TV Guide — There's a lot of catching up to do as the third season of TNT's alien-invasion sci-fi action series Falling Skies gets underway Sunday, with a two-hour opener (9/8c) understandably if regrettably heavy on exposition in between the elaborate battle scenes. As reported in TV Guide Magazine's current Sci-Fi Preview issue, and emphasized for what seems at least a dozen times during the premiere, seven months have passed since last season's surprise ending, when a new alien force introduced itself to the human rebels.

These are the Volm, the good aliens, represented by an upstanding talking lizard known as Cochise (what, Tonto was taken?), who advises the soldiers of the 2nd Mass - now based in Charleston - on battle tactics, though not everyone is as trusting as now-President Tom Mason (Noah Wyle, stolid and Lincoln-esque). The bad aliens from the first invasion are now identified as the Esphemi, who've developed a Mega version of their robotic Mechs, but are losing ground lately to the humans with their Volm-supplied future-tech weaponry. Please take all of this seriously. Everyone else seems to.

TNT helpfully supplied a glossary about all of this with the new-season screeners, as well as a chart of the various cardboard characters who populate this war-torn world. Falling Skies isn't a terrible show, unlike the recently wrapped first season of NBC's Stephen King-lite Revolution. But it can be terribly ordinary, especially when there's a pause in the combat. It probably won't surprise you to learn that there's suspicion of a mole within the military ranks. But even so, you may be dismayed to witness a scene out of a third-rank CBS procedural from maybe 20 years ago, when a major peripheral character looks up as an intruder enters, and says, "So it's you?" before being killed. And the maudlin family drama involving President Mason's sons hits a new low when little Matt plays hooky from his schooling to experiment with explosives, and after being disciplined by his dad's new baby mama, yells at her, "You're not my mother!" He later apologizes, but there's no forgiving a B-story from a bad sitcom slowing down the pace like this. You may start wishing for another invasion by those creepy "skitters" - or maybe a bag of Skittles, because even that would be less sickeningly sweet.

On the plus side, House's Robert Sean Leonard does terrific character work in the second hour as a disheveled, twitchy scientific genius who lives underground to help keep the lights on. "I never go topside," he insists. "Nothing good happens up there." (At least we know someone is reading the scripts.) And because every society needs new blood, let's hope for great things from Tom and Anne's new Mason baby, Alexis, who's barely out of the womb before she's crawling around and saying "Momma." Now that's freaky in the best way.

Can you talk about the addition of Robert Sean Leonard and Gloria Reuben to the cast this season?

I think the reason for including and building up two new characters is we wanted to show different sides of the experience of the post-invasion. In the first season, we were dealing with the arrival of aliens on our planet and what in the hell was going on. The second season was about taking charge of ourselves and trying to take the fight to the enemy. The third season, it has become a way of life now. This is what the world is, so we wanted to expand the cast and show different personalities as we start to get more comfortable with the way things are. I believe both of those characters enhance that idea.

Marina [Reuben] comes from a different point of view. She has clearly had a lot of experience in public life. She understands policy. She understands leadership. Yes, she is Tom’s right-hand person, but in many ways, she is more experienced on the practical side of leadership.

Then we have Roger Kadar [Leonard], who we learn is the person who has been responsible for keeping the infrastructure going in Charleston, with the understanding that he will never leave the basement, or the bowels, of Charleston. Of course, who wouldn’t be curious to find out what actually happened with him [to make him that way]? But the question also is: Is he able to overcome his personal trauma, which obviously was deep and hurtful, in order to become an active participant in the resistance against the Espheni? This is a character I believe we haven’t seen before in “Falling Skies.”
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TV GOODNESS: We’re excited about Gloria Reuben and Robert Sean Leonard being on the show this season. How did you get them?

Rémi: “Well, I like to think that we wrote some really interesting characters that they read because they were pretty quickly on. They were cast just before we started shooting. But I think that first of all we were so lucky to get them. It helped that they were fans of the show. In my discussion with Gloria what I told her I wanted a prominent woman of color in the show, but I didn’t ever want to make it a story about a woman of color. And I think we accomplished that to a certain extent in that I just wanted to show a nice strong woman who could be Tom’s equal and I think that appealed to her quite honestly. as well it should. And she has some multi-cultural ethnicity back story that we talked about but really overall I’d say that it was more about her political acumen and what her objectives were. But I think there’s more to Marina than meets the eye in these first couple of episodes and while she seems to be Tom’s right hand person I think that there’s a lot of story she’ll be influencing because of that. Robert Sean Leonard is a slightly different thing because I was very excited that he wanted to do it. But when we first conceived the character – to be really honest – we were looking for something that had a little bit of comedy relief. I would say that our prototype was closer to Jeff Goldblum – sort of crazy, wild, unpredictable behavior. But Robert when he first talked to us about it – I think certainly he’s eccentric and certainly he’s got a different world view than other people do but he grounded that character in a way that I never really had anticipated and consequently made it very special. We had an opportunity throughout the course of the season to really have him be involved in parts of the story that we actually hadn’t really at first thought about. We had Uncle Scott in the first season. We had Jamil in the second season – one of our technical guys and we were thinking of a replacement for that, but he actually brought something to that character that made it more than just the guy who – I mean he does all that too – the guy figures out crazy stuff, but also there’s just more depth to him. I think where he goes in this season will be really interesting and I look forward to seeing him in the fourth season too.
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