User Reviews

So I am watching season 1 am now on episode 5 and to be honest I am no wiser on what is going on than I was 4 episodes ago? I neither understand connections in reality to the main characters or that in dreams and sometimes I am at a loss as to which is dream v reality?

In a previous review sombody compared this show to Sense8 and advised the viewer to watch that instead. Not sure I agree on the comparison however I totally agree that it is a far superior show and addictive sadly cut short of its full potential by the networks non renewing.

Being a masocist I will most likely continue watching this show in the hope that at some stage the story will fall into some coherence at which point I would most probably rewatch it to realise what I missed from the beginning and add things together. Unless it never happens then I will be angry at the wasted time I spent on such trash. At the moment it's heading in that direction sadly.,

Ok I am now on season 2 after prevailing and I have been able to know understand mostly the story which has improved my viewing experience a lot hence I have increased my rating to a 7 if the first season had been more explicit in script/storyline I would have given a 8 so prevail it Defo got better and more enjoyable

OMG how annoying to prevail through 2 seasons and they cancel the show before any answers or conclusions are revealed!! I have just watched the last episode of season 2 left on a pretty large cliffhanger and now I feel robbed would have been better if they had cancelled it after season 1 than allow another season! DAM NETWORKS!

Although it's eerily hard to follow, a mind boggler, the actors are very good, especially David Ajala (sexy). I am watching it for the second time so it is definitely worth it.

So I've never written a review before so bare with me.

Falling Water's preview was intriguing. Dreams, the sub-conscious mind, connecting on another level along with the required dose of mystery and the hint of coming answers. It looked to have all of the necessary ingredients for a tasty, high intellect sci-fi drama soufflé.

So, my highly intellectual, overly dramatic sci-fi loving mind insisted that I take a bite.

Bittersweet.Or rather "sweetbitter". It swirled around in my head like a slightly old chunk of dark chocolate would on my tongue, but in reverse.

For what little you get from the first episode the idea is very sweet having most of the qualities a TV series of this genre should.

But then you get the bitter.

The writing is harsh to say the least. Cliché, dis-jointed and seemingly lacking much direction. It just didn't flow very well and that took a toll on the episode as a whole.

I'll watch a few more episodes with the hopes that this was noticed by whoever is in charge of the writing and can somehow remedy the cheesiness. Maybe have the writers watch a few old Chris Carter X-Files episodes to get a "taste" of some excellent episode writing.

So, to summarize, you should take a bite of this treat but expect the bitter taste of sub-standard writing along with the sweet aroma that the premise creates.

Bon Appetit. ;)

After episode 10, 'Falling Water' left me with not much more insight to the purpose of the story than after the first episode. This might be the reason why so many people do not like it. Most parts of the story are revealed in the pilot, or at least whereto it would go in the following episodes, but after that we do not learn much more, despite we want to.

The final episode gives a bit more 'Action' and a nice trial-and-error-loop, but in the end, it's not that satisfying.

The dream world is not much disturbing or frightening, it's a very finite space like an expanded mirror of our world, which is, at least for me, far not enough to impress. And with that I do not mean visuals like in 'Inception', but in a dream you can change location and time like, say, from beyond creation of earth to your classroom to a cave on the solid center of Uranus. But that would be more a Doctor Who thing. I liked 'Falling Water' for its style, for the slow pacing, and of course for David Ajala's character Burton, but once I realized that the story struggles with it's purpose, I lost a bigger part of my interest.

That may have happened even earlier to people who are not as patient as me (and I think I am very patient).

Whereby the show has (or should have) much potential. There is dream mysticism, modern technique, conspiracy, a cult, shady characters with unclear intents, fight of the minds, floating borders between reality and dreamscape, a set of good actors, and much more ingredients that could make it outstanding. A great deal of action is not really needed for that, watch season one of 'Mr. Robot', or 'The Leftovers'.

Sadly, many promises (at least those from the trailers) are not fulfilled. The show starts to "tread water" early, loses its grip and therewith its audience.

I hope really for a second (and better) season, which is not clear by now (12/2016) if it will happen.

Edit (01/2018): It got a second season which runs now. Let's hope for better scripts this time.

Season 1 was ethereal, engaging, full of promise. Season 2 was formulaic, commercial garbage. It wasn't aided by changing the production staff, and supporting characters, with a weak story.

This show is not getting much love from the gurus at Metacritic. You don't have to watch too much to see why. It is absolutely bewildering. To say that three people are sharing the same dream, as the first reviewer did, is to put it mildly. It would be more accurate to say that elements of the dreams of each show up in the dreams of the others. Which would be tough enough. BUT . . . .

There is a dream researcher, who may or may not be a mega billionaire. There is a baby, who may or may not have been born. There is a love affair, which may or may not have happened. There is a mass suicide, which apparently DID happen, but with someone on the scene who has no apparent role in the tragedy . . . but there she is. And so on.

But with all, I like this one. There are SO many shows on television these days, you can't watch them all. And too many that are similar - small town bewildered by death/disappearance of child - mystery to be solved by detective with his/her problems of their own; people have mysteriously returned from the dead; a plague has ravaged 99% of the earth - and - my favorite - what I have named the British plot - a great terrorist plot is hatched, hero must unravel, only to discover . . . .it's . . . it's. . . . the GOVERNMENT!!!! This was original 50 years ago, guys. It's a hackneyed cliché now.

So I started the show because of the credibility of the producer, Gale Hurd, and I will stay with it, bewildering or not. It is unique, and that counts for a lot.

Falling Water tries hard, but quickly fails to hold attention with its postmodern, fragmentary and mysterious approach. The appeal of this wears off quickly when you start wondering when something is actually going to make sense. But instead of narrative arc we are burdened with clichés and stereotypical hyper-American character tropes. You just know we're heading into way deeper waters before things start making sense and this lack of narrative direction quickly becomes a turn off. And for a show so very dependent on dreaming sequences, it just does "dreaming" really badly. For example, dreamers are offered Ambien to help them nod off. However there's a real "lucid dreaming" drug out there that will put you to sleep in the middle of the day and give you quite amazing dreams. It's called Baclofen. But the writers and producers have apparently never heard of this medication. Who did their research? Also the dreams that characters dream are much too obviously narrative devices, in any case they are nothing like my dreams. They have way too much focus, detail and colour and carry far too much import to be believable on anything but TV. A good try, but "Twin Peaks" this certainly isn't.

Watched the first 6 episodes now, and i absolutely love it.

It is not the standard kind of series, it is unique in the way that it tells the story. You have to make some effort to follow, especially during the first episode you need to accustom. But that is why I love it: not just another one of the many TV-shows around, it is not straight to the point and all predictable. It is dreamy, mysterious and bewildering. Sometimes you even don't know for sure whether the characters are awake or dreaming.

A must see I think, at least if you are capable of absorbing a different style of TV- making :)

The show has three main characters, somehow stereotypical, which individual plots dissolves in a messy and pretentious development. The continuous inner references joint their paths during this pilot, both in real life and their sleep – sometimes hard to say what is what. Not memorable acting, photography or soundtrack, but with promising story development. Sci-fi is never easy and they try to explain so much in a very unconventional way during a short chapter, that is where this premiere fails in my opinion. They try to connect so many things, as the dreams are supposed to be connected – but dreams don't always make sense. And for understanding (and not to fall sleep) you will need to be very awake, with your eyes wide open. Otherwise, you may miss the potential surprises this show may have for us in the upcoming episodes.

(sorry if my English is not so good)

Here you can find my extended review in Spanish:

http://todoseries.com/pilotos-de-otono-falling-water/

The first thing I would like to know is why there are only 34 reviews here (at this time)... with the latest being August 2018... and none of them deal with season 2. Something is messed up there.

Regarding the series itself:

Rotten Tomatoes wrote: ""Falling Water attempts complexity and intrigue but churns out an unimaginative concept lacking a redeemable payoff." I could not agree more.

The only thing I found positive about this overall is the lead actress, who carries the part well. For the rest, there is a difference between a well-designed mystery and loosely-joined random concepts. At first I wondered why the show seemed so disjointed until I visited Wikipedia and found the writer(s) and even directors changed from show to show. No wonder this seems like a mess of a confusing plot line: that's exactly what it is.

I usually reserve 1 star for the worst of series, but in this case I give it 1 star for wasting people's viewing time with (as Rotten Tomatoes points out), an intriguing premise that fails to deliver. This is as disjointed as LOST, as pointlessly weird as the original Twin Peaks series, and as with so many such efforts, leaves the audience clueless as to what is real and what isn't.

The series moves extremely slow. Unless one is really, really into endless dream sequences in which one can't tell whether the current scene is dream or reality, this is going to leave a lot of viewers cold. Add to that gratuitous scenes that have no bearing on the plot whatsoever (evidently thrown in just to be gratuitous scenes), pointless unexplained special effects, and dead-end story lines... and we have the makings of long, boring schlock.

I see too many short 10-star reviews here to be believe they're honest reviews. I find it difficult to believe earnest, intelligent science fiction fans would swallow this drivel without tearing the writing to pieces. There are some lower-star reviews... which are the only ones I find to be honest and didn't read like paid advertisements.

I love a good mystery, but good mysteries require good plot lines. There is little or no continuity in this series, no explanations beyond the cliche, and dream sequence after boring dream sequence that makes less sense than most actual dreams.

There are better things to watch, and considerably better story lines.

The show is about 3 strangers who are all subconsciously connected through their dreams. The characters are a mother who is looking for her lost child, whom she is told by the hospital doesn't exist, a man looking for his missing girlfriend & a detective trying to cure his catatonic mother.

The directing is great, it plays out like a movie. Fortuately it does not resemble Inception, except for the fact the the theme revolves around dreams & the subconscious. The acting is also good too, especially by one of the leads, Lizzy Brochere who plays Tess.

This seems like one of those shows that will be a long mini-series, or play out like an extended movie, because it's difficult to see how the plot can carry out more than 1 or 2 seasons without the mysteries being resolved. It's a unique plot and very entertaining to watch. The pilot already had a few twists!

No this is not Inception, though you'd be forgive if you thought that. Actually I can't really put it in any category - well sure Science Fiction and I already said what it is about in a nutshell. But what happens in season 1 or throughout it ... it's just amazing. I don't think by watching it just once, you can grasp the scope of it ... or understand the whole story that is told.

Even watching it more that once (which I did for a couple of episodes) might not give you an insight to the whole thing. Still it is confusing, infuriating and enticing because of it. You may lose your train of thought(s), but you'll regain it at some point.

Really well told and edited and acted. The first season is well thought through. Which I may be wrong, but does not seem to have included a second season. The second season may have characters (actors) from season 1 (those who made it), but it seems as removed as dreams seem to my normal life - not sure how that is for you, maybe you feel the same, maybe your dreams are closer to reality.

And apart from the second season being a bit of decline (not too much, but it feels like ... something normal compared to the first season), what really might bug you out, is the end of season 2. Calling it unsatisfactory would be a major understatement. So if the last impression is something that generally haunts you ... this will haunt you for a while ... fair warning. Maybe stop after season 1 if you fear that happening.

The premise of this show is interesting. That's why I decided to watch this. After the first episode, I manned up, and you seriously need to, and tried to watch another one.

It's a fail. It really is. It's slow paced, borderlining Tween Peaks (the new season) and just cannot grab your attention.

The writers tried to make it mysterious and once again failed. It gives you uninteresting crumbs and uninteresting questions that you really don't want to know the answer too.

Couple that up with the poor acting of a few from the cast and you got a disaster.

I can't believe someone really appreciates looong shots about nothing. You could sum up the whole first episode in 15 minutes. That means that they have 30 minutes of utter rubbish - 2 minutes filming how someone walks away, 5 minutes of some chick, who no one cares who she is, standing with her hands in the air and so forth.

It's trash.

It's better than average and closer to very good but it is not very good. Otherwise a very enjoyable TV series

This is like the less fun version of Sense8. Nice try. But not quite.

Sense8: Eight people around the world are connected through their minds and can enter each other's reality. Each character has an awesome backstory (German Thief, Indian Scientist, South Korean businesswoman, Nigerian cab driver with ambition, Chicago cop, Icelandic DJ, Mexican tele-novella star, transgender computer hacker) and use their skills to help one another. And they have this big bad entity/organization that wants to capture them to use their powers. Starts/ends with the actual vaginal birth of the characters.

Falling Water: Three people in the US who are able to walk into other dreams and communicate. They have a big bad entity/organization that wants to capture them to use their powers. Starts with the actual vaginal birth of a character that "connects" them...

So if you are looking for something to tide you over until Sense8's season 2 comes out... sure give it a try. But if you haven't seen Sense8 yet... Don't waste your time on this. Watch Sense8 instead.

Going into this show completely blind, I was captivated by the first couple episodes. I absolutely love this kind of show where dream and reality are intertwined together, and as a viewer one is always not certain what is real or not. I especially love the way the dream scenes are portrayed: the lack of ambient sound, the characters move in slow motions as if they are underwater yet can transcend distance much quicker, and the sudden switching of scenes and places without any logical connection; watching all of these feels just like a dream, and they convey perfectly the feeling of disjointed dream logic I often experience in my own dreams. I am also a sucker for multiple storylines that eventually converge together, and this show did a decent enough job of it.

However, I became more apprehensive once I learned this show's low rating; since the first couple episodes were great to me, I worried that maybe the show just fell off a cliff later, but this fear never materialized since season 1 is fairly consistent in quality and in building an unique atmosphere of mystery by revealing hints piece by piece.

Then I started S2 and I quickly got the feeling that something is wrong. The narrative pacing feels more uneven, the choice to change the actress yet retain the same character is hard to get used to, and the dream scenes lack that unique feeling they once created in S1. I lasted through 2 more episodes and just couldn't do it any more. Season 2 feels just like another generic thriller, with an out of nowhere big bad, while established story thread from S1 seem to be taking a backseat. The old saying "the magic is gone" is what I would describe of how I feel about S2.

Ultimately I still like S1 enough that I don't consider this to be a waste of time. If you are like me and love a show where the storytelling blurs the line between dream and reality, truth and illusion, then you should give this a watch. For S1 alone I would rate this show 8 out of 10, but S2 is just so underwhelming and disappointing, that I can only give this a 6.

I'd be interested in to know the backstory on why the critics have taken such a negative view of this series right off the bat. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus (dating from the very first episode) is "Falling Water attempts complexity and intrigue but churns out an unimaginative concept lacking a redeemable payoff."

The fact is the concept is highly original--I have spent my life reading and viewing science-fiction and have never come across this theme before. And how can they possibly know that it is "lacking a redeemable payoff"?

Is it possible that these reviewers receive a whole series plot development along with the copy of the first episode? I mean, if they know how the series develops and,for that reason, they know it is a dud, this should be acknowledged up-front somewhere.

My initial impression of Falling Water was that it was a low-rent Sense8. Once again, characters are sharing consciousness in some way, only there are less of them, and those connections are less intense.

One of the main differences between the two shows is that Sense8 has a very distinct vision, and if Falling Water has one, it still hasn't made that clear.

Yes, people share dreams, and occasionally see one another in them, but so far that hasn't connected them in any way. It's basically three people dealing with their dream worlds and occasionally running into each other.

I made it through the first 8 episodes, thinking that Falling Water was just taking its time getting somewhere. The early episodes were based almost entirely on showing us peculiar dreams and establishing (quite well) a world in which it's not always clear whether you are dreaming or awake. It was many episodes in before one got some small sense of the mechanics of the world and the goals of its people.

I found the series mildly enjoyable at first, but while Sense8 has a grand vision, Falling Water seems like it just wants to show you a bunch of weird stuff and create a general sense of mystery. It does that well enough, but it never moved beyond that. Stuff happened yet no one seemed to be getting closer to answers.

By that 8th episode, I was just tired of this game of weird stuff taking the viewer nowhere in particular. If the creators are going somewhere, I think it's time they proved it.

Dream related sci-fi show that revolves around three mysterious strangers, a mysterious child, at least two mysterious organization, basically everything here is a but mysterious. There's nothing wrong with a good mystery, but the most rewarding viewer experience is watching one them getting solved. Falling Water is pretty stingy with those rewards. I watched the last episode felt far too many things were left open. Things that were not even worthy of being kept for a possible season two. There's a lot of new age mumbo jumbo going on and some episodes appear to be just fillers, taking the main story arch not any further. I like Lizzie Brocheré, who does her best to ground the whole thing by playing her character very natural and straight, but even she does not seem to know what exactly is going on in show.

i was the kind of kid who stayed up til 3am watching the original twilight zones, so i love this kind of thing, and this series really worked for me.

fun premise, beautifully shot, looking forward to next episode. it could go in lots of different directions, so i am curious. also the performances were really excellent for the most part.

even though some of the ideas have been seen before, i found the way this particular show has woven it all together to be really original and entertaining. hoping to see it come together in a way that surprises me - time will tell.

'Falling Water' is a North American creative dramatic production which stars many talented actors. Its storyline development is propelled by a narrative projection which plays on the myths and common misunderstandings concerning sleep, dreams in particularly. Essentially, dreams are re-imagined as a three-dimensional interactive space, capable of hosting a shared, reciprocal or interconnected experience, in some cases, fostered by technological enhancement. Dreams become conflated with virtual reality.

Ironically, though, it is the biological not the technological which drives this storyline. Specifically, a four-year-old boy, apparently abducted from his mother at birth, sequestered in attempt to exploit his natural ability to affect the dreamscape, and in turn, the well-being of humanity, collectively. Shockingly, the child's mother was manipulated into believing she never gave birth to a child.

No immediate explanation is tendered to inform how pre-knowledge of this child's capability would be known to a third party prior to his birth, or why his abduction was justified. The audience is left to speculate on the self-righteousness behind the abductor's motives. Further, in support of this child's purported potential, multiple organisations are vying to possess, control and exploit him. He becomes an intensely coverted commodity. Apparently, child abuse and people trafficking are not considered 'a thing' for these people.

In trying to quantify this dramatic production, one must attempt to separate the creative license of imaginative creativity on the part of the writers, and the pseudo-science-like projections behind its construction.

Where does imagination begin and misinformation take over? First, I think it appropriate to recognise the creatively imaginative writing in the conception of this series. Second, the problems arise, in my opinion, in the apparent conceptual overlay which seems to conflate virtual reality with the alleged dream space within which our dreams are enacted. Such that, the storyline demands the audience accepts dreams are structured and sequential analogous to a game environment - reflecting a specific objective.

It seems best for rational observers to suspend their disbelief and try to vest themselves neutrally within the story's progression. However, at this level, we are left with a mother seeking a child, people seeking to exploit others for financial gain, and cult-like organisations or corporations who are informed by their own utopian and selfish motives. Perhaps, at this level, this production falls down, as many modern dramatic productions do when the bells and whistles of technological theatre are stripped away. The story, at this level, is really not so original, interesting or engaging. It merely emphasises people of privilege, especially the hyper-rich, can behave entirely immorally in reflection of their own selfish self-involvement. Further, utopian ideals are frequently used to justify and legitimise all manner of abuse, coercion and dysfunctional behaviour.

Ultimately, the deeper relationships which hover under the surface of inter-character relations are not explored in any real subtlety, concerning the larger questions behind the story's premise.

For example, are our dreams a construction of our own, emotional existential struggles in our daily lives; or, alternatively, a specific mechanism attempting to rationalise the irrational or irreconcilable aspects of our lives? Is there really meaning in dreams, or are they merely a reflection of our own levels of unresolved emotional anxiety?

This show is like a combination of Sense8 and the movie Waking Life, only terrible. I'm pretty sure I'm supposed to be intrigued by all the side characters who show up in one main character's life and another's dream, but it's impossible to remember who they all are. Most of all, though, it's just really really boring.