
So, coming into the two-hour season finale, I had a number of expectations [spoilers after the jump]:

Well, I was wrong. The alien ship still stands, although Tom did manage to cause quite a significant explosion in the ship, and nobody died, much to my disappointment. Pope and one of the other fighters were both severely injured, but it seemed that they would make it back to the rest of the group without further incident. Rather than losing one of his sons during the finale, Tom himself voluntarily enters the alien ship after being told that they know of a way to stop Ben's gradual change into a skitter.
Instead of death and destruction, then, the theme of the two-part finale was resistance and communication. Instead of destroying the aliens, the human resistance opens up the channels of communication between the two species--channels that the aliens didn't even seem to think about before the humans fought back. I also think it's significant that the method of the resistance is itself connected to communication--the humans finally got the aliens to withdraw, and then communicate, when they jammed the radio frequency the aliens used to communicate with each other. It was this non-violent form of resistance, rather than their special alien-metal bullets, that finally gets the aliens' attention.
And this is why I'm so excited by what I saw in this season finale. It would have been predictable, easy, and sure, fun, to end the season on an unequivocal victory, where the humans take out the big ship, and set themselves up to move on to the next stage of fighting the aliens. But this ending is much more morally ambiguous. There is a sense that the aliens don't realize that they're behaving badly, making it more difficult to hate them. What's more, this ending sets up next season to be quite different from this one--rather than have another 8 weeks of hiding, running, and fighting, we now have the potential to explore complicated relationships with the aliens.
So while I would have been watching next summer, regardless of what happened during this season's finale, I am much more excited and interested now in what will develop. And maybe, just maybe, next summer I'll mutter just a little less under my breath.