Not to worry, "Falling Skies" fans: aliens will be invading again next year. "Falling Skies," the hit series about a cataclysmic alien dystopia, will be returning for a fourth season, Hollywood Hills reports. TNT's hit science fiction series will return for a 10-episode season in the summer of 2014. The Spielberg-produced show will also return with a new show runner due to Remi Aubuchon's departure to focus on his debut novel. "Battlestar Galactica's" David Eick will be taking Aubuchon's place.
Entertainment Weekly sat down with Aubuchon to get inside details about his feelings about leaving the show, season three's explosive finale, 'Brazil,' and what we should expect in season four.
Aubuchon expressed melancholy at leaving the show. "I have a huge amount of mixed feelings about it," Aubuchon explained. "From a point of view of my personal journey, I probably made the right decision. I have a lot of pain and nostalgia [laugh] - we'll call it separation anxiety. Comic-Con killed me in many ways emotionally because when you're in a room with 3,000 fans who in some ways know the show even better than you do, you get all of that energy and you just don't want to stop. That was kind of sad in some ways for me. But good too."
The third season finale featured the the battle with Eshpeni coming to a head as the 2nd Mass battled the Espheni tower in Boston and the Volm landed to help fight Espheni with the humans. The Volm wanted to send the humans to Brazil, a safe asylum, so the Volm could fight the invaders on their own. However, Tom (Noah Wyle) tells them that the humans want to fight head-to-head with the aliens to gain back their freedom.
The finale also included Tom killing Karen (Jessy Schram), and fans finding out that Anne (Moon Bloodgood) and her baby are still alive-- and that Anne's baby, Alexis, has "special" powers due to her alien DNA.
Aubuchon explained why Brazil was a safe haven in the season finale while the U.S. is a shambles. "We're always trying to open up world a little more, and while we didn't explore it in great detail, the implication was that a lot of South America hadn't been as affected by the Espheni invasion as the rest of the world was," Aubuchon said. "Part of that is just that strategically it probably didn't make sense for the Espheni in preparing for the inevitable Volm conflict. I just like the notion that there might be some spots in the world that are relatively free of the war, as has happened in almost every giant conflict in the world."
Aubuchon also revealed to MTV Geek that the Volm are definitely not straightforward characters. "You know, there's a lot of Volm story to be told in the coming seasons, but we didn't want them to be black and white, good or evil," Aubuchon shared. "We wanted them to be what any invading army becomes, which is that their cause is noble and good, but they've been fighting this war for hundreds of years longer than we have and they have an agenda which might be in conflict with what humans are fighting for."
It was unveiled in the finale that Lexi, Anne's baby, is six years old, and has apparently grown at an abnormal rate. Lexi has the power to extract eye worms, and may have other powers as well. But, as Aubuchon hints, is that really Anne and Lexi in the first place?
"I think that the big question that is a little subtle but is definitely there is, is that Anne and Lexi?" Aubuchon hinted. "Tom saw them dead. It's a little coincidental that all of the sudden Anne and Alexis show up in the middle of the woods. I really don't know what's going to happen in the fourth season, but certainly our thought was to leave that as an open question. Is that even Anne? Why is she sleeping all the time?"
Aubuchon suggested that there may be a jump in time at the beginning of the fourth season, similar to the time lapse in the third season. "The real technical reason why we jumped ahead seven months was just to get the storytelling going at an exciting point instead of it being five episodes of learning about the Volm and learning about Tom becoming president. I'm not saying those aren't valid stories, but they're just not as high-impact stories as 'Oh my God, there's a mole, and we're under attack, and what do you mean Karen is now the new overlord?' It just seemed like a better place to start, so I wouldn't be surprised if David [Eick] is planning a similar jump because it's just smart storytelling."