Falling Skies Gets A Fifth Season But It Will Be The Last
This article is more than 2 years old
While we’re getting a ton of new science fiction shows coming up from the likes of the Syfy network, but we’re also going to lose one fan favorite. Right now we’re at roughly the half way point of season four of TNT’s alien invasion drama Falling Skies. The cable network just announced a fifth season for the series, which should be enough to make fans happy, but at the same time, they also revealed that this fifth season will be the last one we get.
According to Deadline, the choice to end the run after the fifth season didn’t come from some network decree, but rather from the producers themselves. The report states that after four years the creative team feels that the series is coming to a close and they want the opportunity to wrap up the continuing action and conclude the show in the exact way the want.
While it will suck for fans of Falling Skies not to have one of their favorite shows on the air anymore, this could be a lot worse. If the show were simply to be cancelled at the end of a season with no warning, it would just leave fans in the lurch, left to wonder and speculate about the fate of beloved characters. How many times have we seen that? Firefly, Almost Human, Stargate Universe, the list of shows taken from us too soon, that never got the chance to offer any closure for the characters or fans, is nearly endless.
This also offers Falling Skies the opportunity to leave on a high note, to end things before the series starts to suck. We’ve also seen far too many shows that just keep going on and on long after they should have been put to bed. While five seasons isn’t as many as most fans would probably hope for, wouldn’t you rather have five years worth of good episodes instead of five good ones followed by two mediocre seasons and one that is so terrible it taints the entire legacy and makes you wish for a merciful end to this misery?
Looking at this, you’d think that losing Falling Skies, which has provided strong ratings in key viewer demographics, would be a big blow for TNT. Normally that would be true, but the recent addition of the Michael Bay-produced The Last Ship, which has also delivered solid numbers in the same areas should soften the blow, assuming it continues to perform as it has.
For those of you who, like me, have never watched Falling Skies, the show picks up after an aggressive alien race invades Earth and does what invading alien races so often do in such situation, completely ruin everything for everyone. The action follows the survivors and resistance, led, in part, by former history professor Tom Mason (Noah Wylie).
New episodes of Falling Skies air Sunday nights on TNT.
