Falling Skies: The Complete Series - Blu-ray Review

[Michael Scott]

Falling Skies: The Complete Series



Movie:
Video:
Audio:
Extras:
Final Score:



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Movie
Back in the early 2000s and 2010s, the cable TV Sci-fi market was pretty glutted, and the audiences were begging for more. Shows like Battlestar Galactica, Terra Nova, Defiance, The Walking Dead, and the like were pumping out hit after hit, and TNT wanted its taste of the action. Thus, Falling Skies was born. A show that basically hybridized bits of BSG, Earth: Final Conflict, and The Walking Dead to create a fairly derivative sci-fi actioneer that actually seemed to get decent ratings according to TNT, but got eviscerated by the critics. Back in my day, I remember reviewing the 4th season and having to binge-watch the previous 3 to get caught up, but as you can tell, I seem to have forgotten most of the show, as I once more had to binge-watch the complete series to refresh my memory.

Just like all of those shows, big bad aliens came down to Earth posing as friends, then they stabbed us in the back, and now humanity is living in a post-apocalyptic world trying to survive with an invading alien horde running the rest of the planet. The war was short-lived, lasting only a few months as the Aliens wiped out all of the major cities, leaving nothing but scraps of humanity trying to make do. The show proper begins six months after the narrator describes how things went down, with humanity making do with 300-man squads after the military realized the aliens could track them if they congregated together. One such squad, named the Second Massachusetts, is headed up by Captain Dan Weaver (an aging Will Patton) and his ex-history professor, 2nd in command, Tom Mason (Noah Wyle), all fighting to regain humanity’s dominance over the planet once more.

As is the case with most of these shows during that time period, the typical motley crew of assorted backup characters dot the landscape. The smoking hot girl boss doctor (Moon Bloodgood), who manages to look like she came off a runway even though she has no makeup, Military goons, scientists who think the military goons are nuts, and his oldest son, Hal (Drew Roy), who is having to grow up fast in a world that doesn’t allow childhood. A captured alien who wants to help out, and of course, a shady doctor (Steven Weber) who has mysterious ties to our protagonist's past. Add in some weekly stories to turn the show into half soap opera, half action film, and your grandma’s tried and true recipe for sci-fi success.

And in all honesty, this isn’t a bad show. I’m just sort of ragging on it for feeling like every other 2010-2015 show of the same time period, borrowing beats from each other. Take out the aliens and insert zombies, and you could literally think this was a Walking Dead spinoff. But at the end of the day, the show has fun with the Alien concept. It’s not nearly as inventive as Defiance, or as fun as the EARLY seasons of The Walking Dead (before it turned into The Boring Dead), and by the time the series completes itself in the 5th season, the entire character and story arc from the beginning comes full circle. Luckily for us, Falling Skies ended on its own terms, wrapping up the entire storyline with the predetermined happy ending that we all knew was coming (as long as it didn’t get canceled). A few people die along the way, but 99% of our heroes get to bask in a new world order by the time the aliens are defeated, and we can all feel good about winning.

Season 1 takes some time to get going, but the show hits its stride around the 2nd and 3rd season, before starting the typical series downward trend for the 4th and 5th wraps everything up. Warner Bro’s complete series is simply a repackaging of all 5 seasons that were released back from 2012-2016 and put into a single large boxset (which means the VC-1 encode for season 1, and the change over to AVC starting with the 2nd season), but what REALLY surprised me was the packaging. I have become extremely jaded with the packaging for “complete series” recently, with both Warner and Paramount opting to use those gigantic criss-cross packaging in a DVD-sized mega case, which always ends up with scratched discs. However, this one came housed in 2 Viva Elite cases, with seasons 1-3 packaged in a 6 discs viva elite, with seasons 4-5 in a 4-disc case. This means no stacking of discs, no criss-crossing, and no scratching. Both cases are housed in a nice chipboard slip box and fit right in perfectly with the rest of your Blu-ray collection. For once, THANK YOU, Warner, for packaging this correctly for us OCD collectors.




Rating:

Rated TV-MA by the MPAA




Video:

The show looks very similar across the 5 seasons, with the exception of the 1st and 3rd seasons, which had their own issues I’ll delve into. The series has a heavily filtered blue/teal look, with that ashy gray that has been popular in science fiction for the last 15 years or so. Fine details are generally good all around, with strong black levels and decent facial tones. Shadows tend to be the weakest spot, though, with some banding and blocking going on to distract audiences. But overall, this is a solid-looking show on Blu-ray.

The 1st and 3rd season were notorious for being problematic, with the 1st season’s reason being that the show was put onto Blu-ray with the less efficient VC-1 encoding leftover from the format war with HD-DVD. Noise and grain were significant, and it looked worse for wear as a result. The 3rd season seemed to have had issues with the compression, as I noticed plenty of artifacts and a sallow look to the contrast that made everything look washed out and flat. While I give the other seasons a solid 4/5 rating, seasons 1 and 3 are a definite 3.5/5.







Audio:

While the video may have fluctuated over the seasons, the 5.1 Dolby TrueHD track remained stable and standardized across all 5 seasons. It’s not a WILDLY active mix (plenty of dialog-centric moments in the show that keep it fairly mild), but the action livens things up a bit with explosions, machine gun fire, and the rumbling of cars as they roar through the landscape. Vocals are crisp and well defined, and there’s some moderate usage of the surrounds with ambient noise and said action. Simple and effective, the 5.1 mix is pretty indicative of early 2010 era TV shows coming out from TNT.







Extras:

Season 1
• Audio Commentaries:
• Falling Skies Panel
• From Pencils to Print, The Dark Horse Comic Book Revealed
• Animating a Skitter
• The Unknown and The Second Mass
• Unanswered Questions, Season 2 Sneak Peek

Season 2
• Audio Commentaries
• One Page at a Time: Writing the Second American Revolution
• The Fans' Perspective: Touring the Set
• The Skitter Evolution
• 2nd Watch: Episode 20
• Terry O'Quinn is Manchester
• Team Skitter
• Creating the Crawlies
• Designing the Spaceship
• Season 2 Animated Trailer
• Season 3 Preview

Season 3
• Second Watch
• Warrior Poet: Creating the Character and Emotion of Cochise
• Karen: The Overlord Next Door
• Behind the Scenes

Season 4
• Inside the Episode Featurettes
• Tom Mason: A Man of Tomorrow
• 2014 Comic Con Panel
• Episodic Prequels
• Character Interviews

Season 5
• Farewell to the Skies Featurettes
• Cast Goodbyes
• A Look Back
• 2015 WonderCon Panel

Final Score: ​

A decade since the last season came out on Blu-ray, Warner Bro’s finally puts out a complete boxset to re-release the show once more, and once more I remember why the 2010’s sort of wore fans out on the same recycled sci-fi tropes. The series is aimed at newcomers to the sci-fi genre, giving us a pulpy bit of fun that reminds me of the same thing that happened with Gene Roddenberry’s works that came out around the late 90s and early 2000s (Earth: Final Conflict, Andromeda). The show itself is solid enough, and luckily, we get the same discs (no extra compression by putting multiple seasons into fewer discs), so fans of the show will feel comfortable picking up the entire series for a lot less than the 5 seasons by themselves (and of course, massive space savings). My final thoughts are going to be this: fans will be happy to see the show on the market once more, and people curious about testing the waters will probably be satisfied once the price drops a bit.


Technical Specifications:

Starring: Noah Wyle, Drew Roy, Maxim Knight, Will Patton, Moon Bloodgood, Colin Cunningham
Created by: Robert Rodat
Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1 AVC (VC-1 for the 1st Season)
Audio: English: Dolby TrueHD 5.1
Subtitles:
Season 1: English SDH, French, Portuguese, Spanish
Season 2: English SDH, French, Spanish, Dutch
Season 3: English SDH, French, Spanish, Dutch
Season 4: English SDH, French, French SDH, Spanish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish
Season 5: English SDH, French, French SDH, Spanish, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish
Studio: Warner Bro's
Rated: TV-MA
Runtime: 2318 Minutes
Blu-ray Release Date: January 6th, 2026

Recommendation: Decent Watch


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