Christ on a bike. It was physically painful to watch in every possible way.
Based on a hunch and much theorizing, Tom Mason decides to fly to the moon. With the beamer that was not only shot down by the Volm, but also had an Espheni bomb go off inside. Sound plan. Said beamer being buried under rubble (how? Matt and Weaver spent an entire episode removing rubble?!) is not a problem because Volm are magical and happen to have a secret weapon cache that contains exactly the required tools.
Off they go to recover the cache, and take Matt along for absolutely no reason. It results in a showdown with many explosions and toxic waste, caused by Matt’s Hitler Youth girlfriend (Mira?) who totally unsuspiciously appeared. Tom does the first and possibly only smart thing this season and ties her up, just so his idiot son can free her and have her call an aerial strike. The usual “Matt is in danger, Tom almost dies but makes it out without a scratch and Matt is fine” ensues. They do not recover the magical Volm tool.
Meanwhile, the teams Maggie/Ben and Sarah/Pope compete for the most cringeworthy scenes. (Spoiler: They’ll both lose this contest, despite best efforts.) Apparently, Sarah’s fade out speech about being a new person contained something about painkillers? I have no idea, but Pope is all upset when he sees her with a pill bottle. After Super Maggie threw a piece of concrete on Sarah by accident, because Maggie is now She-Hulk. In turn, this accident also leads to Ben teaching Maggie about her super powers and, as absolutely everyone ever expected, they now have a magical spike connection and kiss. Hal sees it, of course, to further the “love triangle drama” absolutely no-one ever wanted to witness. Conclusion: Hal punches Ben; Sarah takes off with a rifle and Pope will very likely go after her next episode because it’s such an uncharacteristic thing for him to do.
The cringe contest is won by team Ann/Tom when Tom proposes in a world that has neither state nor church, Ann accepts and then Weaver marries them. Seriously, the fuck? Volm to the rescue even in this situation, as Cochise’s second in command interupts the “human ritual” with news about the beamer. The magical Espheni Candy Lipstick can make the beamer dig itself out and fly! MOON, HERE WE COME.
Geez am I excited for next week. No, really, I want to know if it can possibly get any more nonsensical and awkward than this.
circusofscars 
I’ve officially given up on this abortion of a show. The first 4 episodes of this season gave me hope that the real Falling Skies writers had been freed from whatever creative Guantanamo Bay they’d been exiled to since S2, but the last episodes have been so terrible that I think they just died and were replaced by a crew of mentally challenged monkeys. This is Sharknado without the enjoyable cheese.
A wedding? Please tell me you made that up. The moon? Going to the moon with your 10-year-old son? Pope turned into a whiny little pussy?I don’t think I have the vocabulary to express how incredibly bad all of this is, but you pretty much summed it up well.
They fucked the duck toward the end of S2 by bringing the alien pregnancy into it, refused to listen to the fans who hated where the show was going, and signed the death warrant with all the soap opera bullshit. Falling Skies had great potential to be a long-running series. Who dies, who survives, and how do they rebuild? Unfortunately, I no longer give a frog’s watertight ass about any of the characters. I hope they all die in the bloodiest and most entertaining way.
It has much of a car crash factor (and I have nothing else to watch, everything else is on hiatus…) for quite a while. In this entire mess, the thing that bothers me most is that in season FOUR, it has still not been explained or even speculated why the hell the Espheni are even there. They have no reason for anything. Take children and harness them. Gather metal. Build various bases, power sources, prisons. FOR WHAT? I’m fine with those things being a mystery in season 1, when the focus is on introducing the characters and situation. But FOUR YEARS, and not a single theory has been uttered by anyone? “Oh, hey look, the skitters now wear giant headphones and dance in circles every 4 hours sharp, that’s new, but whatever, let’s move on.” I’m no guerilla warfare expert, but I would think that the people who fight these aliens for YEARS would be interested in their enemy’s goal.
Wedding, sadly not made up at all. The saddest part, however, is that early in the episode, Tom and Ann had – probably for the first time – a somewhat believable conversation (except for the part where they finally both say they still have hope for Lexi…). Then, that brief moment of an authentic couple is destroyed by a freaking proposal on bended knees and all. Ann had a flower in her hair. Weaver had one in his pocket. 2 scenes earlier, the area was covered in snow, there’s not even a place where they would have found a damn flower. Nothing about this makes sense; nothing at all.
The moon, you BET the entire Mason clan goes. During the Hitler Youth stand off I thought Tom would – as usual – surrender and be taken on a ship, and conveniently be brought to the moon base for interrogation or something. But nope. They’ll actually take a beamer. Where their understanding of the technology extends to “it flies if you blow in this dog whistle we’re using as high tech alien device”.
Funny thing about Pope, I expected the character would be ruined when a love interest would show up. But the writers managed to write him to a bad parody of his previous self long before that. There was even cheerleading for Tom Mason. Y’know, the guy he permanently and exclusively complained about all season 3 long. Now with Sara(h?), it just got worse – zero chemistry, even less than Hal and Maggie (which is now full blown Ben and Maggie, also with little chemistry but a creepy vibe due to him being 17 and her 32 or something…), and their scenes are… I have no idea. It’s like they pull a new “issue” out of thin air every time a camera points at them. “I’m tough” – “Yeah, me too” – “…ohwait, now I’m so shocked” – “Knew it”. Next scene: “I saw you take painkillers, go away” – “It was aspirin, I’m leaving!” Huh?
I predicted the finale of season 5 (how? JUST HOW did they get a 5th season??) – Lexi sacrifices herself for the Masons, Tom blubbers about how nothing could defeat her human spirit, Mason Group Hug under the clear night sky where Espheni ships are leaving Earth for good. No-one who isn’t named Mason has any part in the final episode, except Weaver, who tells Tom cheerfully that he was right all along and how foolish it was to ever doubt a Supermason. Then they all laugh and credits roll.