Falling Skies Season 2 Episode 1 Recap – ‘Worlds Apart’

Episode info: The episode premiered on TNT on June 17. It was written by Mark Verheiden and directed by Greg Beeman.

Hal and his silent friend – Falling Skies season 2 premiere

Worlds Apart, the first episode of Falling Skies season 2, was probably the worst in the series so far. And it wasn’t an easy title to win. The episode was the first half of the long double-feature premiere, that moved from pathetic to boring in slow zig-zags.

But before I delve into the little details that stack to my mind from this premiere episode, let me assure you that I wasn’t looking in the newseason of Falling Skies to anything else but its premise. I didn’t care during the first season of the show that the girls were pretty and mostly silent, reduced to the status of potential lover to one hero or another. I didn’t care that the show tried to sell me peace as a pack of guns with good meaning. Those are all parts of the genre, and even if it wasn’t the genre in its best I still enjoyed what season 1 gave me: good humans, bad aliens, and some surprises on the way.

Season 1 ended with Tom, our hero, going with the aliens in the space ship. Season 2 began 3 months later, with Ben and Hal finding their father and Ben accidentally shooting him. This puts Tom on the sick bed, where beautiful doctor Anne treats him until he heals.

While he’s on that bed, he’s dreaming and showing us what we have missed during those last three months – being kept by the vicious aliens, discuss the Nazis and some other ugly but common chapters in human history with them (remember that Tom is a history professor, a naive idea of a symbol-loving screenwriter, since this has nothing to do with the plot – so far), etc etc. Being the only human the aliens let live, Tom is scared they control his mind and that he might be dangerous for his friends/family.

I didn’t like this structure at all, and Tom on the sick bed felt like just an excuse for the flashbacks. We were’ntscared he’s going to die – Spielberg is no Hitchcok and it is the first episode of the season. Putting Tom’s life in so-called danger was a waste that should have been saved from us, at least until the midpoint of the season.

I was disappointed to find out nothing has happened in those three months since Tom was gone. Even his older son Hal and his lady-friend didn’t become much closer. And we’re still stuch with Ben being a super-power kinda guy, without really using it for real drama (oh, yeah, that moment he pushed his older brother. There was THAT).

Moving on to the second part of the season premiere…