Gone are the days when aliens were benevolent beings who came here to teach us intergalactic wisdom, made first contact, turned grumpy old people into fun-loving youngsters, or healed our wounds with glowing fingers. Seems you can’t set foot outside the exosphere these days without aliens using human beings as the other, other white meat. So let’s try on the latest in tinfoil hat apparel as we probe the nether regions of this month’s abductee, [Falling Skies Thursdays, 8:30pm on Foxtel’s Fox8].
Falling Skies is a sci-fi thriller series that picks up 6 months after our planet has been successfully made the bitch of a marauding extra-terrestrial species known as Skitters. The Skitters, which bear an unfortunate resemblance to angry lobsters with a serious drooling problem when they’re not outside their mechanical suits (or Mechs), seemingly conquered Earth with little fuss at all. Obviously our armed forces didn’t have a pot of boiling water, some elastic bands and a pan of melted butter big enough. They have since started terraforming the planet to resemble their own, making huge bio-mechanical cities and stealing our water, presumably to build really big aquariums. They’ve also knocked out Earth’s entire power grid and suppress electrical energy with a permanent EMP device, meaning we’re all back in the 9th century.
One of the human beings they overlooked during the cull, possibly because he hasn’t really done much since E.R, is Noah Wylie as Tom Mason. A former history teacher who suddenly finds himself without any history to teach, Mason is attempting to find other survivors to form a resistance against the Crabs from the Crab Nebula. Tom’s 17 year old son is a fellow survivor, but his daughter and wife are missing. Why is it we’re now in the 21st Century and 99.9% of all plot-lines in these things still revolve around a decent family man risking hell and high water to be re-united with his wife and kid? Could we have a few programs where the hero is a gay man who travels the country helping survivors whilst looking for his boyfriend and his mother?
Anyway, Tom has soon formed a small posse of civilians who are ready to kick whatever bio-mechanical extraterrestrial lobsters have in place of an arse, ably helped by a female doctor and (sigh) potential love interest, played by an actress with the awesome name of Moon Bloodgood (Terminator Salvation). Also on hand; apocalypse movie veteran, and Kevin Costner survivor, Will Patton (No Way Out, The Postman, Waterworld) as Colonel Wheaton, possibly the last surviving military man on the planet. The mis-matched and frightened survivors must band together and defeat the exoskeletoned extraterrestrials without the aid of any weapons or electrical power.
Gavin Pitts
