Hiya, peeps.
Yesterday was Rizzoli and Isles night. I’ve blogged about them here.
So I switch over to TNT and watch Kyra Sedgwick in The Closer and then Rizzoli and Isles. The Closer has kind of grown on me, actually, and I like the characters. Then, after R&I, what should come on, but another installment of the Noah Wylie sci fi drama Falling Skies. I caught the 2-hour premiere of Falling Skies (blogged here), and I wasn’t too impressed. The worst part about it was the incessant spate of commercials. Completely disrupted the flow of the show. Completely. I didn’t watch one since then, deciding that if it was warranted, I’d check it out on DVD later.
As it happened, I watched last night’s episode, and it was pretty good. It works better as an hour-long because the pacing’s better and the commercial pacing’s better (though there are still way too many commercials). It was fairly easy for me to pick up the plot, even though I hadn’t watched anything but the first episode.
Here, we have Noah Wyle’s son Ben with the rebels; they got the harness off him, but he still has icky alien spikes protruding along his spine and the rebel doc discovers something kind of creepy about them. The skin and tissue around them is numb. So on a hunch, she goes and buts into one a skitter body they’ve got and lo and behold, she determines that the skitter was something else before it became a skitter because, buried under its bone and tissue and muscle is a harness. The implication is clear: the harness seems to somehow transform its wearer into something other than its original form. In other words, Ben and the other kid the rebels managed to get the harness off of might be on their way to alien-ville. Which reminds me of the fantastic film District 9, in which the main character is exposed to some alien fluid, which starts transforming into an alien.
The rebels also discover that there are bipedal humanoid-types who seem to be in control of both the skitters and the mechs. And our outlaw guy from the first episode? He’s figured out how to craft bullets out of mech-metal that penetrates their armor. He also discovers that a basic mech bullet is actually a bullet shell from Earth that they altered to meet their needs. The outlaw guy sardonically tells Wyle’s youngest sun, “they’re into recycling.”
Suffice it to say this one episode made me interested, so I’ll probably watch the season finale on Sunday and suffer through the commercials.
Here’s TNT’s re-cap of Episode 7.
I love an alien apocalypse show as much as the next person. In this case, if you do decide to watch Falling Skies in its entirety, I still recommend getting it on DVD or some other method where you can avoid the commercials. TNT is outta control with commercials.
Happy watching!
Andi Marquette 