Falling Skies Recap: “Be Silent and Come Out”

by Merrill Barr:

Falling Skies Recap: “Be Silent and Come Out”
Original Air Date (TNT): July 7, 2013
Season 3 Episode 6

Pope makes Falling Skies fun… Weaver makes Falling Skies fun… Tom makes Falling Skies fun, but the Mason family is quickly eating away at my fandom of the series. Be Silent and Come Out started out with such promise as I’ve always been a fan of a good hostage crisis, but because the rules of Hal’s bug have never been clearly defined I quickly lost interest in the predicament, especially when it became clear the only major development in the arc would be the capture of evil-Hal. What (lack of) rules, you ask?

• If the bug is in full control of Hal then why the does the bug have any response to the memory of Hal’s mother?
• Is Hal fighting the bug from within or was the bug having an emotional response?
• Why did the bug never try to escape from Hal when it could before being killed?
• If the bug could take full control of Hal from the beginning why did it let him have any control at all? Why play the mirror game?

These are simple questions, ones that should have been answered from the start and because they weren’t it lessened the emotional impact of both the hostage crisis and the events that followed.

When the season began I stated how much hope I had for it based on the premiere and as it progressed into episode three I stated how much I was enjoying the pace, but the problem is that instead of taking the extreme with dragging story arcs out beyond their necessity, the writers have taken and equally damaging approach of not letting them play out long enough. I’m not talking about the mole bit, I’m talking about the bug bit, the bug’s been in full control of Hal for half an episode, there was no screen time given to watching the bug sabotage the Second Mass, no time given to a moment of manipulation between evil-Hal and Tom, it was so run and gun that even someone like me was annoyed with the conclusion.

The saving grace of this episode (like so many in the series) was Pope, he and his game of life-or-death odds was much fun to watch as was his mini-showdown with Weaver in the bar, but that leads to yet another wasted opportunity, if there was never a plan to pay off on one of the Berserkers trying to manipulate the gambling odds in their favor, why bring the idea up not once but twice in the episode and then waste screen time showing Hal’s body guard reading a magazine? It’s not a red-herring for the audience, it’s just annoying.

Perhaps taking Tom out of the presidential seat and replacing him with Peralta will allow him to be more active in his wants and less passive aggressive, perhaps being rid of the idiotic bug and mole storyline will allow the show to finally go in a direction worthy of its concept and perhaps we can finally get back to the bigger issue at hand, the fact that the formal US government and its president are alive and well.

Look Falling Skies, as I’ve said before, I like ya and I want so badly to love ya, but every time you come close to achieving that bliss you misstep in a catastrophic way… take it from a guy who’s watched way too much television for his own good and stick to the basics, humans vs aliens… that’s all the show has ever needed to be from the beginning and I assure you there is enough story to mine from that idea alone.