For a decent episode, continuing in a long line of good episodes in Falling Skies season three, “Search and Recovery” is sort unmemorable despite nothing jumping out that overtly says the episode was particularly bad.

No one seems to notice that Hal is suddenly boring holes in the back of everyone’s skull with his glaring.

Now, the title “Search and Recovery” is a bit of a misnomer and I feel the need to note that nothing in this episode that is searched for is actually recovered. For those of you keeping up, this means that Anne Glass and her alien-hybrid daughter, Alexis, are not found in this episode, but we do get an awful evil stares from our favorite former do-gooder, Hal Mason (Drew Roy). It seems clear that evil Hal is still in control.

The search and rescue party perform an impromptu funeral for the anonymous woman.

Instead, their search and failed rescue of Anne Glass is punctuated by metaphors as they find corpses of dead women reminding each of the 2nd Mass of their fears. The most prevalent is young Matt, who remembers his mother when they bury the unknown dead woman, and what we get out of it is the touching closeness that lies between the middle brother, Ben, and his younger brother. I can only hope that this relationship will develop even more and give us something terribly heartbreaking in the end.

Next, there also isn’t a whole lot of search and recovery going on for Tom Mason and John Pope, whose plane crashed last episode due to Esphensi intervention. The Esphensi search, but they do not recover. Instead, we get a very testosterone-filled adventure with Mason and Pope who grow to dislike each other more throughout the episode, culminating in many a fist fight. Fortunately, their dislike and their respect are positively correlated, so as one goes up, so too does the other.

Mason and Pope collapse after finally arriving in Charleston.

It’s seems fairly unclear to me, though, why Tom Mason is so intent on beating Pope up this episode. Despite getting Pope to open up about his family life and why he was in prison (he accidentally killed a man while trying to show his son how to stick up for himself), Mason instead decides they can’t be friends at all (despite Pope obviously thinking so) and the two duke it out for the rest of the episode. At the end of the episode, after Pope manages to find a car and drive them to Charleston, they decide on a tie, though Mason is uncomfortable with that thought. “You know what they say about a tie?” he states. “It’s like kissing your sister.” And for the second time in the episode, Mason refuses to let them be at peace, but instead makes it into a competition. What his motives are for constantly making Pope angry, I’m not sure, but I’m fairly sure we’re going to see some fallout because of it.

The rest of the episode is the standard “we don’t know who the mole is” and “what are the Volm really building” fare, just to remind us of what’s really important. Unfortunately, nothing more illuminating was presented aside from the Volm generating more power than they need, and this worries the Vice President greatly. So, look forward to more Volm intrigue as Cochise is missing and the Vice President is suspicious of their allies.

All being said, it was a good episode, but not a great episode, and as such I  give it: