Originally thought to be the alien species responsible for invading Earth, the Skitters are a race under the control by the Overlords. Their home-world was subjugated by the Overlords and the Skitters were harnessed just like the children of Earth. Some Skitters have been able to overcome their controllers and plot rebellions against the Overlords.
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He points out that robots humans created were made to look human, with two legs, yet the Skitters' mechs also have two legs, despite a Skitter having six. Tom theorizes the Skitters may have studied Earth before the invasion, and deployed bipedal machines as a form of psychological intimidation. After running in to Lourdes, Karen talks to Hal about her intention. Hal doesn't seem to care about Lourdes and kisses Karen.
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It also focusses on the discovery that the Skitters are themselves "harnessed" and mind-controlled by the invaders, but that some of them are resistant to the effects and are rebelling against their Overlords.
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After this, Weaver tells his soldiers that the Skitter needs to die. Anne asks for more time to study it and Weaver gives her 24 hours. Hal speaks to Rick who sits quietly on a bench outside. Hal asks him about the "harness" and the Skitters.
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Tom begins having nightmares about the Skitters recapturing him. A parasite is found in Tom's eye, forcing him to question his own loyalty. The 2nd Mass has to find a way to cross a destroyed bridge. Ben offers to cross the river alone to scout the area ahead.
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They discover that while the Skitters have tough leathery skin and carapace armor, their internal structure isn't that much different from terrestrial vertebrates, including an endoskeleton, cardio-vascular system, and nervous system. Anne then confirms her fears when she saws through the armored carapace of the Skitter's back, and finds that it has a harness attached to its spine, identical in structure to the ones attached to the human children. The implications to Anne are clear: the Skitters were themselves harnessed, and might not always have been Skitters. Particularly because the harness was found within their outer carapace, it seems that they used to be some other kind of lifeform, captured by the tall humanoid aliens who used the harnesses to mutate them into shock-troops.
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Clayton talks to Weaver and Tom after the attack and tells them that the next attack could happen soon. Weaver tells Tom that Clayton’s offer has to be reconsidered. Tom agrees. Ben is verbally attacked by an angry citizen who calls him a “razor-back” and the Skitters are attacking because of kids like him.
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Clayton explains to Rick that like soldiers in a human army, each detachment of Skitters has its own assigned regions and sectors, and each has its own quotas to fill; in their case, the number of human children they are expected to capture and harness. The force of Skitters that nearly wiped out the 7th Mass decided that if their quota was being met or even surpassed, it didn't really matter to them that the remaining handful of the 7th Mass and their families were still free. So the Skitters offered Clayton an arrangement in which he'd collaborate with them, let the remnant of the 7th mass serve as a trap to quietly collect refugee human children, and in return the Skitters would leave his men and their families alone. Mike decides that it's time for the 2nd Mass to leave the Sanctuary.
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He tells Mike how horrible it was to witness the 7th Mass be taken down. Clayton says that one of the kids, a girl named Megan, fell behind and was taken by Skitters. After that, the aliens left his team alone for a week. Clayton describes the behavior as though the Skitters were thanking them for Megan, for handing over one of their own.
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While getting food, Margaret meets Sarah, a pregnant civilian. Later, Scott tells Tom that he can try and pick up a Skitter transmission on his radio as the Skitters communicate using radio waves, as an early warning system that Skitters are nearby. However, just one Skitter in the hospital will not be transmitting. Weaver hears a record that Scott is playing and it clearly brings up a distasteful memory.
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Bipedal robotic drones that fight alongside the Skitters. Destroyed Mechs are entirely mechanical inside, so there is no "pilot", implying they are unmanned drones. Ones who control mechs can put them into guard/patrol mode, give special orders violating their usual protocol and assign priority targets. These commands are followed even if the commander is dead implying that they have primitive A.I. that allows them to some extent think on their own.
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Assuming their father is dead, Tom's eldest son, Hal, becomes more of a presence in the 2nd Mass, along with Ben, whose hatred of the Skitters grows stronger. After Tom's return, through flashbacks, "Worlds Apart" details his torture by the Overlords and his pilgrimage back to the 2nd Mass. Reviews for the episode were relatively positive. Many critics saw it as a step-up in quality from the first season and praised the darker approach to storytelling.
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Three months have passed since Tom Mason (Noah Wyle) boarded the spacecraft, and the 2nd Mass has been on the move. In the opening scene, a small group, part of the 2nd Mass, led by Captain Weaver (Will Patton), attack a group of Skitters and Mechs patrolling the streets. Ben Mason (Connor Jessup), who was captured by the Skitters months earlier, has since grown to despise the extra terrestrials. Weaver orders the group to cease fire and conserve ammo.
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Inside the camp, when the children raise the alarm, Tom is forced to separate from Weaver and is led by Mira to Matts cell. He immediately rescues Matt who is being attacked by Kent Matthews by striking him, and with the help of Mira who distracts the skitters, leaves along with Matt. Shortly afterwards, Tom is reunited with an emotional Weaver who explains to him, Matt and Cochise what had happened with Jeanne. Though unbeknownst to Tom, he is currently being tracked by the scorched Overlord.
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Mentioned in "The Eye," this alien race drove the Espheni from their home galaxy which caused them to flee to the Milky Way Galaxy, conquering planet after planet. They are indirectly responsible for the Invasion of Earth, the Volm-Espheni War, and the enslavement of the Skitters. According to the Espheni overlord Scorch, they are fast approaching the Solar System. One Dornia appeared to Tom after his Beamer was flung to the edge of the Solar System, creating a room that mimicked his Boston bedroom.
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Rick tells Hal that if they go and find Ben, they will be killed. Hal then comes up with a new plan for rescuing Ben, wearing a "harness" himself in order to avoid detection. Tom protests against this idea, but Hal convinces him. The pair goes to see Anne, who tells them of the "pressure point" that Dr. Harris found earlier when Mike knocked the Skitter out: the Skitters have no bone separating the soft palate of their upper mouth from the brain, making it a weak spot.
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Clayton tells them that he must take the kids of the 2nd Mass because Skitters are on their way and a move from the school is necessary. Tom is very reluctant against this move. Margaret, while getting medication from Anne for her friend, Sarah, gives Anne a gun for future protection and offers a shooting lesson. Ben seems to be recovering well as he performs 102 push-ups without breaking a sweat. He tells Matt that the Skitters cared for the kids and weren’t monsters, but a family.
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It remained in publication . In April 2012, Dark Horse began releasing a second eight-issue limited series entitled Falling Skies: The Battle of Fitchburg, with Paul Tobin returning as writer and Juan Ferreyra returning as series artist. The digital comic was made available through both Dark Horse Comics and TNT via their respective websites. The story takes place chronologically between the first and second seasons of the television show and details a costly engagement occurring between the skitters and the 2nd Massachusetts Militia Regiment when the aliens surround the human forces at Fitchburg, Massachusetts.
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Realizing that the only person who knew their location was the strange woman they met earlier, they return to her apartment and discover she is an agent of the Skitters who use her to capture people. While questioning her, a young woman turns up at the door inquiring whether any more people have been there. She turns out to be Karen, Hal's girlfriend, who has now been captured and harnessed. Before Hal can do anything, Tom looks through the peep hole and comes face to face with one of the new tall aliens.
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When given the option of joining forces with the approaching Skitter rebellion, Manchester refuses and eventually orders that all members of the 2nd Mass be arrested. However, General Cole Bressler (Matt Frewer), the commander of Charleston's resistance force, mounts a coup and deposes Manchester. Tom facilitates dialogue between the rebel Skitters and the humans, resulting in a plot to assassinate the Overlord that was briefly captured by the 2nd Mass. The 2nd Mass is forced to work with the Skitters with no help from Bressler or his men.
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However, while the Skitters communicate at radio- frequencies, their communications only have roughly the same range as a human voice, so the captured Skitter cannot alert the other aliens. Anne attempts to perform an autopsy on the old Skitter corpse from Pope's hideout, but it has been dead for too long, and the insides have already rotted into "mush." As the gang prepares to leave the motorbike store, Pope knocks Dai out and escapes on a motorcycle. He goes back to the sleeping Skitters and blows them up with a few grenades attached to a can of gasoline.
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While scouting the Skitter command tower in downtown Boston, Tom, Hal and Weaver spy a tall, humanoid alien species directing Skitters. They appear to be the "officers" or master- race commanding or controlling the Skitters. Tom theorizes that the reason they haven't seen them before is because in a normal military occupation, high-ranking officers don't expose themselves in open territory until they feel confident that they've secured a region. Weaver, who used to run a construction business, observes the alien tower and notes that both the aliens construction techniques and building materials are fairly imitative of those found on Earth.
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Tom reassures his son that Ben will be fine. Col. Porter calls a briefing for the fighters in a classroom. Long-distance communication collapsed when the Skitters detonated their EMP attack at the start of the invasion six months ago, leaving the resistance to have to rely on sending scouts to physically run west to try to find out more information, and the runners have finally returned. Porter reports that they contacted another human resistance militia in the outskirts of Chicago, who in turn told them that they had contacted other resistance cells in Oklahoma and Texas, with fuzzy reports of surviving human resistance cells as far away as California.
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At the opening of the series, most of the human race has been destroyed in an alien invasion. Tom Mason, a history professor from Boston who almost always wears the same bike gloves, is made second-in-command of the 2nd Massachusetts Militia Regiment, a group of civilians and fighters fleeing the city. Tom's three sons are Hal, Ben, and Matt; his wife perished during the initial stages of the invasion. At the start of the series, Ben has been captured by the "Skitters" - six-legged beings who make up the alien ground forces - and fitted with a "harness" that is making him perform slave labor through mind control.
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With the escape plan now in motion, Tom is now pursued by skitters and Pope is forced to scale the fence when Dingaans hand is injured, meanwhile Hal waits with the ghetto residents in the tunnels. With the fence now down, Tom leads the skitters to the building and blows it up and jumps into the water in triumph. That night, Tom reunites with Hal and the group and then thanks Pope for his part in the escape. Now on the run from the Espheni and faced with increasing Beamer patrols, Tom arrives at the Volm hideout in an abandoned warehouse and is immediately greeted by Cochise.
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However, Harris says that it is impossible to remove the tips of the needles that have fused into the child's spine: the points of the needles seem to be some sort of nanotechnology that grows into the spine the longer it is present. Tom finds Hal alive and Hal tells his father of what he witnessed. Tom explains that the Nazis used similar tactics against Allied POW's in World War II: if one prisoner managed to escape, they would execute entire groups but leave one witness behind, to let the Allies know the harsh reprisal they would exact. The Skitters let Hal escape because they want to discourage the human resistance from attempting to free more harnessed children.
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Three months after the battle in Boston, a traumatized Tom is returned to the 2nd Mass and is accidentally shot by Ben. In flashbacks, it is revealed that Tom was put through agonizing torture before being brought before the Overlords, who offered to allow the 2nd Mass to peacefully live in a "neutral zone" in exchange for their surrender; Tom refused. A "Mech" - one of the robotic beings fighting alongside the Skitters - massacred a group of humans as a reprisal. After he recovers, Tom becomes the focus of suspicion by other members of the 2nd Mass, who fear that he turned or was brainwashed while in alien captivity; this tension leads to a conflict between Tom and Pope, who forms a parallel group called the Berserkers.
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Along the way Tom learns that the Dornians were the first race the Espheni destroyed, and the skitters that they've been fighting were once Dornians until the Espheni transformed them into their servants. Pope and Sara begin a romance that is short-lived when she is stuck and killed in an Espheni trap; Pope blames Tom for her death when he chose to destroy a facility that was mass-producing skitters instead of saving her. Tom, sick of Pope's constant complaining and vitriol, kicks him out of the 2nd Mass; several others including Anthony go with him. The 2nd Mass come across a naval station currently occupied by a group of soldiers under the command of female captain named Katie Marshall with whom Weaver once had a relationship.
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However his actions which sometimes involved provoking the skitters, were not unnoticed by the Espheni, a single overlord aboard a ship monitoring the ghetto sends a message to an unknown person demanding that the vigilante, which some residents dub 'The Ghost' be handed over, or the residents of the ghetto will be killed. Meanwhile, Tom learns from Cochise that the Volm had no choice but to leave the Earth, and have left behind several scout teams. He is then informed that the Espheni had set up ghettos all across the planet, for reasons he does not yet know, and that the Espheni are developing a new power source. Fearing the extinction of humanity, Cochise offers Tom words of support, and when Tom requests that he try to find Anne, Lexi, Matt, and Ben, he agrees.
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Falling Skies begins six months after a global invasion by extraterrestrials, where in early days, the invaders neutralized the world's power grid and technology, defeated and largely destroyed all the world's militaries, and killed over 90% of the human population by destroying all of the world's major cities and capitals. The aliens include mechanical attack drones called "mechs"; a species of light brown-skinned six-legged beings known as "Skitters" that appear to control the mechs; and a mysterious species known as the Overlords, or "Espheni", presumably the actual engineers of the invasion and the masters of the Skitters. The aliens' objectives are not explained until season 4. They plan to extract helium-3 from Earth's moon to power their technology, and to use humanity as an enslaved frontline army in their war with another alien race.
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The only difference is that they changed the tips on each of the cartridges so they fire bullets made out of exotic Mech-metal, making each shot armor-piercing (which Pope compares to using depleted uranium tipped rounds, but much more powerful). The human resistance does not know why the aliens are using Earth building materials and ammunition, only vaguely speculating that the aliens planned for the invasion to rely on local resources to support itself. Matt remarks that it's not fair that the Mech- metal used in the Skitters' robots gives them such an edge in combat that the humans don't have, which inspires Pope to start experimenting around with the recovered Mech-metal they have. Meanwhile, Dr. Anne Glass decides to perform an autopsy on the corpse of the Skitter she killed, which she hasn't had a chance to perform yet because of the temporary evacuation instigated by the incident with the 7th Mass.
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Faced with the news that humanity will be skitterized by the Espheni in the coming days, Tom puts the finishing touches on his escape plan with Dingaan, and then offers him a place among the 2nd Mass when they escape. Later that day, with Pope, Hal, Weaver, Tector and Digaan gathered, Tom, with a scale model of the ghetto in front of him, informs them that he will draw the attention of the ghettos skitter guards while Dingaan scales the fence. He then informs them that Hal will lead the ghettos residents into the tunnels in 15 man groups to avoid suspicion while Pope and Weaver cover for Dingaan, but faced with a skeptical Pope, Tom explains that when he manages to gather the skitters into one area, he will blow the building he was once held in with the explosive charges. The next day, Tom meets with an Overlord and a harnessed child and informs them that the deal they had is now off, and that they should surrender, but when the Overlord threatens his life, he attacks it with a flamethrower and severely injures it.
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