Falling Skies - The Season Finale Rant (spoilers)

The series isn't bad, hell sometimes it's pretty damned good, but there are so many moments where they go formulaic while still trying to take itself seriously and be "edgy" and "unpredictable" that I feel like I am watching a schizophrenic. The season finale exemplified this.

Earlier in the season we saw the ghetto ships and their power-dicks. A giant blimp-lick thing is hovering over a powered fence, there's a tentacle that tethers the ship to a point outside the fence. The ship has power, the fence has power... but they had to work to figure out where the power was coming from? Really!?! But these are the same people that will somehow figure out how to fly an organic ship? Oy vey.

So now instead of being powered from the ship we find that power is being beamed to Earth from the Moon. So everything must be run on batteries during the day? Okay, fine. But once that battery is destroyed, how does it kill the fricking plant thing and it's giant snail critters? There's not an ounce of electronics in either thing but yet the literally die (and crumble to dust) once the power generator on the moon is destroyed?

And let's talk about those snail things... So how is it that when they bite someone the have a tail that runs back to the plant but at other times they don't? And if they have a tail, how the frick long is it for them to be skittering and slithering all over creation without that thing being caught on something?

So Matt threw a knife and nailed one of the snail things to a wall? Great. When Weaver was later bitten by one and holding the window closed to keep it's tail thing from filling him full of evil ooze or something, why didn't someone think to just GRAB THE frickING KNIFE AND CUT THE LINE? Pope bit through one, cutting through it should be simple enough. At the very least, how about offering to help Weaver hold the window shut instead of taking a fricking nap? And who sleeps through that kind of shite anyway?

And then there's the trip to the moon. Lexi realizes she can't auto-pilot the big ship to crash into the power station so she sends Tom back to the small ship so he can... wait for it... use its auto-pilot to get back to Earth. Here's a crazy idea, how about set the auto-pilot of the small ship (the one with the possibly useless bombs) to crash into the power station while Lexi and daddy go home in the comfort and style of ol' Burned-face's personal ship. Hell, I bet if you looked hard enough you might even find a weapon or two so you could fire on the power station from space.

And then we have the sacrifice. The Volm got there in plenty of time for someone to say "Hey, turn around and come back. These guys have big space guns and will take us back home". Instead Tom sits there like a mute and watches his daughter die. His daughter who would be a stupidly powerful weapon against the enemy. His daughter who WANTS to be a stupidly powerful weapon against the enemy. And he just sits there with his thumb up his arse.

It's the little things, the lazy writing things that keep a show from fulfilling its potential.

/rant off.