Saturday, July 25, 2015

Falling Skies 5:04: "Pope Breaks Bad"

“What if one person was your greater good?”
- Pope

To say there is dissention in the ranks would be somewhat of an understatement. Tom finds Pope burying Sarah in the woods and sort of half-ass offers condolences. Pope is clearly still furious with Tom for not going to save Sarah before taking out the Espheni breeding facility in last week’s episode. But for a little while, Pope keeps quiet. Well, until Anne completely shuts down Anthony by refusing to give him his gun back and clear him for duty. He’s a loose cannon and they can’t have running around on missions. So now Pope gets his hooks into Anthony a bit and together they start spreading some negativity among the ranks. They point out to a bunch of guys that if it had been Matt or Ben or Hal stuck in the gunk in the forest, Tom would have hauled ass and moved heaven and earth to save them. But since it wasn’t a Mason, Tom didn’t really care. I’m not saying that’s true, although Tom does take his family’s security and safety very seriously. But that could be just a good father.

Cochise (they finally had subtitles with his name so I know how to spell it now!) is also got some drama of his own going on. He’s dying. The Volm have two kidney-like organs and he only has one and it is failing. So he’s going to spend time with his father before he croaks. Naturally, Tom and Anne don’t accept this and Anne goes behind his back and talks to his father about a possible transplant. At first, Cochise doesn’t think it will work. But his father ultimately agrees when Cochise goes on this big long rant about how the human will to live and survive and have hope has rubbed off on him and it seems to have served humanity well in the fight against the Espheni. So now Anne has to perform a transplant on an alien. Good job Anne!

Thanks to Ben doing some research gathering, Tom, Matt, Weaver and a couple other folks head out to an old police cruiser station to get some more gear and wheels to make the trek to Washington DC. Apparently the Espheni are blocking the capitals of a lot of countries but the most is DC. Once they head out, Hal overhears Pope and Anthony drumming up support. Unfortunately, Hal sort of suggests that all of Pope’s prior plans were thinking small (hoarding supplies and the like) so now Pope is going to plan something much bigger. Oops!

The raid on the cruiser depot starts off pretty well. They find some batteries and mace. Oh and some cars that will run and some gas. Oh and they manage to raise a woman in Bolivia on a short-wave radio. Then, of course, things go badly and some of the little weird hybrid bugs that stung Tom swarm out of a building and Tom tries to draw their attention to keep Matt safe. Tom doesn’t notice the open window in the room he ran into so of course they swarm inside with him. But he remembers they have human eyes and maces them all. It gives the gang enough time to get out and head back to camp with their haul. Back at camp, the transplant looks like it’s going well. Cochise even wakes up feeling fine. But alas, his father’s heart has stopped. So when the gang arrives, Anne and Ben grab what they can from a car battery to use to jumpstart the alien’s pumper. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work.

Things between Tom and Pope come to a head when they come back one short. Pope rails that the Masons have come through without a scratch on them and that Tom just sends everyone else to die. Tom throws back that his daughter counts. And then he lights into Pope about being a leader. He even tells Pope to kill him right there. But Pope doesn’t do it. He’s got other plans. And when Tom basically kicks him (and anyone else who wants to follow him) out of the 2nd Mass, Pope puts his plan into action.

In a brief lull before the shit really hits the fan, Anne and Cochise share the silence (which is what he didn’t get to do with his father before he died) and it’s kind of remarkable. Cochise gets to say goodbye to his father’s spirit and Anne gets to say goodbye to Lexi because she’s realized that everything is about Lexi. She was secretly hoping that once the war was over, everyone they’d lost would just be back. It was a touching moment that ends when Anthony ropes Anne into talking about his condition. It’s a rouse to get her into a room with Pope who has now shaved his head. It just makes him look like a crazy White Supremacist to me but whatever. He looks like he’s going to kill Anne and to be honest, that’s kind of what I was expecting going into the scene. By the end, though, I realized that’s not what was going to happen. Sure Pope may have considered offing Anne as payback but when she points out that Tom is fighting for his children and his legacy, you can clearly see that spark something in Pope’s mind. And later that night as Tom is walking in the woods, the Dornia appears to him as Rebecca and says that there’s one final battle that is coming and he needs to be ready. But he also needs to know where Hal is. Of course Pope kidnapped Hal. For one thing, Pope had young kids so I don’t’ think he’d touch Matt and Ben could probably kick his ass. And for another, it was sort of Hal’s suggestion that led Pope to this point. So while the 2nd Mass is marching to Fayetteville, Tom is off to confront Pope and try to save his son.

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