'Falling Skies' recap: 'Journey to Xibalba'

Courtesy TNT

After last week's weird hallucination interrogation episode, Tom is making his way back to Charleston. The Mason boys have already made it back, much to Maggie's joy.

During Tom's brief absence, Weaver and Pope have found common ground in their mutual distrust of Marina, the new President. Oh, and during Karen's interrogation of Tom, she claims that Anne and Lexi are dead. And that nifty Espheni defense grid is finally up. You know the one that will have that cute side effect of killing everyone? I guess now we will get to find out just how good that Volm weapon works.

And I'll save you the trouble of googling Xibalba. It's the name a tribe of Mayans gave to the underworld, and translates into "place of fear." So, I imagine things are going to get more difficult for our little group of survivors.

Tom makes it back to Charleston in record time using a sailboat and boy is he pissed. He gathers his sons together and tells them what Karen did to Anne and Lexi. He uses all these feelings to feed his own hate to carry him through the fight ahead. Ben seems to be the only Mason left with a sense of perspective. This new grim Tom marches to Weaver and demands that they use the Volm weapon on Boston. Since this was not the intended target, Weaver is not very keen on this idea. But Porter seems to be considering it even though they have concerns about whether Tom has been “bugged” again.

Since Tom isn't the president anymore, they send him away while they take it under consideration.

Tom takes this time to go have a friendly word with Pope. Pope merrily assures him that if he bugs out, he'll put him down. Tom applauds this sentiment, feeling that Weaver might hesitate. At this feel good moment an explosion blasts outside knocking the pair down. Uh oh, the explosion was the Volm compound going up. They find Cochise wounded and rush him to the hospital, where Lourdes is trying to make a hurried exit. He gives Tom an impassioned speech about the human spirit being the greatest weapon they have. Blah. He claims that his body will regenerate if he is left undisturbed and then passes out. (Regenerate? Maybe he's a Time Lord.) Anyway, as the group leaves him, Lourdes turns back and smirks. She then plants some Espheni nastiness inside an airvent where it starts growing ugly little tendrils everywhere. As Lourdes tries to surreptitiously leave the scene of the crime, Weaver appears and orders her back to the hospital to see the wounded. It doesn't take long for the tendril things to grow and apparently break the building so that it begins to collapse. What will those sneaky aliens think of next?

Up above the collapse, Ben uses his super hearing to direct the digging towards survivors. Pope is proving to be quite the team player lately. He has his people frantically digging down towards the stairwell and helpfully tells Weaver that his daughter will be fine. Ben and Matt heads toward the sewer tunnels hoping to put his hearing to better use.

It seems that most of Charleston's folks got buried in the collapse and start looking for a way out. Tom and Marina stumble upon Lourdes in the rubble and haul her to the hospital. She fakes unconsciousness until she's put on a bed next to Cochise. She then turns her head and smirks at him some more as his wounds heal themselves. Meanwhile, Hal and Maggie are trapped in the armory trying to dig themselves out, only they're running out of air. Luckily, Tom and Anthony stumble upon Dr. Kadar who immediately starts looking for a way to blast the current predicament away.

Tom gets distracted by Lourdes deciding to be awake. She lays it on pretty thick with remorse about Anne and all. She thinks it's so sad that Anne died back where she started. Hmm. Red flag, anyone?

Anyway, it doesn't register with Tom right away and he leaves her alone. It doesn't take her long to pull out a scalpel to kill poor Cochise. Fortunately, Tom mulls it over a while, and with some coincidental prompting by Anthony, he puts it together. You see, he didn't tell anyone but Weaver that Anne died in Boston, so Lourdes shouldn't have known that little tidbit. When they corner her, she is finally goaded into pulling out her energy pistol and they konk her on the head.

Finally, Lourdes is caught. They strap her down to one of the hospital beds where she starts spewing abuse at Tom. It's sort of reminiscent of The Exorcist except without the vomit. Even though he obviously would like to shoot her, Tom takes her pistol and uses it on the rubble. So at least they got some use out of her after all. So, just like that, they are saved from their underworld of fear and emerge back into the daylight. And with his cathartic journey, Tom appears to have regained some of his faith in humanity. He and Cochise have a heartfelt talk about carrying on after this setback.

Cochise appears to be very hopeless for once. He thinks the weapon is buried under the rubble of the Volm compound, but everyone who knew how to operate the thing is dead. So Tom immediately offers up Dr. Kadar as an excellent quick study, after they bury their dead of course. Looks like we have a lot of ground to cover in next week's season finale. Don't miss it!

The season finale of Falling Skies, “Brazil” airs Sunday Aug. 4th at 9PM ET on TNT.