Falling Skies Recap: “The Pickett Line”

by Merrill Barr:

Falling Skies Recap: “The Pickett Line”
Original Air Date (TNT): July 14, 2013
Season 3 Episode 7

Falling Skies is not Strike Back… it is not Person of Interest and it is not Burn Notice, Falling Skies is not a balls to the wall action/adventure show, it’s a post-apocalyptic, sci-fi drama with an emphasis on drama, that is what the last few episodes forgot but more importantly, this episode remembered. With its many revelations and a bit lackluster Mason family snafu, The Picket Line ultimately succeeds because the plot is character driver rather than plot driven and unlike the last character driven episode, it’s done with characters that match up well together for an extended period of time.

I’ll start at the ending just so we can get it out of the way, Lourdes is the mole that killed Manchester and that has now killed – rather dramatically – President Hathaway, and I must admit part of that doesn’t make much sense since there’s been no real indication that Lourdes was trying to sabotage the Second Mass in any way as opposed to Hal for whom we say clear indications of his intentions. There were plenty of opportunities beyond the killing of Machester for her to do some damage, none of which she takes… it makes me feel as if the choice of making her the mole was made by the writers in this episode rather than planning it from the beginning and that kind of writing can work for other arcs… but not for this one.

Now as for the reveal of the Volm weapon… eh… it’s not that shocking as I never believed the Volm to be evil, they are as they are sold to be, a fighting force looking for revenge against the Espheni. The reveal that their weapon could potentially wipe out humanity in a single nuclear hell fire just seems like a fun way to raise the stakes for the season finale… although this might be a case of raising them too high since we know they can’t burn down the world so they can have a season four.

Then there’s the most interesting story line of the episode, Pope, Pope will always be the firecracker under the bums of the Falling Skies writers and this was by far one of my favorite uses of his personality. Despite seeming like a redneck, Pope is an extremely cultured individual and I quite enjoyed watching him rally the troops of Charleston together in rebellion against the Volm leadership, it truly does feel like he’s the only character which his head on straight in that town… blindly following the leadership ruined humanity and it’s people like Pope that will rebuild it. Oh, and Weavers speech about the war effort just further lends to my theory of Falling Skies going for a “eras of America” sort of theme, this one being pulled from World War II.

And finally there’s the Mason family who again have the weakest story of the episode… they’re going for Anne and the baby, they get robbed, they rob the robbers, Matt shoots a robber to protect Hal, robbers retake weapons, Masons get away, Tom goes back to save them from mech attack, Tom gets captured, the entire arc is nothing but a sequence of events with no dramatic tension, what even happened to the Picketts anyway? More importantly, what happened to the dude that Matt shot? Did we just forget about him? The answer to is he dead or alive will greatly affect Matt’s character in the future so it’s an answer we kind of need. At this point I’m more interested in having a show led by Pope and Weaver rather than Tom and the Masons because all the Masons seem to be good for lately is getting into trouble… but hey, maybe there’s more to the story, we’ll just have to wait till next week to find out.