mad scientist Robert Sean Leonard determine, by the scientific method of looking at three crappily taken photos, what the alien allies are building is. Not. Good. Surprise surprise! We saw this “twist” coming for like, forever and a day. I love Robert Sean Leonard but lord, he is wasted in this role. Give him something better! Honestly, that awful wig he has to wear does most of the acting for him. But, being the honorable and game Mr. Leonard, he gives it his all and invests emotion into the simplest lines, such as “yes, I think it is a good thing.” Not that the delivery made me want to weep, but I sat up and half paid attention from my couch.Also, I need to take a moment and talk about Noah Wyle’s beard in this show. Can it get more awesome? Always just the right length to make him look post-apocalyptic to indicate he has more important things on his mind than shaving (like fighting aliens and survival) but generally well trimmed and not too scraggly, indicating he still cares about his appearance a.k.a. his humanity. What a statement from a simple makeup/facial costume choice!Granted, I may be reading too much into this. I spend a lot of time during this show thinking about that beard…mostly because the plotlines and dialogue are so predictable and canned that I find analyzing people’s hair more interesting.For example, take the youngest Mason son. How in the world does he have time, running around and surviving and having emotional talks with his brother in which he says, “I don’t want to die alone like that corpse lady we found” to maintain that weird douchetastic little faux-hawk mullet of his? Whoever decided that kid needed to look like he was trying to imitate an extra off the Mad Max set needs to rethink every coiffure decision they ever made.Anyways, the episode ends with Weaver telling Tom that Anne and Alexis are missing. So, in addition to spraining his ankle, losing his Volm liaison, Bressler and Pope’s plane biting the dust, now his baby and baby momma are gone. And his baby is an alien. Well, half-alien. And she may be evil. She’s definitely creepy.I feel at that moment, Tom Mason should have jumped out of his hospital bed, yelled “I QUIT!” and then gone off onto a real Into the Wild adventure of his own. He didn’t though. Ah well, one can always hope.Den of Geek Rating: 3 out of 5 Stars.Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for all news updates related to the world of geek. And Google+, if that’s your thing!
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