We liked it - will continue to watch.
I liked that they actually showed the aliens and set up the premise of the show in short order - things seemed to move quickly.
Got right to the characters without dragging it out (one of my nitpicks from Super 8) and kept the action going at the same time. For instance, we got to know about the little boy, dad, other two sons all while “stuff” was happening instead of some godawful flashback to having pancakes in the family suburban kitchen.
I guess what I am saying is that the pacing is great in this show - no lulls where you say, “get on with it…” so far.
I don’t mind Noah Wyle’s character being a latent military genius; it’s not without precedent. If that’s even the direction the series takes his character. Could be he’s just the rational POV character.
But realistically, mechanized society is now smashed, and humanity reduced to nomadic groups of 300 or so. The only food, medicine, and ammo to be had are what was “in the pipeline” between farm/factory, warehouse, and store. What happens come winter? Are they going to try to continue to nomad through Massachusetts in winter time?
What about food, long-term? Are they going to try to covertly plant crops with hand tools? John Deere don’t work too damned good when the gas is gone, and the aliens are dropping EMP bombs all over the place. Hand-planting’s back-breaking work like few people nowadays know; animal powered is better, but still much harder than what anyone outside of Amish communities and the rare, few, "back-to-Earth"ers know about.
Everything that we, humans, have at our disposal to fight the aliens has been taken from us (plot-wise, didn’t Capt. Dale Dye say early-on that some militia got potted by the aliens because they used an AT-4 anti-tank missile on the aliens?), with the exception that guns and cars still work to some extent (as long as they have old-style carberation, not ECFI).
There is something to be said for striking now, while there are weapons and bodies enough to make a difference, not next year when lack of food, medicine, and shelter has killed off 2-out-of-3 humans that the aliens haven’t.
This seems, plot-wise, to be war-to-the knife, with an alien (in every true sense of the word) invader, whose motives and goals are unknown to us; nice, civilian sensibilities would be an early casualty.
Do they have more than one dog? Could you make effective suicide bombers out of dogs?
I have the sad feeling that they are going to pull a “Voyager” and ignore such things.
This show could go either way. Hopefully they have a nice story arc and we are going to find out more about the aliens in dribs and drabs. Or it could be commando raid of the week.
I think next week’s episode is going to tell us a lot about which way they are headed with this.
Wasn’t that the argument that was had pretty much at the beginning of the episode?
-Joe
Kind of cliche but not bad so far. The lack of anything good on TV and particularly anything sci-fi means I’ll give it at least 6 eps.
The gunplay was actually pretty reasonable which is something that tends to drive me nuts in shows when no one has any idea how to handle a weapon. But I thought it’d be cooler if they had a more realistic set of weapons. They almost got it right - a few explosives, one special heavy weapon, some scavenged M4s off of army troops - but there was a curious lack of common hunting rifles and shotguns and civilian weapons. Also, where did all the select-fire AKs come from? It would make lots of sense to have semi-auto civilian AK type rifles all over the place as they’re not uncommon, but there’s no reason you’d find any substantial numbers of real deal rock and roll AKMs in the US, especially not Massachusetts.
Good point…how difficult is it to convert them?
Practically impossible - or at least you have to do so much work to do it that if you can you’ve probably got the machinery and expertise to just manufacture entirely new guns. There are requirements on guns imported or made in the US that receivers be modified in a way that you couldn’t put in the necesary parts.
I demand a high level of realism in this sort of thing because half the fun of this type of show is looking at the logistical problems of obtaining food, clean water, guns, ammo, etc. I would enjoy the show much more if they dealt with those problems realistically and came up with practical solutions. So the “we’ve managed to get one .50 and attached it to our best running old car” part is great - that weapon is rarely and valuable - but then the “we have a bunch of old beat up select fire AKs apparently air dropped in from Africa” aspect is mostly nonsensical.
Yes, it’s Boston. They’ve mentioned Jamaica Plain and Back Bay, which are neighborhoods south and west of the center of the city. The 2nd Massachusetts appears to be moving further south and west, out of the city.
The Russians tried that in WWII. I don’t think it worked very well, though. It’s definitely where my mind went when I saw the dog!
It was an OK pilot episode. There just aren’t enough decent SF shows on TV, so I’m going to keep watching and hope it gets a little better. Locking up the leader of those bandits was really transparent way to introduce a recurring villain/ally of circumstance. And the product placement for that damn magic skateboard was downright painful. I hope we won’t have to watch much more of that, but at least we didn’t have to watch the kid escape from aliens on it.
I hope that we do get some real information on why the aliens are here, why their motherships have left, and what the whole deal is. It’s perfectly reasonable to avoid spilling all the beans in the first episode, but I do want some long range story arc that explains it eventually, rather than an endless series of small raids focusing on how many skitters they can kill with objects at hand. I don’t need to feel like Noah Wyle is the lynchpin of the resistance, eventually single-handedly evicting the aliens (I’m fine with following him as a mere cog in the machine) but I do want to see some long-range story.
They should raid a Toys R Us or something and equip ALL the kids with skateboards, bikes, and scooters. Then they can all escape from aliens on it, in the sense of making their group migrations move a little faster in a way that doesn’t waste gasoline. Come winter won’t they want to be a few hundred miles south? An older kid could carry 50 pounds of supplies in a bike basket. Increase the carrying power and you can bring along a few nonessentials like looted My Little Ponies that will increase kid morale and lessen whining.
It’s gonna happen. (Or at least, that was my first thought as I watched that unnecessary, and unnecessarily long scene of kid demonstrating his mad board skills to the all-agog adults…)
The hint dropped that robots were usually made in the image of their makers is interesting, I wonder if the motherships have gone back home to bring the real (bipedal) master aliens to Earth (now that their shock troops have wiped out the major enemy forces).
The show is just interesting enough to keep me watching in spite of the SF Scriptwriting for Dummies feel to it, but I’ll need to see some originality and intelligence coming through in the writing pretty damn soon or I’ll be moving on.
Or, it could have just been a “sometimes we need to take ten minutes and appreciate something nice about life instead of spending all our time either worrying, walking or scrounging” scene.
-Joe
Or it could have been the scourge of Science Fiction shows, “We have to have a kid in it!”
And as soon as we see him save the day because of his skateboarding skills I’ll agree with you - see the insane bit of Jurassic Park 2 with the gymnast girl for the most egregious example ever.
-Joe
It’s a Spielberg show… it has to have cute kids in it.
Its an apocolypse - it has to have kids in it - to present comic relief, “new eyes” solutions and dramatic tension.
The genre is well defined - the pilot pulled in alot of the right elements, lets see where it goes - its 1000000000000000000000 times better than the Killing.
I must have missed a Staff Meeting. 
What does it mean, “The Killing”?
I finally managed to see all of it. Kind of a deus ex machina escape, but I’ll keep watching for a while anyway.