Note: Full spoilers for Falling Skies: Season 5 follow.
The final season of Falling Skies had a promising start. Tom’s return sparked new questions about an enigmatic race of beings named the Dornia who were a powerful force that the Espheni actually feared at one point in time. The 2nd Mass were on the offensive after Tom blew up a facility on the moon and everything looked like it was building to a well-planned finale with ten episodes of room to develop some conflict and mystery.
For the first half of Season 5 it felt like things were working well. There weren’t any standout episodes in particular but it was fairly smooth sailing. However, it started to become apparent that the Espheni as a threat had significantly diminished. In part, this is explained from a story perspective as Tom did blow up a key power source for their entire war machine. Still, it’s a little strange that a highly advanced alien race that traveled across the galaxy would find it difficult to maintain more than one way to power their vehicles. Their invasion effort had essentially devolved into rushing the 2nd Mass base of operations over and over again. An effective strategy, sure, but not what you would expect to see from the Espheni.
That notable deficiency in the alien threat is when the cracks in the narrative for this season started to become apparent. For four seasons the Espheni had been the primary antagonists and now all they had were numbers without the military strength to back them. When the primary threat in your story loses any sort of legitimacy it’s hard to create any meaningful threat or conflict that can be engaging for a viewer. That’s precisely what starts to happen here and the latter half of the season barely even feature the Espheni as human threats become the core focus.
In fact, the Espheni threat really doesn’t become legitimate again until “Reborn”, the series finale. Even then there are no adult overlords, the face of the Espheni for the past few seasons, present. We are introduced to an Espheni queen and what happens in her scenes really does reflect badly on the entire season. There is a huge information dump regarding the Queen seeking revenge on Humankind because we killed her daughter in a previous invasion attempt fifteen years earlier.
What?
There were nine episodes prior to the series finale when that information could have been imparted through various different methods. It could have been expanded upon and developed into something legitimate for an audience to actually invest in. The time was there. Instead, this huge piece of information is delivered in a few lines of dialogue in the series finale. As much as I had enjoyed some of the previous episodes earlier in the season, that moment really stuck out as terrible and reflected poorly on everything that came before it. Sure, they hinted at the fact that the Espheni had been here previously through some nonsense regarding the Nazca lines but any actual development of that story was non-existent. They just didn’t bother and thought an audience would buy into it in the final moments of the series.
Remember when a single skitter was a dangerous and vicious threat? I miss those times. By the end of this series we had Dan Weaver choke holding an overlord to death with ease. The legitimacy of the villain as a threat was lost this season and that hurt big time.
The human threat had a promising start. The “Find Your Warrior” storyline that kicked off the season featured a Tom Mason that had returned from his trip to the moon with a more aggressive gameplan. His initial meeting with the Dornia had sparked a rage in him that had altered his perception of what it meant to win this war. He had lost some of his humanity but had gained the edge that could help humanity win the war. That’s an intriguing concept with a lot of room to develop. It’s a concept that is played with in the first few episodes. Anne shows some legitimate fear and concern around Tom as his new aggressiveness is a danger to those around him. Some of his key decisions are built around people finding their inner rage.
What worked so well about this concept is the fact that a lot of Tom’s decisions were not necessarily bad ones. They were fueled by the urge to win but at the same time they endangered the lives of the people under his command.
Enter Pope.
Pope, when utilized correctly, is an important voice of reason, as hard as that might be to believe. He was right about Tom, Dan and the Mason family. They did exist in their own little bubble and it was important that they be challenged to ensure they had in mind the best interest of everyone involved. As stupid and insulting as the character could be sometimes when he was on point he could be the most important voice on the show. I wouldn’t necessarily call him an everyman but he sometimes played that part very well.
So when Pope loses his girlfriend Sara due in part to a decision that a more aggressive Tom makes, that should create something really intriguing and exciting. Something that is hopefully different than any of the other countless times the two characters had feuded in the past. It starts out that way. Pope shaves his head and swears that he is going to kill one of Tom’s kids. This time his anger is believable. He’s lost it and his threats feel legitimate. This is something that I could see myself really getting into.
We get one quality episode out of Pope’s quick descent into madness. “Non-Essential Personnel” was a great showcase for Liam Cunningham who was now allowed to play Pope completely unhinged. It was a lot of fun and Tom being in the chase mode trying to save his son who was in legitimate danger was exciting. It ended great, leaving us with room for at least an episode more Pope versus Tom before the final showdown before the Espheni. The problem is, we never get anything else. Pope, one of the key characters, an important voice, disappears for pretty much the rest of the series. He pops up a couple of times to tease his return but when he finally comes back in the series’ penultimate episode “Reunion” he’s on screen for barely a couple of minutes and is seemingly killed in a matter of seconds. We’ve had five years of building animosity between Tom and Pope and it’s wasted in a couple of short scenes. It’s frustrating.
It’s equally frustrating that Tom’s inner rage issues are resolved in an episode that felt like a big waste of time. Tom finds himself being nursed back to health by a family that has somehow managed to be completely untouched by the war. The idea that war on a planetary scale would leave entire regions untouched is definitely feasible but it’s unfortunate that a fairly big plot, Tom’s rage taking over, is concluded on such a soft note with very little development in the overall narrative.
They try to close out Pope’s story in the series finale by having him return and beg Tom to kill him. At this point, Pope just feels like an afterthought. It’s almost as if it was assumed that people would be disappointed if Pope wasn’t in the finale and they needed to find a way to shoehorn him in without breaking the rest of the episode’s plot. It was a disappointing return for a character that deserved a lot better.
There are a few other talking points that I wanted to get to in this season review. The Dornia being completely underutilized from the start of the season was a disappointment. The Maggie, Ben, Hal and Isabella love square was developed way too much for what ended up transpiring in a heated moment during the finale. It was a waste of time and a lot of quality characters were wasted on it. Cochise was great when he was given enough to do but the Volm were a waste and it’s unfortunate that they couldn’t be utilized more this season.
Season 5 of Falling Skies feels like a conclusion to a series that didn’t know it was getting canceled until they started shooting. That’s strange when you consider they announced that this would be the final season on July 28th, 2014. Now there is a lot we don’t know and may never know about this final season. Maybe there was a back and forth on how many episodes they were doing? Maybe actor scheduling became an issue? It’s hard to say. What we ended up with was badly paced leaving a lot of key plot moments stuffed into the latter half of the season with little room to develop and become something that we would be invested in.
