A month with the alien apocalypse

Dalcash Dvinsky
Jul 25, 2017 · 7 min read

Ten things I learned bingewatching “Falling Skies”.

  1. The number one lesson right away: Fingerless gloves. Everybody needs to stock up on fingerless gloves. After the alien apocalypse, fingerless gloves will be the most important item, more important than weapons, water or food. Keep different types of fingerless gloves, hard leather gloves for the men and soft woolen gloves for the women. Since I started watching the show, I wear them constantly. Fingerless gloves for cycling, kayaking, typing, for cutting bread, for playing recorder, for making coffee, when I’m in class and when I’m alone at home. Fingerless gloves, people. Fin. Ger. Less. Gloves.
  2. “Falling Skies” has an extragalactic number of one-dimensional characters who languish through entire seasons as plot devices, but Pope is perhaps the worst example. A TV show, and a society, or what’s left of it, is defined by the way it treats its outsiders, and Pope is not treated well. He is always a jerk, an obnoxious, giant dickhead, and as such he has great potential. But on this show there are only two options, he can either be a jerk who acts heroically and is halfway integrated into the world. Or he can be completely unhinged, an asshole roaming the streets. And of course only a woman can make him switch from one side to the other, and only the death of this woman can make him switch back. Admittedly, a rather cruel death, nobody wants to see his girlfriend eaten from the waist downwards by alien insects. The man who made Pope die like a vermin deserves to be eaten by alien insects, too.
  3. The 2nd Mass might be like the lost tribe of Israel, but they don’t seem to believe in any deity. Tom Mason is their Moses, who walks to God and comes back empty handed without anything to show. The only higher purpose that seems to keep them going is the loss of the loved ones. Death of a child causes the pain that holds all of them together. Emptiness is the ulterior principle of the human race. We all have lost someone, they keep saying. You are not alone in your pain, they keep saying. All the final speeches are stupid and sentimental, but also strangely hollow. The humanity they are trying to restore seems to be focused solely on family life, on eating cake in the afternoon, on having clean bedsheets, and on wearing clothes without vintage rips. Nothing else seems to matter.
  4. I feel bad for the million characters who do not even get a name before they die. The show throws them in there just to be brutally killed by yet another alien attack. Year after year, the 2nd Mass is replenished with new extras, new faces who just get to hang out with Tom Mason, with Pope, or with Dan Weaver for a few minutes. They go on a brief adventure, meet some aliens, and then they get torn to pieces. You wonder how much they paid for this exclusive trip. Later we find out how much we owe these people, how heroic they fought. And in the next episode new faces come in and get blown apart. This show is a monster. An endless stream of men, always men, is sacrificed to the god of war.
  5. “Falling Skies” is the ultimate cheat show. The success in the first season has to be at least halfway earned, by ingenuity, by pain and by taking huge risks. After that, all battles are decided by cheat codes, like Harry Potter’s endgame. The magic tricks of the show are either aliens or scientists. Every year brings a new alien race that comes out of nowhere to help the hapless humans, the rebel skitters, the Volm, the half-Espheni, the Dornia. Every year the final battle becomes more anticlimactic, the victory devoid of meaning. If the aliens are somehow incapacitated, the scientists are there to save the show. The scientists, “Dr. Wilson” Kadar and Dingaan, are themselves kind of alien creatures, who speak a different language and have no life outside their contraptions. Science is indistinguishable from magic, even when it’s just a Faraday cage. The final superweapon is built in a collusion of aliens and scientists: A supposedly extinct alien race, which manifests herself as a hologram of Tom Mason’s deceased wife, delivers a poisonous fungus, which is then genetically modified to be harmless to humans, by a biochemist specialised on fabricating yeast for beer. Please don’t kill me for typing this sentence. The same alien race then brings back Anne from the dead, in the ultimate cheat move. There is absolutely nothing at stake here.
  6. Sometimes, out of nowhere, among all the dreadful, bland dialogues, among all the sentimental drama, among all the cheap romance and bromance, the show delivers fantastic lines, as if someone got briefly in touch with an extraterrestrial writer’s room. “If we are not successful, people like you and me will never be able to trust each other again”, says Tom Mason, still a human (probably) to Cochise, the human’s friend among the Volm and the character with the most endearing expressions in his alien rubber mask. You are so frustrating, mutters Hal, and glorious Ben Mason retorts “I’m your younger brother, that’s what we do.” In season 3, Matt Mason, a like 10 year old child, states “maybe it wouldn’t be so bad”, it being the death of his own father, and follows it up with “whatever happens, you (his brother Ben) will be there to see it, no matter what”, a statement out of nowhere, backed up by nothing. These are quotes right out of the time machine, as if some of the characters know more about being on television than all of us together.
  7. For a show about survival after the breakdown of civilisation, the actors deal surprisingly little with nature. Sure, there are trees and bushes, but they are just background. Most of the action happens in urban, well-gentrified battlegrounds, in schools, malls, and basements. We never see the 2nd Mass hunting or foraging, not a single time. Even three years after the invasion their primary source of food are rusty cans of pineapples. Surviving and warfaring seem to be in conflict with each other, and when in doubt they always go for the latter. With the exception of the great famine in season five, when the characters briefly try eating alien flesh and regret it immediately, the 2nd Mass does not have any serious problems, like a suburban middle class army free to indulge in its primary pasttime, killing aliens.
  8. “Falling skies” has a a unique theme, a good story, no matter how poorly it is told. The story is this: Colonisation is a two way street. It includes slavery, indoctrination, violence, but it also includes betrayal, collaboration, the attempt to understand each other, or simply trying to live life as if nothing has happened. As a result, the colonised people will be changed forever, genetically and culturally. Some of them will have spikes on their backs. Others will forever hate the Universe. New friends will be made. Some of them wear funny rubber masks. And all the ideas about us and the world, about what is possible and what we are capable of, the tapestry of facts that surrounds us, is forever altered. Once the invasion has begun, there is no going back. The paradise is lost.
  9. Just before everything is over and humanity is restored to everlasting tedium, we get a glimpse of a more interesting show, a teaser perhaps, just to fuck with us one more time. When Tom Mason appears in front of the court martial and has to defend his dubious record of collaborating with the aliens, we are allowed to question everything, at least for half an episode. Is Tom Mason the alien? Is he the enemy? Think about it. How is it that he comes back from multiple visits to the enemy, mostly unharmed, without a scratch, as Pope correctly points out? How is it that his daughter is half Espheni, his one son has Espheni insects in his spine, and his other son used to have Espheni bugs in his brain, just like Tom himself? How is it that he keeps finding solutions to impossible problems, and he keeps going on the most dangerous missions, at point, without getting killed? Remember when he came back from the moon, yes, the moon, and doesn’t remember how? What really happens at the end of season 1 when he voluntarily, without good reason, follows the Espheni into its spaceship? How is it possible that the enemy, the terrifying aliens, always seems to be so easy to beat, but only for Tom Mason? Are we sure he hasn’t brainwashed the entire 2nd Mass? Are we absolutely sure he hasn’t brainwashed us? There is an alternative history here, a conspiracy theory, that is ready to explode in our faces.
  10. Anne’s hair is the only thing worth fighting for. With Maggie, the only other female character that lasts longer than one or two seasons and is not imaginary, they make at least a notional effort to pretend that her hair is unkempt, in line with the idea that she hasn’t seen a freaking shower in years. But Anne’s hair is always flawless, if anything it gets better over time, except perhaps at the very end, when the war is over, when she is holding her pregnant belly and a glass of juice and her hair is weirdly frazzled. But during all the dark years of the invasion, during the entire 50 hours of TV, Anne Mason’s hair is dark, flowing, smooth, fluffy. Sometimes we catch her in a moment, almost accidentally, when she is seen to straighten her hair, and it’s these moments when the bright light of the entire show shines through. In season three, when the 2nd Mass was divided and in turmoil, Anne had to take masculine action. As a result, her hair deteriorated. The world was falling into pieces. But as soon as she was re-united with her tribe and her man, Anne went back to being feminine Anne, to healing people, to making concerned faces, to holding semi-automatic guns, and to straightening her hair. Her beautiful rolling hair.

Postscriptum: A much smarter analysis of “Falling skies” with some similar comment was written by Charlie Jane Anders for Gizmodo.

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