Falling Skies Season 3 Finale Preview: “Brazil” [PHOTOS and VIDEO + Noah Wyle Interview] 

[Warning: Spoilers for Tonight’s finale]

Season three of TNT’s Falling Skies comes to a close tonight.

There’s still much to accomplish like getting Anne and Lexie back. Do we believe they’re gone? Heck no. Also, there’s a little matter of getting rid of that super deadly grid. If anyone can get the job done it’s Tom Mason and his boys. Plus, Colonel Weaver and Maggie, too. And we can’t forget Cochise. And, yes, everyone knows Lourdes is the mole. But does that mean she’s done wreaking havoc?

Official Synopsis for “Brazil”: When the 2^nd mass destroys a crucial Espheni base, a relentless enemy is taken down and the Mason family is reunited with those who had been lost. But the arrival of more interstellar players puts the fate of the Earth’s remaining survivors in doubt. Robert Sean Leonard guest stars.

It’s exciting to know going into the finale that this series will be back for season four. Unfortunately, it’ll be without showrunner Remi Aubuchon. However, it has been announced that David Eick [Battlestar Galactica, Caprica, Bionic Woman remake] will be taking over the reigns.

In other news, earlier this summer, we got the chance to talk to Falling Skies star Noah Wyle [Tom Mason] about season three in general:

About things clicking in season three

NOAH WYLE: I think the first season we had a really good concept that we didn’t really know quite how to execute and we learned a lot from watching the first season episodes. We learned that the show works better at night, with some shadow and some mystery. We learned these characters are more compelling when they’re wet and dirty and bloody, looking miserable. We learned which relationships really had some pop, some gravitas to them and we kind of built on that momentum in the second season. And as a result I think we have a really good second season where we got to explore there characters a little further. Then the third season, I think we just keep building on our own momentum. This is the strongest season to date, it’s certainly the broadest in terms of the storytelling. We’ve really opened up the narrative considerably. We’ve brought in some new players. As Drew said we’ve got a lot of new talent on the writing staff. We just keep sort of figuring it out, refining it to a greater and greater degree.

The success of the turbulent Tom/Pope relationship [that was showcased in the season three, episode four “Search and Recover”]

NOAH: They’re two characters that really don’t like each other at all and were it not for a sort of mutual need for each other’s skill sets we’d probably come to blows a lot more often then they do. But that’s the way we try to pace it out, that the tension is always there and starts to simmer and then starts to escalate and finally reaches a boiling point where these two characters are extremely volatile and go at it and it’s some external force that pulls them apart, that keeps them from taking it to the ultimate step and it’s just good storytelling. We started off the pilot it was pretty clear cut that Weaver was committing to be the militarist and Tom was the humanist and that was where the tension was gonna be coming from and then with the introduction of Pope and Maggie in the first episode that became more of a triangle in terms of tension whether it was Will versus Pope or Pope versus me or me versus Will in relation to Pope has more of a kind of wheel structure then it did before. But Colin [Cunningham] is great. A very clever actor, very committed and very inventive. He keeps me on my toes.

About the additions of Robert Sean Leonard [Dead Poet’s Society, House] and Gloria Reuben [E.R.]

NOAH: Two very old friends. Gloria and I were doctors on E.R. together and Robert Sean Leonard and I did a movie called Swing Kids together back in the early ’90s. They’re both incredibly talented actors and we had a few deaths last year in our ensemble, as is the nature of this type of show. But it opens up the possibilities of bringing new characters on and the hope is always that you’re gonna bring in an actor of a high caliber who is gonna have a character that’s gonna be fully realized very quickly and then through that character, we’ll be able to learn more about the other players and about the ensemble to a greater degree. And they’re terrific. They’re really great, solid this season.

Gloria was a coincidence. I put Bob up for the job. Gloria was – I mean when they told me they were thinking of her I said, ‘Great. She’s perfect. That’s great.’ Bob, there were a couple different ideas for him. Although we never really kept in touch in the twenty years since we worked together, I had the utmost respect for his talent and we have the same manager and I’ve always thought I’d love to get him up here and on this and it worked out.

About working with the alien characters on the show

NOAH: It is worthy of mentioning that when we initiated the storyline, there was gonna be a character that we were gonna have a lot of interaction with. But first the idea was that it was just gonna be a green screen and I would be acting with a tennis ball on a stick and then they said we’ll get an actor, we’ll get somebody who wears the suit so you’ll have someone to react off of. And then we had the greatest fortune of all to cast Doug Jones [Cochise] in that part. Doug’s body of work speaks for itself. He is the vocab man. He brings such depth of character to what could ostensibly just be a rubber suit and a mask that it was a real pleasure to work with him and, very quickly, it helped me bridge the gap in reason between the logic of the situation, which is to be inherently distrustful of anything that comes from outerspace at this point and the fact that this is an alliance that needed to be brokered. There’s something about the way he played his part that made him inherently trustworthy that allowed me an ability to rationalize all that so I can’t say enough about Doug.

The Falling Skies season three finale [“Brazil”] airs tonight at 10/9c on TNT.

Preview

PHOTOS
Images Courtesy of Jeff Dittiger and TNT

            

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