Falling Skies Recap: “Search and Recover”

by Merrill Barr:

Falling Skies Recap: “Search and Recover”
Original Air Date (TNT): June 30, 2013
Season 3 Episode 5

Anne and her baby are missing, Weaver and his team went looking for them, found a dead body (not Anne’s), bury it, figure out the two of them were taken, go back to camp where Matt and Ben reminisce about their dead mother, at the same time Kadar figures out the Volm weapon is something possibly far worse… got all that? Good, because that’s all I’m saying about it, because nothing happened with those story lines, but that’s not where this episode faltered, no that happened in a much more extreme way on this week’s Falling Skies. See, I fully understand the desire to put Tom and Pope alone together for an episode, really, I get why the writers did it, I get why they thought it was a cool idea, I get why they think the audience wanted it, in fact I’m positive it’s something the audience wanted… but not like this. No this, this was bad… very, very bad.

One of the hardest things to do in writing is find ways to deliver exposition to the audience without them knowing their getting exposition, and on that front this episode succeeds. We get some insight into Tom’s past with his father who owned a hardware store, never made it past seventh grade and was a mean, abusive drunk. We also get a fun little story about Pope killing a man by accident that almost killed his kid, but in doing so scared his son so bad that he ruined his relationship with him, but that’s where the fun ends.

In the very next scene after the commercial break that follows that heart-warming moment, the two of them get into a fist fight for no reason… for… no… reason. So Pope threw a snake on Tom while he was sleeping, it didn’t call for Tom to react the way he did, especially not Tom. Tom is the one with a cooler head and a kinder heart, and after what happened in, again, the previous scene, his actions didn’t fit his character, whereas Pope playing a snake prank is exactly in line with his character. But the fighting didn’t stop there because after that nonsense the two jump a waterfall in order to run from skitters, and what happens? They get into it again, and again, for no good reason! Tom hates Pope after that moment why? Because he got in an extra punch after being pushed off a fucking cliff? Tom was nothing more than a giant cry-baby in this episode and it was not fun to watch, at all.

I’m a strong defender of Falling Skies, even when it was getting shat upon in S1 by Walking Dead fan boys claiming it to be nothing more than an alien driven rip-off, the thing is those people were dead wrong though because the one thing Falling Skies has always had over The Walking Dead is hope. AMC’s zombie show is an annoyingly depressing program where humanity is an awful piece of shit, whereas many episodes of Falling Skies deal with humans who rise to the challenge and are always striving for the light at the end of the tunnel… but there was none of that this week and for the first time I believe the show made a case of the Walking Dead comparison… I want to like you Falling Skies, I want to like you so bad but sometimes you just make so god damn hard to.