Falling Skies Season 4 Premiere "Ghost in the Machine" Review

WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THIS EPISODE

            Falling Skies is now back on television with the premiere of season four. In this episode, on the group’s return to home, they are attacked by more aliens that have been attacking them throughout the whole series. Some are trapped, and some get away. Skip to four months later and some are in prison while others are in Chinatown, which is not getting attacked, and some are against Chinatown.

            Overall, I enjoyed this episode. Though, it would be hard for it to be boring. It’s a sixty minute T.V. show, and only about 45 of those minutes are the actual episode. And this episode was very fast-paced. Almost all of it had to do with the plot. Though, that is a negative as well as a positive. Because of this, we don’t learn anything new about the characters. That causes aspects of this episode to be bland.

            I didn’t really care about the characters in this episode. When Hal and Pope got in a fight, I didn’t care. And because I didn’t care about the characters, events in the plot start to become dull if they have to do with the characters. I’m not saying that this episode got truly boring. I’m saying not all of this episode was as entertaining as it could have been. I was not bored by this episode. I was simply not invested into the entire episode. There were some parts that I was invested into. I was very interested in the people who were not imprisoned, but not in Chinatown. Some factors of Chinatown were interesting. I liked the conversation between Tom and Cochise. This episode just had room for improvement.

            For a flaw I have with this episode, I have several nit-picks with it. I will present some of them here. At the beginning, when the aliens drop the wall things down on them, why did they send a big machine to fire at them if their goal is to imprison the humans and not kill the humans? Why did they let some adults, like Maggie, get away when they dropped the walls to the prison? They did not want to imprison the children, but they did not imprison all of the adults. When did the aliens decide to drop the buildings for the prison down on the people? Where did Tom get a flamethrower and motorcycle when he did his vigilante thing? At the end, we see that in the ship, they have cameras to look into the jail cells. An alien leader notices the poster thing of “Ghost” on the wall. If the aliens could notice this, how could they not notice the map on Tom’s wall when he took the mirror off or Cochise stand right outside the prison? I have more nit-picks, but there are some of them.

            Overall, this was definitely not a bad episode, but not a solidly good one. It is an alright episode. I did think of it slightly positively, but it definitely had room for improvement and I think the show will get better as it goes throughout the season.