I gave Falling Skies a chance. I like my sci-fi dark.
I like my characters to undergo a personal transformation by fire, and come out on the other side. Some make it. Some don't.
Noah Wylie (see second pic) is a great lead, a father, history teacher, who is the narrator by proxy; it is through his eyes and heart that we experience the alien invasion. And these aliens are bad-ass, and they have mech soldiers to rip flesh into ashes, and they take control of children via Alien-meets-Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and through the horrible experience the creators make sometimes profound and sometimes mundane observations & reflections about the nature of man, the nature of democracy, the nature of war, and parenthood.
It is good TV.
However the more I watched it the more I just wanted to start watching Battlestar Galactica all over again. BSG won a Peabody Award, for excellence, and reflected post 9-11 culture, from the suicide bombers perspective, the perspective of the oppressed. Now Falling Skies succeeds in this as well--putting the good guys in perilous moral predicaments, however BSG's aesthetic trumps Falling Skies dated paradigm of the resistance. A proto-alpha male backbone, FS's heroes feel dated. Forced. Perhaps overwritten. AMC's Walking Dead hobo survivors are like BSG's characters, rooted in personal drama and complex, and while I was watching FS I kept waiting for TWD's survivors to show up and take care of business.
BSG put a female teacher as the leader of the dwindling human population and played up the personal defects of Commander Adama and his children: Lee, his "adopted" Kara, and his crew. There are so many strong female leads in the show it would be tedious to list them all; the characters are put through the emotional ringer, especially Kara and President Rosalin who are equally headstrong and often arrogant and suffer hubris.
And back to the aliens...FS aliens are two faced, a mech soldier and the alien ugly creatures.BSG also featurs two faced aliens, the mech cyborg cylons--who appear in a variety of forms, and the human models, the AIs that become more and more human as the show progresses. The humanity shown by the Cylons challenge the typical good vs. evil dichotomy. They are humanized. The human Cylon models undergo a spiritual transformation, worshiping one god, vs the humans worship of many gods: a smash up of Norse/Greek/Roman mythologies, which make for an interesting sub-plot in the dystopian drama.
So much of the Cylon threat is psychological for Gaius Baltar, the show's genius anti-hero Lothario, who falls in love with sexy Six that exists entirely in his head and heart (see top pic).
BSG's scope lead them to explore prison relations and consensual slavery, religious freedom and religious fanaticism, union strikes, racial tension, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now BSG did have five seasons to develop a rich and profound, not mention visually stunning, oeuvre. But FS just seems a little, produced, canned, forced. Part of the problem is that the scope is derivative, borrowing tropes from a variety of sources.
But it is their first season.
The mini-series that begins BSG is great, and sets the misc-en-scene, it's not nearly as tense as the first episode of season one proper, "33", where the Cylons psychologically screw with the humans; tracking them through hyper space and attacking them every 33 minutes, the news leaks that the Cylons look like humans now, which prompts the last scraps of humanity to turn on each other, a theme that continues throughout the show.
FS, if given the legs might get a chance to grow some wings and fly. Many sci-fi series start off a bit weak: The X-files and Buffy come to mind (monster of the week and the Master paled to later story lines)
Give them a season to get their legs underneath them and the quality might improve.
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