Date of airing: December 4, 1994 (NBC)
Nielsen ratings information: 13.9 million viewers, 9.1/14 in Households
EARTH 2 goes into the history books of television as one of the shows that had been screwed with by the network it aired on. Maybe some of the episodes didn’t finish in time, or maybe NBC quickly lost interest in advertising this high-concept sci-fi drama when it became clear that viewers weren’t finding back to the show. At some point, you don’t even know where an episode belongs in the timeline of the season, because you can’t even keep the episodes in proper order in your head again. Turns out this episode should have been placed before Gaal’s third outing, meaning the second and third episode with guest star Tim Curry had two episodes between them. You know you made it big as an actor on television when the network reshuffles the order of episodes, just so your three-episode arc can air back-to-back. In case you needed a reason to curse NBC to hell and explain why your favorite 1990s science-fiction show was canceled too soon, here is one, although EARTH 2 had a few other problems why it didn’t quite work with the audience.
Three weeks after the Eden Project’s crash of humankind’s new home planet, the writers gave the characters a new virus to deal with. It had struck a group of survivors whose bodies were found by Devon’s group, and it wouldn’t take long for Danziger and a random guest character whose name I had forgotten as soon as I finished watching this hour, to also be infected by the mysterious virus that apparently gives you flashes before your eyes – memories from the past that only affect the sick in the present, severe pain included. EARTH 2 certainly went down the 90s television sci-fi route with the virus premise, especially when it came to establishing the cause of the virus and how to defeat it. If only real-life viruses causing pandemics would be this easily eradicated, that would make it easier for anti-vaxxers to shut up. Plus, the viewers get a bit more backstory of the crash of the spaceship, and the characters are suddenly asking themselves if their trip was sabotaged.
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| You get to relive the highlights of your life with the love of your life. |
I didn’t quite get the ending of the episode. The final scene in which Julia talks into a transmitter almost felt like she knows way more about what is happening than she has previously let on, and she may even have contact with some of the bureaucrats who could be behind the crash of the Eden Project. But she started her initial check-in with the words “I’ve joined you on the planet,” which makes me think that there are people on this planet who wish the Eden Project harm, meaning the colonists are not alone. All of this is fine and good for a mysterious narrative that leads to the creation of a spy within the group, but now I was asking myself questions: Was Wentworth deliberately manipulated with that organic chip, and maybe even “remotely controlled” when she melted the wires? Is Julia one of the people involved in the conspiracy to destroy the Eden Project and therefore knew that the spaceship would crash? Is Julia the only spy on this planet or are there others?
And why does there have to be a conspiracy in the first place? The pilot already established a conspiracy when Devon saw the newsfeed about the Eden Project’s destruction and the crew later finding the bomb, but with the new angle on the conspiracy, it all looked like the Eden Project was doomed from the beginning and that there may have been multiple parties out to end the Eden Project’s journey before it even began, with every potential chance of the settlers getting killed during the journey taken by the evil people behind said conspiracy. It creates a whole new storyline for the writers to deal with, but it’s also a complex one because it came out of nowhere and the crash itself was explained away lazily (the organic chip malfunctioned, leaked, caused the virus, made Wentworth act weird, and then the ship crashed?). And I’m not sure the writers ever had a plan to make some sense out of it by not explaining the backstory of the crash with random sci-fi ideas.
The episode was still good though. Granted, the virus premise has been done to death in this genre, but it was a nice plot device to bring some emotions into the story and focus on the characters for a bit. I loved the story that led to Wentworth’s death, because the entire moment felt like the viewers were forced upon the emotional demise of one of the main characters, with the difference that Wentworth was just a one-and-done character. The same can be said when Firestein died – the moment of him seeing his angel, and Wentworth giving one last kiss to Danziger, was great, and I almost shed a tear, as it was a fitting emotional moment for a show that wanted to make you care about its characters. It was great to see that even a show like EARTH 2, about to become a boring science-fiction show set in a planetary version of New Mexico, was not shying away from sad moments. Though it was a bit weird that both Wentworth and Firestein were black, upping the quota of African-American actors with this episode, and both of them died before the end of the hour. I’m pretty sure the next survivors that are found will survive and join Devon’s group and they will be white. Subconscious racism is on display, folks. But it’s not like EARTH 2 was the only show of the 1990s suffering from that.
Morgan’s story was also good, although slightly ridiculous when only looked at through his behavior. I wondered for a few seconds if he was starting to have hallucinations himself, due to the virus going around, as well as his feelings of guilt and shame, but when the resolution to that story came, I wondered if the Grendler was following Morgan on purpose, just to have him deliver the hunch that their saliva is a cure for whatever disease you need a cure for, meaning the Grendler cared about what the humans were going through. Of course, the Grendler following Morgan was a cheap plot device for Julia to come upon a cure for the virus and to quickly lead to act five of the episode, but I would have loved for Morgan to be part of something more than just the ludicrous B plot. If the story had been about Morgan’s mental state (since he thought he was hallucinating), it could have been a wonderful story dealing with PTSD about surviving a crash and believing you may have caused it, and it could have been a narrative that wasn’t necessarily placed in the science-fiction genre itself.
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| This turned into strip poker for Morgan. |
Meanwhile, I still can’t buy that Bess and Morgan are a married
couple. Maybe it’s because the two have never embraced each other
lovingly in the show so far, or maybe it’s because the two couldn’t be
more different as characters – while Morgan has been slightly developed
after five episodes, Bess hasn’t been much of a character at all, making
her just a side note in Morgan’s life and proving that the wife in this
relationship is unimportant, as long as the husband is the one going
through the motions story-wise. Not to mention that there is no chemistry between them.
The rest of the episode was okay. There was one moment between Danziger and True that was touching, but I wanted a more natural father/daughter relationship here. When it comes to single parents and their kids, which there are two pairs of in this show, the writers weren’t really interested in depicting the stories. They had some great ideas ready for individual episodes, but none of them have been used yet, and if there is a story that could bring the show into a sub-genre of the sci-fi genre (by focusing on drama and emotion), the episode doesn’t fully deliver and comes up short at the end. EARTH 2 maybe needs a reboot or revival season, just to see if writers having lived through the rule-bending time of early twenty-first-century television could make more out of the premise.
