Date of airing: November 20, 1994 (NBC)
Nielsen ratings information: 13.9 million viewers, 8.8/14 in Households
Was this the final episode with Gaal or will he turn up with a Grendler army in one of the upcoming episodes and attack the settlers, because it’s in his nature to kill? I would appreciate either idea since Gaal was kind of a crappy and cliched villain in this hour, but his potential re-appearance would give EARTH 2 a serialized tone to prove that network television was taking science-fiction seriously midway through the 1990s. That Gaal turned out to be an evil bastard was pretty much clear from the get-go, but the way he was stereotypically put on screen by the writers became quite annoying after a little while, especially when it became apparent that True was unable to smell Gaal’s fishy behavior. The man was feeding his blood to the Grendlers and if that doesn’t ring all the alarm bells in young True’s mind, then I don’t know what can. But I guess that’s what happens when you’re on a boring planet and the only person your age steals a horse from you while your father barely gives a damn about you, and your teacher (who isn’t even supposed to be your teacher) teaches you things you won’t even come to use later in life. The only thing you can do as a kid in that situation is befriend someone who sees beauty and intelligence in you. In a way, Gaal was the perfect villain for True’s story, already gaslighting her like the white man he is, but because he was too perfect as a villain, he became something of a caricature of enemies.
True didn’t have it easy in this episode. She is still a kid, not being taken seriously by her peers and no one trusts her with something she could do and help the settlers with. That she would turn into a rebellious kid almost seemed logical, but maybe it would have been a better premise separated into multiple episodes, or she could have made friends with Gaal in the previous hour, just so everything would have looked like he had a master plan and he was executing it from the beginning. But no, everything in this episode happened because of a horse, proving once more that a mosquito can turn into an elephant in an instant. With Gaal’s mysterious and questionable behavior, some of the settlers start to get uneasy around the man. Yale’s memory banks slowly figured out Gaal’s backstory, and Danziger was off to the races to save his daughter before losing her forever. Because going up against Gaal was apparently only Danziger’s mission and not the entire settlement’s.
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| Forbidden friends meet at a secluded place. |
I did like the conflict the story brought. The settlers were already starting to turn against Gaal, so it only took one wrong move for him to screw up his already mediocre standing with the group and get exiled (or tried and then executed, or something in that regard). The story would have made a huge leap forward if Danziger had smelled the danger coming from Gaal as soon as he witnessed the long-haired man beating up one of his trans rovers, because that seemed like the most obvious moment for Gaal to turn out to be a real and dangerous asshole. If Danziger had come to that thought, he would have been in a similar boat as Devon was, who started thinking about leaving Gaal behind. But Danziger and Devon never got together to talk about Gaal, so half of the episode’s interesting premise wasn’t even used, because Tim Curry needed all the screentime he could get and was allowed to steal content from the other cast members. I still wonder, if Gaal had been portrayed by a lesser-known TV actor in 1994, would the character have had less screentime and the early stage of EARTH 2 could have focused more on the settlers? But because this was Tim Curry’s show, a LAW & ORDER-type episode was unable to be part of this science-fiction show and we will probably have to wait for our entire lives for the settlers to handle a dangerous situation properly: by arresting, trying, and then sentencing the criminal.
The next time Gaal returns (and it’s quite obvious he will when True looked at the whistle on her ride back to camp), I hope he will bring trouble with him, because the show needs far more conflict material and maybe even some visual and physical action sequences. With the delivery of his backstory (as expected, he was a criminal, not that he had any reason to lie to O’Neill right before killing him in the previous hour), there might even be a chance that some more of the E2 criminals were roaming around the planet, giving the group something to fight against and giving the show the chance to hire more guest stars (but Gaal said he killed everyone, so... I guess not?). Who would have expected that humanity turned out to be the colony's greatest enemy? They are aliens on an alien planet, those aliens are humans, and they have to fight against other humans. That’s how troublesome the human race is, they have to fight each other on another planet.
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| Mankind needs bigger guns to defeat Tim Curry. |
The rest of the episode was okay. The rise of Pegasus the horse was funny at first, because I couldn’t grasp how quickly a horse can grow like this, even if you pack that premise into a science-fiction series. Even Robin Williams was growing only four times faster than normal in the 1996 movie JACK, but the horse was almost living its entire life within 48 hours, giving definition to the phrase of life flashing before your eyes when you die. But by the end, I came to like the story, because it gave me something to look forward to: If the Eden Project brought with them horses in a can, who knows what else they will find in a can. Maybe they can’t just grow living things and food with whatever was in a can, but also build something? Here is something the writers could use to explain away story developments without giving a damn about the logic of it all.
