Episode Reviewed: Falling Skies: Homecoming

They are all screwed...

In A Nutshell:
Karen's back. No harness, but lots of Ben's Captain America powers. Naturally, they shut her up in the hospital and have Ben, who thinks she's got major ulterior motives, keep watch on her. Hal's going nuts about the whole situation, the bulk of 2nd Mass is suspicious, and Two-Gun Maggie, well, take a wild guess. And at the same time, Weaver's getting very sick, and someone else returns to the 2nd Mass.

The Good: 
I saw the promo for this episode, and I thought to myself, "if this is a love triangle episode, I will never watch this show again." Fortunately, this was not a love triangle episode. Instead, the episode is used to take the story in a new direction, ending in a cliffhanger that poses questions and gets you excited for next week. Pretty much every scene with Karen (Jessy Schram did a great job this episode as a still creeptastic Karen) in it, you can't help but think, "this is not gonna end well", and I think they just did a good job speeding up the story, and they actually managed to characterize Ben a bit more beyond "angsty, sociopathic, spikey Captain America". Seeing Karen and Ben interact in this episode was also pretty interesting. The bottom line was that this episode not only improved things a bit from the last two, pretty weak episodes, while showing us where the story is heading and posing some new questions along the way. Plus, who didn't get a weird kick out of seeing Maggie with the two guns again?


The Bad:
The b-plot with Weaver being sick felt a bit contrived. It was kind of like the writers knew that they didn't have enough material with Karen to support an entire 40 minute episode, so they came up with something random and somewhat irrelevant to kill 15 minutes (at least they didn't go the Alcatraz route and use flashbacks of some random character we don't give a damn about). I think they might have been trying to develop Tom more by putting him in a position he doesn't like, but that was not what made up the bulk of this subplot, making it all the more tacked on.

Final Rating: 88%