'Falling Skies' Season 1, Episode 8 Recap - 'What Lies Beneath'

If the past two episodes, the two-part "Sanctuary" set, seemed a bit slow in terms of learning new things about the aliens, all of that lost ground is made up in "What Lies Beneath." We get not one, but two shocking discoveries about our alien friends, all in one hour.

One of those discoveries comes as Weaver, Tom and Hal go on a recon mission to the big alien structure. The skitters are retreating back to the structure, which leads historian Tom to think that they're clearing the battlefield and planning another attack. During their trip, though, they see something that changes the way they look at the enemy...because they're looking at a brand-new enemy.

There's a third alien! The tall, thin, humanoid aliens look a lot like what we've always imagined aliens to look like, and they're in charge. So it turns out that the skitters are not highest on the chain of command (we had an idea of that already), even though they seem to command the mechs.

But the trio runs into some hiccups on the way back to camp. They run into a lady who has been staying in the city since the attack, and has been providing information in exchange for supplies...supplies provided by the harnessed Karen. Hal flips out, and swears to rescue her. Oh, so now you're not so interested in all those other love interests that are all over you, are you Hal?

The other snafu explains why Weaver has been acting more and more strangely lately...it is revealed that he lost his wife during the attack, and he lost his daughter when he tried to remove her harness himself. But when he finds his wife's glasses at his old house, he thinks there's a chance she might be alive, and the fight in him is renewed.

The discovery of the humanoid aliens (what should we call them? Tallers?) isn't the only big one. Anne has a theory about the harnesses when she finds that the skin around Ben's harness spikes is hardening. An autopsy of the dead skitter reveals that her hunch was right: the skitters themselves were harnessed! That implies that the skitters were once human (or something other than skitter, anyway) and the harnesses transformed them. Things aren't looking so good for Ben and Rick, who continue to act weird (Rick more than Ben).

But there's hope at the end of the episode. The still-injured Pope (at least he won't be running away) is assigned the task of designing bombs to use on the alien structure, but makes a discovery in the meantime. While showing Matt the inner workings of a mech, he shows the kid a mech bullet that is essentially the casing for our bullets, just with a mech metal slug. Pope is apparently too dumb to realize the implications of this until Matt says "I wish we could use these on them." Brilliant, kid! The episode ends with Pope giving everyone a demonstration by taking a mech bullet, loading it into a revolver, and shooting straight through the defunct head of a mech. There is much rejoicing.

Next week marks the end of the series with a two-hour finale...and by the look of things, there's going to be a pretty big fight. After all, we can kill those mechs now. Let's hope the Lankys don't have any tricks up their sleeves...like being able to read our minds as Weaver fears.