Review of 'The Man Who Fell to Earth' 1.3

The Man Who Fell to Earth just keeps getting better and better. The last few minutes of episode 1.3 were the best so far in this very fine series. Faraday tells the audience -- assembled in the narrative and whoever's watching the episode on Showtime or Amazon Prime or any way else on Planet Earth -- "I've come with a prototype for a quantum fusion process," and proceeds to make good on his claim by lighting London up in the night. England swings like a pendulum do.

Faraday is progressing well. He's a big drinker -- of water, which gets him to expel the poison that he took in last week to cure Josiah. Before the hour is over, he and Justin are in London, brought there by Hatch Flood, ousted a few years ago by his sister Sonya from a science tech behemoth, and that's how Faraday got that crucial audience.

At this point, the bad guys seem way behind. Spencer is driven and smart, Lisa seems even smarter, but if this is a battle between the CIA and big tech to get control of the quantum fusion process I don't see how the CIA can overcome the combination of Faraday and Sonya's company unless ... well, I guess unless the CIA got the inscrutable Thomas Newton to work with them, but why would Newton do that? The last we saw he was being tortured by the CIA all those years ago.

I'm beginning to think that Newton, the man in The Man Who Fell to Earth in David Bowie's 1976 movie, will be far more than just the foundational character who so far has been hovering around the edges, in effect passing off the narrative to Faraday. The truth is, I didn't quite buy what he told Faraday in episode 1.2. And last night we learned that his failure to complete his mission was not due to his getting "distracted" here on Earth, although I guess you could consider having your face peeled off an extreme kind of distraction. (By the way, that black and white old film reminded me of The Man in the High Castle, just saying. They had color back then, didn't they?) The gist of all of this is that it's not clear that helping Faraday is now Newton's ultimate goal.

Well, there's nothing like keep watching the series to get answers to these and other open questions, and that's exactly what I intend to keep doing. See you back here next week.