The second season of TNT’s Falling Skies begins Sunday night at 9PM, and it continues the string of very successful, very enjoyable programming that TNT has been bringing us all summer. The humans vs. aliens drama starring Noah Wyle was a summer highlight last year, and this season, the action continues.
KSiteTV participated in a press junket with members of the cast and crew several weeks ago, and you can expect those interviews to be posted within the coming weeks. But first, the spotlight shines on Noah Wyle and Drew Roy, who play Tom and Hal Mason, a father and a son facing some pretty big challenges, especially considering the events of the Season 1 finale.
Season 2 shows what happens next. “It picks up almost exactly where we left off, inexplicably getting on the spaceship,” Wyle says, “and then there’s a passage of time of three months where he’s been in captivity, and released far from where they picked him up… and he’s got to make this odyssey back to the group. A lot has happened in his absence.”
Tom Mason’s absence forced some changes in responsibilities for his oldest son, Hal, played by Drew Roy. “Since he’s been gone, by the time three months has come around, you could hold on to that little dream that he’s coming back, but it’s really getting kind of bleak,” Drew says. “So in the meantime, Hal’s had to step up, and he’s become more of a leader; but also, he has to become this paternal figure, because he has Matt, who’s a 9 year old kid, and also Ben, who’s 14-ish, and he’s also coming in to becoming a man.” Don’t expect things to be completely smooth between the brothers. “That same animosity that Hal has, and that fight, Ben has it as well; so they butt heads on a couple of subjects. Hal’s leading this little group, and Ben is having to take orders from him, and he doesn’t always like to do that. Ben has this new personal vendetta against the skitters, to kill all of them, no matter what, even if it’s putting him or other people at risk, and that causes some confrontation,” Drew explains. Not having his father around meant that Hal had to slow himself down so that he did not do anything foolish. “I was no longer just the catalyst; I had to actually go through with it, and I think it makes Hal a stronger leader as well as a stronger person,” he says.
Not knowing what would come after the cliffhanger provided challenges for the writers, but ultimately, it also had its advantages. “We wrote ourselves into a pretty good corner last year, going onto the spaceship without knowing how we were going to get him off or what was going to happen, but it afforded us an opportunity to have a little bit of an inside view of what the spaceship and the technology looks like, with a face to face confrontation with the Overlords, and the realization that there isn’t really a negotiation to be had, that they are occupying with the intent of total annihilation, and there isn’t really a peace to be brokered. So Tom comes back a bit more of a realist,” Noah explains. “He doesn’t hold any more illusion. He goes from retaining a certain hope of being able to rebuild society in a better image than the one they had before, to having to side-table all of that until the threat’s been completely erased. And he may be a security risk. He may be a security risk. He may be a liability to the group. He’s not sure what they did to him, exactly. So he’s as suspicious of his own actions as they are of him.”
One of Tom’s greatest allies will still be Ann. Season 2 will see their relationship developing further. “It was a relationship that we had a little difficulty, in the first season, finding moments of intimacy, because as soon as we would try it, it would seem to dissipate all of the tension that was there, and the threat level that was supposed to be ever-present. So we’d write scenes where I’d be on guard duty and she’d bring me a sandwich and we’d talk about sweet nothings, and then we wouldn’t end up shooting them, because it seemed like it was going to be counter-productive to our aims,” Wyle explains.
“That left two choices. We could either have the relationship play out across crowded rooms, with two busy people wishing circumstances were different, or I could grab her and pull her into a supply closet, and have it be a moment of passion that was based more on tapping into some sort of human need than not. So we chose the former, and really kind of paced that relationship out, culminating in a really nice kiss in the last episode, when he entrusts the care of his children to Ann when he goes on what could be a suicide mission. And this season, we spend more time in the supply closet,” he laughs.
The show’s production has moved to Vancouver for Season 2, but Noah Wyle says that the scripts are approached differently for Season 2 as well. “I knew from the first script that this was going to be an easier year in a lot of ways, because we didn’t have to dedicate so much of our screen time to exposition. This is the world, these are the characters, these are the aliens, this is what you need to know… we build on the momentum of the storytelling from last year, and really have the group, because of this off-stage battle that has been taking place… we’re much more mobile. We’re no longer stationary in a high school for 3 or 4 or 5 episodes. We’re constantly on the move, constantly being followed, and it ratchets up the tension quite considerably,” Wyle says.
This “on the go” move is reminiscent of classic films that Wyle finds himself watching frequently. “It’s a science fiction show, but that serves as the backdrop to pretty human storytelling. In a lot of ways, it’s probably more analogous to a war film than science fiction. That was certainly the kind of source material that I was watching. Will Patton and I, we trade DVD’s back and forth, and they tend to be John Ford, John Wayne, Ward Bond Westerns or war films, because they had the same sense of camaraderie in the face of adversity, up against an undefeatable enemy. Disparate personalities have been pulled together for a common good, which are all themes that we explore pretty regularly,” he says.
Look for Falling Skies Season 2 to premiere on Sunday, June 17. See a gallery of images from the premiere and come talk Falling Skies on the KSiteTV Forum!
