In other news:
Falling Skies renewed for a second season
Been watching, haven’t caught last week’s yet. I’m enjoying it, mostly.
Yes, absolutely. He was a friggin’ murderous criminal before the incident, and his behavior with his group shows he is just a liability. I’m sure they’re going for the “but maybe he knows things they need, like how to kill Skitters” and “maybe his personality is a survival function for humans” or whatever. Blah, he is not an asset to them at that time, and they don’t need a drain on their resources. Wax him fast, take the weapons and any supplies the girl shows them, and move on. Use what info he dumped to Professor Soldier and move on.
It’s not meant to be a direct analogue. More of a motivational/inspirational comparison.
I took it as a simple matter of starting big and working down the chain. First wipe out the capitols and largest population centers - no need for everyone since they only want kids anyway. The military was eliminated in one fell swoop, too - too much hassle to deal with, make it go away. Now start in the big cities and do your round up/weed out/snatch kids routine. Kill off adults and infants, keep workable kids in harness. Start with groups of a million, work down from there. When run out of groups of a million, move down to groups of 100,000. Then groups of 10,000. Rinse, repeat. It’s simple numbers. They got down to groups of 1000, so make smaller groups. Once they seek out and sort groups of 1000, then they’ll aim at groups of 500, or 300, or whatever. It’s simply logistics - focus on the most productive size you have to work with, and only go after the smaller groups later.
This! Well, it’s not the mothership, but still, what makes them think they can raid an enemy compound to make off with a kid? What makes them think that making off with a harnessed kid is smart. Sure, you get your kid back, now what do you do with him? Is he still under the influence of the harness? Can they track him? Continue to control him? Get info on you from him? Okay, I understand they tried at first and then found out it kills the kids. Why are they so caught up with “rescuing” their specific children, when right now the rescue doesn’t consist of helping unharness the kids, only either killing them or putting yourself and the rest of your group in danger?
But that’s the point, they don’t have enough bodies to make a difference now. They only succeed on the small scale actions because the Skitters aren’t really concerned with the small scale actions. If the attacks become to severe, they wipe everyone out, no fuss just muss. The humans are scattering and running now because they can’t effectively fight, only get slaughtered. Right now it’s about survival. They hope to learn enough to be able to develop effective means of larger scale resistance, but the primary goal now is to stay small enough not to be sought out by the Skitters, and avoid drawing attention they otherwise wouldn’t get.
The Skitters are working on a two prong algorithm.
-
Deal with population by size, largest groups first, unless
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If a population group attacks/resists/makes a mess, deal with them, then proceed to 1.
Yes, that’s a brilliant idea. Right now they seem to have settled in the school area, but presumably they may need to run in the future again. Why not stock up now?
Bingo.
Yes, I’m so annoyed by the whole “let’s pray together” thing. Surely somebody is out there, “I didn’t believe in God before this mess happened, why would I start now?”
Interesting visual… “Quick, hide behind the fat girl!” I think this is just standard Hollywood filter on humanity. If it helps, you can imagine one of the hot girls used to be fat, but doesn’t have as much to eat now. And imagine a giant mole on another one. 
Yeah, that was telegraphed and painful. I was hoping they’d make the point how dumb it was to lose your cool, but I guess the kid with the dog was making that point, so this point had to be “we can’t resolve the main character’s biggest hurdle right away”.
Why should they resemble mammals? I suppose if we’re going to independently evolve sentient life, it is plausible somewhere out there another group also evolved hair/fur, and the survival benefits that construes. But from a writer’s perspective, there’s something about making the aliens more alien and less pleasant if you go with bugs as your inspiration. It triggers the innate creepy meter.
Throwing more money down the hole in my opinion. I think I’m done with this one, nothing about it is holding my interest. It’s just bad.maybe things will change and I’ll be forced to catch up but until then I can watch plenty of failed sci-fy movies with better plots actors and special effects.
Here is the fact you are all not getting
It isn’t about the tech or the military “realness” or sci-fi
It is a drama about an occupied people!!!
It is a drama about a resistance movement!
The aliens and the invasion are the Mcguffin to do a show about an occupation and resistance movement … Much like the original “V” (not the wacky weird new thing)
I usually don’t nitpick these shows, but I’m really wondering about this - in this week’s episode (7/17 - “Sanctuary”), the returning resistance fighter says there is an impending skitter attack on the camp, and tells Weaver their orders are to send the children ahead to safety (a cabin “Sanctuary”) and wait for the Mass 3[sup]rd[/sup] to meet them at their camp, after which both Weaver’s group and the Mass 3[sup]rd[/sup] will head to the same Sanctuary. But - why does this sound like a good idea to anybody? “Hey, send your kids to safety, but you guys stay here and wait for the skitters and their mechs to decimate you. Then the survivors can join up with the 3[sup]rd[/sup] and go to their children!” What? Why? If there’s a skitter attack coming, why am I waiting here for it?
I wish we were live posting as we did on 24,
Are we hiding spoilers in this thread?
'cause I didn’t like this guy’s plan right from the start, and figured he wanted the kids.
No spoilers warning in the title so I assume we are.
I couldn’t get over how dumb that was. “Hey, our kids are our most precious commodity, let’s send them all off with this guy who wandered in and said he wanted to go on ahead with them!”.
Not a good episode. I keep giving this show one more chance and keep getting disappointed.
Spoilers for July 17th episode:
[spoiler]Is there ANYBODY that didn’t see that coming? I didn’t trust the dude from the get-go. ONE guy comes in and says he wants all the kids? Yeah. . .no.
And remember, these are the ppl who survived while millions, of not billions, of others died. These are the clever survivors that take the dangerous criminals with them on missions, and give away their kids. They really need to bounce some ideas off other people before they commit them to film.
“Sorry, that’s really stupid, and no way would I, nor any other reasonably intelligent person do that.”
[/spoiler]
Yeah, this is just not a good show. Everything that happens is totally telegraphed.
[spoiler]At the beginning of the episode, when the Dr. was working on a kid with a family we’d never seen, I said, “she’s getting shot.” Well, that didn’t happen but there was a gun in her face when she turned around. I knew she wouldn’t die, but it was so obvious that something bad was going to happen.
And yeah, who thought it was a good idea to just send the kids with the new guy? Come on!
Finally, what’s the deal with Ben? He seems way more normal after removing the harness than Rick (is it Rick?) does.[/spoiler]
The show is not frustratingly bad in a *Lost *sort of way. It’s just a combination of a dumb story, dumb writing and sometimes quite bad acting. The DVR is set to record the whole series, so we’ll probably finish out the season.
It’s not great, but it is worth watching. Better than your average cop/doctor/lawyer program anyway. 
I really think the problem was that he was just introduced to us. It was implied that they knew him pretty well, but we had no reason to trust him. They should’ve introduced him now, have him fight aside them, and then introduce this plot like five episodes from now.
I haven’t seen this newest episode yet, but I have to ask…does the guy own a bike shop?
-Joe
More
spoiled
stuff
about
the
previous
episode.
[spoiler]
But the aliens are probably using his family to make him co operate, so he doesn’t have much time.[/spoiler]
Well, they could’ve made him not get “turned” until later on. I’m not saying my idea would work with the plot as it is right now, I’m saying that we needed to know this character more so his sudden but inevitable betrayal was more of a twist.
Yeah, that would have worked.
[SPOILER]Well, that’s just it - ‘we’ don’t know his motivation just yet, and it was also clear that he had ties with members of that group before they split off - so, it’s not unreasonable for them to trust him at that juncture. It also makes sense to move the children away from imminent fighting, as well as having to maintain the FOB for the rest of the whatever group to meet up with.
They also sent members of their own fighters with him - so its not like they trusted him entirely on his own.
I also think its quite understandable that ‘most humans would trust other humans to not betray them directly to the aliens’ at this point - unless harnessed, this is likely the first time they will have encountered a traitor of this magnitude.
IOW, while it was obvious ‘a mile a way’ to all of us viewers - it does actually fit into the show.
and of course - he will still end up dieing a ‘hero’s death’ before the end of this - he’ll do something redeemable - at least partially so.[/SPOILER]
No need for spoiler boxes after we’ve been talking openly about the show for weeks.
But yeah, that plan didn’t even have the superficiality of sounding reasonable. Even if it had been “send all your civilians ahead while the fighters delay” that makes more sense, and you could have a subplot in which the civilians were killed or abandoned and the kids taken. But just saying “oh hey guys yeah just give us your kids. And stay here. And keep the adult civvies with you” makes no sense from any angle.
I’m shocked, SHOCKED, that the kids were lead into a trap. Never would have guessed it in a million years.
Hmmph.
