I can’t tell if I was disengaged because the episode was lacking or because I’d finally broken down and watched the first hour of HBO’s Girls and was dealing with some feelings and thoughts.
Feelings like, “This must be how Mom felt while watching Reality Bites.”
Thoughts like, “I look like a South Florida divorcee.”
(I don’t. Not really. I just happened to be wearing a flowy maxi dress and sporting a tan. Granted, for me a tan is going from optic white to ecru. But, I was wearing gold sandals and sweeping grandly about with a wine glass, singing the theme to Golden Girls.)
So, pardon me for not really giving a $h!t about the 2nd Mass, the Skitter rebellion, and Tom Mason: Action Professor’s god damn kids for a moment.
Oooh! Mini-skitters exploding from a dude’s mouth!
I am so back in this.
“Molon Labe” is a standoff from start to finish. Karen double crosses Ben, as expected. But, they’re beset upon by Hal and the Berzerkers, who manage to run Karen off and capture her bipedal, alien master, Fish Face. Everyone spends the rest of the ep attempting to make a trade.
Meanwhile, metal-eating mini-skitters are infiltrating the hospital, which makes for some character development.
The Littlest Mason is put in a position of actually doing something heroic, instead of standing around with a rifle, staring intently at everyone but the cameraman. Because in this environment, there’s no room for thoughts like, “What about the children????”
Dr. Glass does what she does best: keeping her $h!t together under pressure and even pulling a bit of a MacGyver. God, I love her.
Lourdes even got to have some emotional development other than being the ray of sunshine she’s always been, even though poor Jamil – who I liked – got shoved into a refrigerator to make it happen. Of course, Jamil was also a black man in a science fiction show, so he had it coming the second he showed up on screen.
How many black guys in sci-fi have to die so that Torchwood’s Rex Matheson might live?
By the end, the 2nd Mass was readying to make the last, 500 mile push to Charleston. Everyone has high hopes and made the mistake of vocalizing them for the camera. Which can only mean that Charleston is going to be a bust and everyone is going to regret the decision to go there.
Lastly, Fish Face alluded to the true purpose of the invasion: it was a corrective measure taken because humans are screw ups who don’t know how to run their planet. Fish Face indicated that the aliens would do their work, then be on their way.
I really hope Falling Skies has the guts to use that premise to do what sci-fi does best: constructive criticism of the world as we know it. The aliens’ corrective action sounds a lot like what the United States does all over the world.
So, Show? You have an opportunity here. Don’t waste it.
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Lisa Fary's earliest influences are Princess Leia, Rainbow Bright, Astronaut Barbie, and her 6th grade teacher, Ms. Palmer. She's angry that it's 2011 and she still doesn't have a hovercraft, but will accept a jetpack as consolation. That jetpack had better be pink with a rhinestone monogram. 
