Falling SkiesFollow

That sounds pretty awesome. Has the first season come out on DVD yet?

I really tried to like this series, but I can't get into it. The over all storyline is interesting, but I can't get past the fact that I just don't care about any of the characters.

Put me in the love/hate category as well. I like the general premise and theme, but it seems like they like to spend waaaaaay too much time on some parts of the story while not really moving the broader narrative along much at all. The first season worked well because it was more about just surviving and figuring some stuff out about the aliens. You could see it was building towards something more. This season was a bit disappointing. The way they handled the cliffhanger from season one was kinda "meh". So he goes aboard the alien ship, has a brief conversation with the overlord guy, then gets let go, and basically nothing is learned at all. I was hoping for at least some sort of information about the alien's motives for being there, plans, etc. But nothing.

The rest of season 2 basically muddled along IMO. Frankly, if it wasn't for the last 3 episodes, I'd have considered the whole thing a failure. Dunno, just not sure I really like the pacing of the show. It's like slow-slow-slow, then toss a zillion things at us in the last few episodes with a big reveal/cliffhanger at the end. It was totally redeemed with the final minutes of the finale though:

SpoilerOne of my issues with the series as a whole is that the humans are basically defeated. Sure, they can fight back a little and resist, but without finding some weakness in the aliens or weapons to fight them, they're doomed. They sorta went in that direction with the use of mech metal in their weapons, but pretty much ignored it this season (I guess we can assume they're still using it, and it gives them a fighting chance, but not any sort of overwhelming advantage. Which kinda makes sense). The focus on the Skitter rebellion seemed to be moving in the right direction, and the potential of Charleston being something that could give them a significant base of operations did as well, but then neither of them really seemed to pan out much.

The only real accomplishment was that it all lead them (almost tangentially) to destroy this weapon pointing up at the sky. Hmmm... Then cool aliens in battle armor show up. At least this fulfills the need to have some advantage against the aliens. I'm not sure what direction they're going to go from here, but at least it'll hopefully be a bit more realistic. It was seriously starting to strain credibility that they could continue to operate in large numbers fighting in any way at all, without just being obliterated by the aliens. I mean, methods to conceal their heat signature aside, it's not like it should really be that hard to spot several hundred people in a convoy of vehicles driving along when they're pretty much the only thing moving. Hell. You'd think they could trivially spot them sitting in a large set of buildings with power, lights, etc for months as well.

And that kinda brings me to the one part that still bugs me (and I was hoping would be resolved early this season, but wasn't). It's been clear that the aliens at several points in the story have known exactly where they were and clearly could have simply bombed them into dust at will if they wanted to. But they didn't. Instead, it seems like they've engaged in elaborate plans to trick them into doing something, most of which didn't make a whole lot of sense. The Skitter rebellion explained that a little bit. But I'd still think that if the concern is humans working with the Skitters, that blowing up the humans would be a great first start. Just seems like the aliens have failed at "Destroying enemy civilization 101". It's clear that they have other priorities and objectives, but it would have made this season a whole hell of a lot more believable if they'd taken the golden opportunity they had from the cliffhanger in season 1 to provide information to the viewers about exactly why the aliens are doing this. I've suspected since early in the first season that the aliens are basically some kind of galactic CPS service (or think they are), and that their motivation is not to eliminate humans, but rather a society that they feel is limiting our potential (or something). It fits with the whole harnessing kids but not adults thing, but there are holes in that theory as well.

It'd be nice to have at least some sense of motivation for the aliens actions. You generally don't spend the effort to travel dozens or hundreds of light years to launch an attack on an intelligent alien species just because you feel like it. I'm hoping that with the introduction of this new group of aliens, that maybe we'll learn from them what's really going on. Hopefully. Unfortunately, I've been disappointed by enough promising shows where it becomes apparent that there is no plan other than to keep tossing new dramatic changes until the audience gets bored that I've developed a healthy skepticism that sci fi writers will actually bother to think about things like why those aliens are attacking us when planning the series rather than just kinda winging it as they go along.

I can still hope though.

Edited, Aug 28th 2012 12:29pm by gbaji