Episode 5: Love and Other Acts of Courage
I took a couple of days off from watching this season to watch some movies and to not feel so, um, pre-weepy for a couple of days. I watched the first disk over two days instead of one which allowed me a little more time to reflect on it. I'm at the point where I have become emotionally invested in the story and it's characters. This is what good stories do, they make you, or perhaps the better terminology is, allow you to care about the characters in enough intensity that it transcends the amount of time spent viewing/listening/reading the story. A good story also provide an amplified intensity of the emotions you're feeling that you don't typically get from entertainment across the various media. Some stories make you laugh, this one makes me hold my breath and get all dewey-eyed. Aside from maybe some more of the laughing bit, I don't think I can really ask for a story to do more for me.
Episode 6: Homecoming
Sometimes the best part of a story is that you, the reader/viewer/listener, know what's going to happen but the characters in the story do not. Really good thrillers work this way, whether they're psychological, emotional or physical or more likely some combination of these. This is akin to foreshadowing but typically less subtle as the storyteller had to make sure that you know something is going to happen that the characters don't. Though, I suppose if it's told well, even if the audience misses the hints, the story is still suspenseful, because now they are identifying with the characters who also did not see it was coming. I think for great stories, while this technique may be applied from the beginning, it is put to best use once you have a vested interest in the bad thing, whatever is being built up towards, not happening. The technique is applied as the action builds until it reaches it's crescendo, whether that be the high point of the section or of the whole story arc, and then it is dropped immediately after the big reveal so that the audience can commiserate with the characters. Often this is the point where the storyteller may give the audience one last glimpse of how, let's say, the missing character's return is worse than just the sour homecoming we've have witnessed.
Episode 7: Molon Labe
I have to assume that the name of this episode must be the name of one of it's characters, and since I know the names of all of the human resistance it must therefore be the name of one of the aliens. Look at me all mixing up my inductive and deductive reasoning skills to arrive at some conclusion which I will assume is correct until I check it on Wikipedia, which won't be until I'm caught up with the series of which I am fully one season behind on at this point.
I enjoy stories that while episodic in nature has a larger story arc and the accompanying structure in place. Some series have multiple arcs going - the arc of the episode, a several episode arc, a seasonal arc meaning the current season of the show and a show arc. It seems fairly rare in American television to have more than two of these occurring in the same series, especially the show arc because most shows get cancelled instead of planning on going for a set number of shows and then stopping. Falling Skies has evidence of all four types of arcs in play, the only time will bare out if the show arc pans out or not. All I do know is that so far, so good.
Falling Skies on IMDb
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