TNT’s ‘Falling Skies’ good, but hard to read

Steven Spielberg has aliens playing with little kids again. But “Falling Skies” isn’t nearly so adorable as “E.T.”

“Falling Skies” on TNT traces life following an alien invasion. The children narrating the opening sequence inform us “they didn’t want to be friends.”

In a prologue that glossed over the details in the previous six months of life on Earth, children’s drawings accompany a litany of horrors – the aliens came, they turned off the electricity, they killed the soldiers and the government so mommies and daddies had to fight.

In this time, groups of resistance fighters led by combat veterans did their best to – as warrior poet and father of three Tom Mason, played by Noah Wyle, put it – “be porcupines,” if the aliens were going to be wolves.

Mason, a history professor, pointed to instances where smaller, less well provided armies held off superior invading forces by making the victories too painful or costly, such as in the American Revolution.

Roving outlaw John Pope, played by Colin Cunningham, wondered aloud if that was the right analogy. That to him, the invading forces seemed more like the wave after relentless wave of Europeans taking over America – “and how did that work out for the Indians?” he sneered.

Communication

The aliens were harder to get a read on, although I think Spielberg may have figured out an ingenious way to bridge the communication barrier.

The aliens, nicknamed “skitters,” are six-legged green reptilian beasties who communicate in shrieks and squawks. Their bipedal robot mechs are similarly uncommunicative, although they do seem to be all about the violent overthrow of humanity – with an estimated 90 percent of the world’s population wiped out in the first wave of alien attacks, that seems to be something they’ve decided is a goal.

First, however, they seem to need a bunch of human slaves to, among other things, gather scrap metal for them. What the aliens have done is they’ve created these scary-looking cybernetic harness things that they attach to human children they’ve kidnapped. The harnesses fit along the spines, and the kids basically become zombies. And if anyone tries to remove the harness, the children die.

So oh yeah, one of Mason’s children, his middle child, Ben, has been harnessed.

One doctor has managed to cut one child free from the harness – for something he said probably works on the basis of nanotechnology, the acetylene torch he used to simply cut the harness free seemed a bit of a low-tech solution. But the child seems to be surviving, albeit in sort of a drug-induced coma.

But the resistance fighters have managed to capture a skitter, and at the end of the third hour, when the alien opened its eyes, the child who’d been cut free of the harness also opened his eyes.

This could be a means of communicating with the alien, if the aliens form some sort of mindlink with their child slaves through the harnesses. In that case, then, it was weird when one of the aliens ordered a crew of harnessed children to be executed – you’d think there’d be some pain involved with that – but it did, and while the shooting occurred off camera it was a pretty dark moment.

Disconnect

That’s the part that feels like the hardest to understand – its tone.

This is a dark show, no question about it. “Falling Skies” traces a chapter of human history plunged into a Hobbesian dystopia where life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

It’s also a show about families. The soldiers travel with a group of civilians they dismiss as “eaters” – Moon Bloodgood as Dr. Anne Glass is offended to be so dismissed. There are grandparently types and there are kids everywhere, including hormonal teens like Mason’s oldest son, Hal, and the hijinks he gets into, and Mason’s pre-pubescent son Matt, 8, who, yes, realizes life is pretty much horrible since the aliens came, but even homeless, even on the run, even having lost his mother in the war, still insists that Mason get back from a raiding party in time to celebrate his birthday.

Hal tries to give Matt some perspective on this – come on, give dad a break, he’s trying to save the world – but Hal also gets Matt a present, a RipStick skateboard, which the kids skate around on for a few minutes before everyone has to leave again, to establish base camp in a school – one with lots of windows so the aliens will be sure to see the hive of activity the place becomes.

Matt’s one birthday wish is that everything go back to the way it was before the aliens came. But that seems really unlikely. If all electronics in the world fused in an electro-magnetic pulse detonated by the aliens and the only people left are just the ones the aliens haven’t enslaved or killed yet, it seems like even if the aliens were to decided they didn’t like Earth after all and just left en masse, life would never really return to normal.

So is this a kids’ show with hopes and dreams and puttering around on cool skateboards and normal healthy teens sneaking off together and rebuilding human society in an abandoned school? Or is it a dark dystopia with cyborg child zombies and killer aliens and power struggles regarding the nature of humanity?

Because right now it seems to be a jarring combination of both, and so long as it is ... well, if the kids are watching, there’s probably a few parts you’ll want to fast forward.

New episodes of “Falling Skies” premiere Sundays at 9 p.m. on TNT.