What Falling Skies needs even more than stunt horses and dynamite is a strong female character. By “strong”, I don’t only mean “strong personality”, I also mean “shades of She-Hulk”. A woman who can kick ass and is more than just eye candy in battle scenes. Someone with an attitude and the firepower to go with it.
I had hope Maggie would become the Action Girl, but she didn’t. It seems every time she tries to step up, Hal gets in the way and someone clicks “reset” – and Maggie immediately goes back to being nothing but Hal’s Love Interest. Then we have Anne – she belongs to the lucky few to grab a last name, making her a major character. And frankly, I see nothing wrong with her character. It wouldn’t add up to make the former pediatrician a gunslinging badass. So Maggie obviously doesn’t want to be the asskicking Action Girl, Anne would be horribly out of character if she became one… and that leaves us with Lourdes.
Season 1 didn’t do her any favors. She was the med school student turned nurse aka “person to hand stuff to Anne”, her age was uncertain and besides some minor things that were dropped in season 2 alltogether – what some people see as a crush on Hal, her religious aspect – we didn’t learn a whole lot about her. In season 2, she suddenly had a boyfriend; Jamil and that was it for a long time. Then, we briefly (as in “in 2 or 3 lines”) learned that her family in Mexico was dead. Again, a long break before anything of note happened. When Weaver was infected and close to death, Lourdes turned out to be good for more than handing random instruments to Anne and came up with a way to save Weaver. And then… Jamil died, as I had suspected after hearing that Anne and Lourdes will develop a deeper bond in season 2. The shared experience of loss is likely the trigger to start this development, and it also showed a very different Lourdes than in season 1.
What some call “Emo!Lourdes” is “BadassInTheMaking!Lourdes” to me. In season 2, the friendly, shy, religious girl lost 3 essential things: the hope that her family is alive, her boyfriend and very likely her faith. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, even if Lourdes doesn’t give much about this phrase. She has nothing left to lose. You know who else went on a vendetta after losing everything that had any meaning? The Punisher.
Here is the future of Lourdes. If not in the real Falling Skies, it’s certainly her spaghetti western AU future. Upgraded to main character with one of the most legendary spaghetti western last names, I present:
circusofscars 