Falling Skies S4Follow

Honestly, my issue isn't necessarily with this seasons story line (at least what it looks like it's going to be), but with the fact that they wrote themselves into a corner with regard to the alien actions last season, and now "poof!" it's just gone. Last season, the bad guys were literally building a system to exterminate all the humans on the planet. What changed? If the good aliens left, giving them sufficient control on Earth to do what they're doing, then why bother doing it? It's kinda hard to imagine that a galaxy spanning alien race is this disorganized in its planning.

Basically, the aliens choices look like they have nothing to do with any sort of logic or reason and everything to do with what "cool idea" some writer came up with absent any consideration of how that fits with the cool idea they ran with before this one came along. And that's exactly the kind of poor writing that ruins sci-fi IMO. Maybe they'll come up with some kind of rational explanation, but I'm not holding my breath on how believable it'll be. I suppose it's possible that they've decided that Lexi represents something important enough to save humanity for? Dunno. But then that means that the events of the last season were really kind of meaningless since the aliens knew about her the whole time (well, about half the season anyway, if we assume her hybrid nature was an actual accident and not planned all along). So why'd they continue trying to wipe out all the humans? Again, I'm kinda left with the only thing that changed was that this is a new season and the writers came up with a new story arc and didn't really care if it made sense. It's like "Ok. Last season, the big threat was a giant series of energy beams that would wipe out all humanity. How about this season the aliens decide to put the adults in ghettos while the children are put in re-education camps? We'll even make them wear uniforms that ensure the audience can't miss the **** reference. This will be so cool!".


And that's not counting the introduction of the sci-fi series killer (the "star child"). I'm not holding out much hope for the series lasting past this season. Never know though.

Well. Last nights episode confirmed that Lexi's "condition" was intentional. Which still leaves us with the question of why they proceeded with the original plot. I suppose you could consider this a contingency or something, but that's a lot of planning for failure going on there IMO. At least they're not going full bore with the whole "magic child saves the day" bit. Well, at least not yet.

SpoilerI enjoyed the "break out" sequence. Good clean fun storytelling, with the requisite bits (Old man falls behind and is killed. Selfish guy rises to the occasion to save the day. Yadda yadda). But at the end of it all, I was like "Wait a minute! That's all they had to do?". Um... Couldn't anyone have just blown up the damn tether at any point? I get the whole "need a distraction to climb over the fence in the magic suit" bit. But... isn't that a terrible security method? You're rounding up people who have been part of an armed resistance movement for years now. You know there's no way to catch everyone. In fact, your whole system assumes that some will remain free and cause trouble (that is presumably the whole point of the re-education camps for the kids). This is a worldwide system of ghettos. Are you seriously suggesting it never occurred to a single person who was outside the ghetto to just blow up the tether so that those inside could escape? Hell. The alien guy was right outside the damn fence talking to Mason. He's like "sorry, can't help you". All they needed him to do was shoot the tether with one of his energy weapons at say midnight tomorrow and the exact same escape plan would have worked. Except without the need to do things like lure all the skitters away, or the drama of someone having to climb over the fence, or... Oh yeah. Drama for drama's sake.

sigh...

I mean, you didn't even need a friendly alien to help out. Any random group of people with some explosives (like say all those people who weren't caught initially) could have done it. I get that they needed to do a whole sequence of "stuck in a ghetto" for some reason, but this was just weak writing. There are any number of better obstacles to put in their path than what they came up with. I swear that writers are just getting dumber and dumber.