FALLING SKIES: To the Moon, Alice!
Episode 410: “Drawing Straws”
[photos by James Dittinger/TNT]
Now that our erstwhile heroes have unburied the “beamer” last episode, it’s time to figure out how to the fly the dang thing. The bright side is that it appears the beamers can fly themselves beyond on a certain range. So the 2nd Mass just needs to get the beamer up sufficiently high into the sky then the autopilot will take over, guiding it to the moon. That’s handy.
Matt Mason sneaks aboard the craft and experiments with the “controls” (it’s more like pulling on ligaments and tendons). Inside the craft, the 2nd Mass also intercepts a radio message in Spanish detailing the elimination of ghettos in other parts of the world, including Andalusia (Spain), Italy, and Morocco and referencing a new weapon the Espheni are using to capture fugitive humans (the skitterized humans, perhaps?).
The message sets the 2nd Mass survivors to doubting. Tom thinks that trip to the moon is the still the right course. Pope, being Pope, wants to take the fight to the Espheni and skitters there on earth. Others just want to call it a day and give up.
Then the question becomes…who is going to fly the beamer? Tom says he’ll do it, but various objections are raised. Anne wants him to stop making unilateral decisions without the input of others. Pope thinks Tom is being a glory hound. Others want to volunteer and don’t want Tom to take this on himself without being allowed to participate. Also, it’s determined that the ship may reject any Volm presence, so Cochise, in typical Cochise fashion, can’t go and remains there only to give information instead of being a mover of the plot. So Matt suggests a drawing where anyone interested can put their name into a hat (or in this case, skull).
Later than evening, Dan catches Pope removing a name from the drawing. Dan thinks Pope is removing his own name and is thus a coward. Pope says something untoward about Dan’s daughter who was skitterized and they have a knockdown drag-out fight. Pope says he didn’t remove his name, that he removed Dan and Tom’s names because he wants to take part in the mission. He wants to be the “hero” one time.
The drawing occurs and the first name out of the hat…is Ben Mason. The second name is…Tom Mason. Anne, after the drawing, gets Tom to admit he fixed the drawing, palming his name for someone else’s so Ben won’t go alone.
They prepare to leave, but before they can, a wave of beamers attacks…
The Hal/Maggie/Ben love triangle continues apace. Initially both Ben and Maggie blame the kisses they shared last episode that Hal witnessed on the actions of their spikes. But as the episode goes along, it seems like their attraction is more and more genuine and it’s maybe the feelings driving the spikes rather than the spikes driving the feelings. Tom talks to Hal about how the choice is up to Maggie, offering a counterpoint to Hal’s chauvinistic caveman response from last episode (“She belongs to me!” punch). Ben and Hal seem to bury the hatchet after he catches Ben and Maggie kissing again (but something feels a bit off about their resolution and there is a weird musical note/highlight at that moment that sounds ominous).
Meanwhile, Lexi appears to having subconscious doubts about her actions as the episode leads off with a nightmare of hers, where she encounters a version of Ben that is starting to get all skitterized.
The Espheni Monk begins training Lexi on how to use her powers, starting with the ability to eliminate gravity between atoms (she causes a tree to explode violently at an atomic level). The exercises exhaust her, but she succeeds. Their lesson is witnessed by the Espheni, Torch.
Monk and Torch have another long distance heart-to-heart on the burned out planet introduced several episodes ago (called the “shadow plane” this episode). Lexi witnesses the Monk communicating and uses her powers to generate her own Espheni communication stone (it looks like a piece of coal) to eavesdrop on their conversation. The Monk admits he has a fallback method to destroy Lexi should she stop being compliant. Torch demands that he destroy her immediately. We also get the tidbit that Torch and Monk are brothers (whether that’s biological or metaphoric, I don’t know).
At their next lesson, before Monk can put the kibosh on Lexi, she uses her newfound powers on him. She admits to overhearing the conversation she had with Torch, that her purpose isn’t to bring peace but to bring war. And then she disintegrates Monk where he stands and heads back to the enclave.
She arrives as the flight of beamers zeroes in on the 2nd Mass’ position. It’s not revealed if they’re coming for Tom and company or for Lexi, but she appears and destroys them all in the sky (it’s a bit messy, with flaming pieces of six beamers falling out of the sky). Most importantly, Lexi, for the first time, calls Tom Mason “father”.
Cochise’s ongoing impotence is becoming tedious. He exists solely to give the humans some piece of information they previously didn’t have but need to move the plot along…and then he’s excluded from any action resulting from that information. It’s happened several times this season. At the fascist camp, he’s eliminated before Dan and Tom infiltrate. During the Saturday Night Massacre, he and his team disappear to blow up a bridge. This episode, it’s determined that he can’t fly the craft to the moon, but is a wealth of information about the ship. It’s annoying to see his character reduced to strictly a plot device with weird skin.
Also, more logic plot-holes abound – after being discovered by the fascist humans last episode while trying to retrieve the Volm cache, it stands to reason that Torch now knows that Tom Mason and company are still alive. But rather than moving on the enclave again, he does…nothing. He is awful accommodating to his own demise.
The moment between Dan and Pope was the highlight of the episode. It’s nice to get glimpses of Pope where he acts like a human being with faults and weakness.
The voices used for the two main Espheni leave a bit to be desired. Torch sounds more appropriate to an otherworldy presence, but the Monk’s voice, for an alien creature from another world that can’t actually vocalize, has a weird tone to it. He’s sounds like the voice on an instructional video or a professor reading blandly from a textbook.
Plus, we get the loudest television crickets EVER.
Two episodes left (the double-sized finale) and then it’s on to the final season in 2015.
Woodchuck sez, “Check it out.”
