Episode 'Falling Skies' Season 1, Episode 5 - 'Silent Kill' Recap

The plot to rescue Ben is finally amping up (haven't they been saying "We'll get Ben tomorrow" for weeks?), and the captured skitter is still chillin' at home base. By the end of the episode, one of them is going to be much worse off. But which one?

Before the big rescue mission happens, though, we get a look at some of the dynamics at John F. Kennedy high school (a.k.a. home base for the 2nd Mass). Margaret is struggling to fit in, having awkward run-ins with pregnant ladies. Lourdes approaches her and asks her to show up to the baby shower, but Margaret is hesitant. She's much more content to quasi-flirt with Hal. Is this going to happen now?

By the end of the episode, we see Margie soften up a bit...and attend the baby shower. All that's left is to see if she and Hal hook up by the end of season one.

Anne, meanwhile, is dealing with the ghosts of her past while still trying to solve the mystery of the captive skitter. We learn through Uncle Scott that Anne had a family, and lost them all during the attack. But that doesn't stop her from still serving the skitter water...that is, until Harris tries to get in close and the skitter attacks. Is Harris toast? Yep. If you, like me, fell victim to the show's attempts to make us hate Harris from the minute we met him, then you're probably pretty happy right now.

That would mean that Anne would have all the time in the world to study the POW skitter, except that Captain Weaver tells her she has 24 hours to figure it out before he kills the thing.

That plan gets sped up a bit, however, when Hal comes up with an idea to get Ben back. Tom's bust-in-guns-blazing battle plan doesn't sit well with Weaver, so Hal suggests another idea: he'll wear the harness they took off of Rick and sneak in undercover. It seems unlikely, and Rick himself says that they'll all die, but the team goes ahead with the plan anyway once they learn what Anne has figured out about the skitters: they have a slightly inconvenient but very vulnerable point inside their mouths that can kill them. That gives Anne her badass scene of the season as she totally stabs the skitter that has come to trust her.

This evidence is enough to start the raid, and miraculously enough it actually works: Hal falls in line right behind Ben and marches right into the hospital room. This is where we get a shocking look into how the skitters interact with the harnessed kids: the kids all lie together on the floor and the skitter sleeps above them, caressing their heads in a motherly fashion with its slimy hand. Does the skitter see the harnessed kids as its own children? Are the skitters, as hinted at last week, a lesser pawn in the alien grand plan?

We won't get to find out today, as Hal stabs the skitter right in the mouth. The team takes off with Ben and the rest of the kids, bringing them back to home base and commencing the operations. Apparently, if there is a delay in putting the kids under and removing the harnesses, then their heart rates drop and they die. Sure enough, Anne loses one of the kids...another loss in her already very bad day.

But everything ends on a relatively uplifting note with the baby shower, although Lourdes always manages to be a total bummer, doesn't she?

So this week (despite some overly sentimental scenes), we learned something new about the skitters. They seem to care for those kids. That doesn't explain why they would use them as human shields as they did a week ago, but we can't figure it all out at once, can we?