Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Falling Skies: episode one

The series kicks off with nicely done visuals, cute-but-annoying kids and an unwelcome product plug ? but a lot of potential. What did you think?

Spoiler alert: Don't read on if you haven't watched the first episode of Falling Skies on FX. If you've seen later episodes please be aware that many UK viewers have not ? and don't post spoilers

Welcome to the series blog for Falling Skies, the new TV science-fiction drama brought to you by Steven Spielberg (apparently in association with RipStik ? more on that later). There are no guarantees in the world of television science fiction, so I should point out that if the show drops massively in quality or the viewing figures are microscopic then we'll knock this on the head. None of us wants to get stuck into another Outcasts, we all expended enough time and energy on that dud. So use it or lose it, people.

So, how was the start? In the US they debuted this by screening the first two episodes; here we got just the one, making it a little tougher to gauge where this is going. We had a lot of exposition-filled dialogue ? fair enough I suppose as they had a lot to get through. But it's hard to see the characters as much more than ciphers when they say things like: "Ever the history professor" and "I grant you a great deal of those books were military history." It got the job done but did so without much style or grace, and all seemed rather perfunctory.

Of course some characters came across better than others. I liked Will Patton as the gruff Captain Weaver, a man of few words and all of them delivered as if he'd swallowed a handful of gravel and washed it down with battery acid. Noah Wyle as Professor Mason makes a good everyman type, sensible and level-headed. Peter Shinkoda as Dai also made a little go a long way. The only other standouts did so for the wrong reasons: Drew Roy as Hal, one of Mason's boys, was shown as a young hothead whose "bravery" is going to get a lot of people in trouble. In this first episode alone he had to be physically restrained by his dad twice to prevent him from getting himself killed.

Mason's youngest, Matt, became a bit of a pain, too. It's hard sticking kids into science fiction or horror, where they usually become a mixture of the popular tropes of the wise fool who sums up situations with naive simplicity and the damsel in distress who's just there to be rescued. They're often more of a plot device or a false-emotion generator than anything else. It didn't help that every time Matt spoke they cranked up the soft, sensitive piano music on the soundtrack as if it's his ringtone. It's tempting to think these scenes are the ones that most bear the mark of the show's producer, but Spielberg always handled the soppy kids' stuff in a far more sophisticated way. Writer of tonight's episode was Graham Yost, who is the developer of Justified ? writing for kids is hardly his comfort zone, so we'll let that one slide.

It was the RipStik scene that annoyed me the most. I spent a lot of the show wondering what a RipStik is (it's a brand of caster board, which is a kind of funny-shaped skateboard). Would it have killed them to have changed it to something more generic? As it is, it's a bit of an advert for RipStik. The only thing that saved that scene was the realisation that the child soldiers were only a few years older than the non-combatant Matt. It seemed a long and clumsy way to make that point, though.

Still, there's plenty that's good. The opening sequence of kids' drawings to fill in the background of the alien invasion was nicely done, although it did make you wish they'd been as creative with the rest of the exposition. The alien effects were good and we got a few nice clear looks at them. I look forward to finding out more about their dastardly alien ways. The raid in the warehouse was well done too, as was the scene where Mason found that dead child with the creepy biomechanical mind-control harness hanging off him.

All told, I liked it, more for its potential than for its execution so far, but we didn't really get a fair chance with only one episode. I'll definitely be back next week ? it's off to a better start than V or The Event. How was it for you? Will you be returning next week or are you already using the phrase "jumped the RipStik" to describe a show's failure?


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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2011/jul/05/falling-skies-series-blog

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