YMMV / Falling Skies

• Actor/Role Confusion: In the beginning it took an episode or so for viewers who had watched a lot of ER to stop wondering why "Carter" wasn't the doctor.
• Alas, Poor Scrappy: Yes, she killed Lourdes, and she tried to brainwash Ben into having a Face–Heel Turn. But Lexi eventually realized what the Espheni were doing and teamed up with the 2nd Mass to strike a critical blow against them, and she lost her life in the process.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Considering how ruthlessly devoted Karen becomes towards the Espheni cause, it makes you wonder whether she was really brainwashed or she has always harbored misanthropic tendencies and the Espheni just provided her with an outlet.
• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • The "final" clash between Pope's turncoats and the 2nd Mass is nothing more than a shootout that lasts about two minutes, and ends with Pope supposedly dying while hiding near barrels containing flammable fluids.
  • The Espheni Queen. After she and Tom talk to each other briefly, the Queen starts sucking on Tom's blood while he's stuck to a wall. Then Tom grabs the Dornian weapon, allows it to poison his blood, and after the Queen consumed the poisoned blood, she combusts.
  • Pope's true final confrontation with Tom in the finale. Fatally wounded, he begs Tom to kill him with his gun. He doesn't, and then Pope succumbs to his wounds.
• Broken Base: The finale. No one can agree on how they felt about the show's ending. Some say it was satisfying, and that they were pleased with the relatively happy ending. Some say that it was rushed and should've been longer, but was still quite satisfying given what the creators had to work with. Some say it was a terrible episode filled with a horrible Anti-Climax Boss, a Deus ex Machina, and only showed the deaths of a couple of Mauve Shirts. Some people liked the episode, but will fully admit that Pope's death was pointless, that Anne should've stayed dead, and that the Espheni Queen's Freudian Excuse was terrible. Some people found the finale dull and forgettable, and so on and so forth...
• Critical Dissonance: Season 5. Several critics have showered the season with praise, and it currently holds an 80% rating over on Rotten Tomatoes. A portion of the fans, however, believe that the season is filled with way too much Filler, atrocious writing (especially with the way Pope's character was handled), new characters who keep getting introduced, and a blatantly obvious rushed plot. However, both fans and critics agree that the series finale was a huge letdown, even for those who enjoyed Season 5.
• Fan Nickname: Early on for Lourdes: "God girl.", but that subplot seems to have been dropped in the second season.
  • Before the writers said they were called "Overlords" fans called the tall aliens "Slenders" or "Skinnies"
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Most of the alien characters, really.
  • Everybody loves Cochise, the noble and dignified Volm warrior played by beloved creature performer Doug Jones. Especially after the beautiful "Catarius flower" speech he gives in 3x04.
  • Red Eye, the badass Skitter warrior and leader of the Skitter resistance. May he rest in peace.

• Fanon:
  • For the first two seasons (before the harnesses got dropped for other plots) there there were a lot of fans who thought that the harnesses turn humans into skitters. Admittedly harnessed humans have been shown in various states of gray-green skin creeping across their faces, and the harnesses have some absolute effect on their wearers, however there has never been any solid evidence that skitters are changed humans. Karen has been harnessed and heavily used by an Overlord for a very long time yet she still maintains a human skin tone and doesn't show any signs of sprouting extra limbs. As a matter of fact in season 2 the red-eye skitter says that skitters are an enslaved race from another planet. However this has not stopped fans from insisting on the "harnesses turn their wearers into skitters". While the writers continue to leave this ambiguous, the fanon continues.
  • The Espheni introduce a system of turning adult humans into creatures in season 4, but this is different from the harnessing children seen in earlier seasons.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Season 4 and beyond have a lot for many fans of the first three seasons to dislike and want to disregard as non-canon. The Skitter Rebellion and the stabilization of the new government under Porter and Peralta both amount to nothing, as those characters suffer abrupt Uncertain Doom fates at best. Weaver's surviving daughter is abruptly kidnapped, and despite hints of a Rescue Arc, merely ends up as a source of Collateral Angst. Tom and Anne's daughter Lexi becomes a base-breaking Wild Card. Lourdes (whose religious beliefs previously got a nuanced portrayal and who just got out of being a mind-controlled spy) ends up as a Straw Character worshipping Lexi. Some fanfiction has the point of divergence a bit earlier due to wanting stories where Karen forms an Enemy Mine situation with the heroes after releasing Anne and Lexi at the end of season 3 instead of being rejected and shot.
• Fridge Horror: When Anne and Lourdes dissect the Skitter and realize that the Skitters are harnessed.
• He's Just Hiding: Almost no one believes that Pope died after his brief shootout with Mason in the penultimate episode. And as it turns out, he wasn't dead.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In an 2013 interview for Season 4, Doug Jones joked that he hoped Cochise would get a love interest that season, even if it was a human woman. Just wait four years, Doug.
• Jerkass Woobie: Weaver. After we find out what happened to his family, it's hard not to forgive him for his Jerkass tendencies.
• Like You Would Really Do It:
  • We all knew that Pope wouldn't leave Mason to die in the forest.
  • And that Hal would survive his "surgery" and would be rid of the bug inside him forever.
  • And that Hal and Maggie wouldn't suffocate to death after being trapped in a room after Lourdes blew up the Charleston HQ.
  • And that Anne and Alexis weren't really dead.
  • Subverted with Pope in Season 5. He didn't die in the penultimate episode, but when he shows up in the series finale, we find out that he was gravely wounded from the explosion. And then he dies anyway.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: The 2014 licensed video game unfortunately is an XCOM: Enemy Unknown clone with bad enemy artificial intelligence and poor graphics.
• Romantic Plot Tumor: Most of the relationships involving the Mason family qualify, but by far the worst is the Hal/Maggie/Ben Love Triangle in later seasons. This ended up evolving into a love square in Season 5 when Isabella showed up.
• Sci-Fi Ghetto: An odd case. Whole episodes seem to go by where the whole "invaded by aliens" plot is just in the background as character development takes place, causing a Broken Base. Some fans love the story arcs that focus only on the characters in the show, but the scifi fans get frustrated at the lack of actual science fiction going on in a show with already short (10-episode) seasons. For two episodes straight in season 3, the only aliens seen (skitters, all) only show up as antagonists in very short (thus cheap) CGI scenes as antagonists, and one skitter in a short scene mostly there to hand over the Applied Phlebotinum.
• The Scrappy: Lexi Mason. Moral Myopia abounds to the point of hypocrisy. She's definitely some kind of Sue with alien powers and everyone on the human side either wanting to understand her or unable to stop her.
• Seasonal Rot: The odd directions of season 3-4 make people wonder if this show is just going with the flow instead of leading somewhere. Season 5 only exacerbates this — see Broken Base.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • The Skitter Rebellion is indicated to have been completely smashed in Season 4, despite being played up as a large plot point in Seasons 2 and 3, and offering a new dynamic with the aliens the series otherwise did not show.
  • Everything regarding Caitlin and Brian in Season 5. They were siblings who survived for months on their own, and the latter of which was part Skitter. They easily could've been the center of a subplot focusing on how the 2nd Mass would deal with Brian, or even attempting to use Brian as an ally against the Espheni, similar to Red-Eyes. Instead, Caitlin is accidentally shot by Brian, and Brian turns the gun on himself. Both of these characters are quickly forgotten about.
  • [[spoiler Pope losing his mind and declaring war on the Mason family]] in Season 5. With the Espheni crippled, it looks to be the main source of danger throughout the season and could have been the perfect culmination of five years of Character Development for Tom and Pope. Instead, Pope vanishes after one standout episode, reappears in the penultimate episode for a two minute firefight that severely wounds him, and turns up at the end of the series finale simply to say a few words and perish anticlimactically from his wounds. The whole arc results in nothing of consequence and almost seems like an afterthought after a while.
• Trapped by Mountain Lions:
  • Nearly every subplot involving the Mason family. Many seem to think that in a world with humans fighting a war against a technologically superior alien force, the Mason family drama (as well as general hero worship of the Masons) is the least interesting part of the show.
  • Near the end of Season 5, the Mason family is put on trial in a Kangaroo Court situation that lasts two whole episodes and ignores the main plot entirely. This occurred right after a Filler episode where Tom was stuck on a farm.
• The Un-Twist: Not too many people believed that Karen really killed Anne and Alexis, so when it was revealed that they were alive in the Season 3 finale, even fewer people were surprised. It really didn't help that Moon Bloodgood, the actress portraying Anne, was listed in the credits at the beginning of the episode. Also it is worth noting that to kill a major character for real offscreen and simply having it mentioned would have been simply bad writing in averting the Rule of Drama.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: For a cable television series, the special effects are very good.

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