The two-hour season finale of Falling Skies picked up with Tom (Noah Wyle) returning from scouting the alien structure in downtown Boston. Last week, Anne (Moon Bloodgood) and Lourdes (Seychelle Gabriel) found a harness inside their dead Skitter POW, and now the good doctor filled Tom in on his formerly harnessed son's potential future. Tom was upset at the thought that Ben (Conner Jessup) might soon transform into one of the slimy creatures, but he didn’t tell the kid about this new discovery. Sure, Ben is already aware of the changes the harness caused in him, but you’d think he'd want to know that there's a chance he's about to sprout four extra limbs and turn into a lizard. It seems like simple, post-alien-invasion common courtesy to me.
Tom does, however, tell Anne about last week's incident where Weaver (Will Patton) flirted with losing his mind, which prompted the eavesdropping Lourdes to reveal that she gave the Captain painkillers a while back. The pill-popping revelation didn’t boost Tom’s confidence in Weaver, and the rest of the first hour of the finale was basically an aggressive tug-of-war between the two men for control of the 2nd Mass. The crux of their argument: Tom's discovery that Weaver is proceeding with an assault on the Boston alien ship despite the loss of Colonel Porter (Dale Dye, hopefully not really dead), who's possible last words revealed the 2nd Mass. had lost their backup units and were being ordered to abort the attack. Tom questioned whether Weaver was fit for command, got locked up, escaped and ended up in a John Woo-style face-off that almost led to a shootout in the clinic. Ultimately, Tom and Weaver decided to tell the soldiers of the 2nd Mass. about everything that has happened and ask for volunteers to undertake what now amounted to a suicide mission. For some reason (something about wanting to fight back no matter the odds), a bunch of the fighters signed up for duty.
Overall, I thought the first half of the finale was a bore. Did anyone really think that Tom and Weaver were going to shoot each other? I definitely did not. My favorite part was watching Matt (Maxim Knight) and Pope (Colin Cunningham) banter; everything else was pretty much more of the same and not really befitting the finale "event" TNT had been endlessly hyping.
This article appears in Aug 4-10, 2011.