Date of airing: November 27, 1994 (NBC)
Nielsen ratings information: 16.3 million viewers, 9.7/14 in Households
This looks like the final episode with Gaal as the villain of the story, although there would still be an opportunity for him to show up and cause trouble for the Eden Project, because being pulled into the ground is not necessarily the end of your life on this planet. If the Terrians can live below the surface, so can Gaal. I am wondering though if Tim Curry would have found his way to another guest-starring contract with the show if it had been renewed for another season, since Gaal truly was the first human villain of the series, and every other villain in the show has to be compared to the original, which means at one point the writers would have thought about bringing him back, maybe even give him a redemption arc. On the other hand, Gaal was never a great character, so his demise was a delightful one for me. Over and done with are his monologues where he smiles like a truly evil bastard at the end of the scene, or laughs like a cliched villain in a low-budget genre movie with a Dr. Evil-type antagonist. And Tim Curry could go on and play the villain in yet another project because he seemed to have been typecast in such roles during the final years of the twentieth century.
The Eden Project continues its march through the boring and lifeless lands of their new home planet, always on the lookout for food and a great place to pitch their tent and have a little rest. Their travels are being interrupted at the dreamscape, where Alonzo realizes the Terrians need help, and the humans are the only ones capable of doing so. And to make sure that the humans don’t just move on and forget all about their alien neighbors, Uly gets sick again and causes a lot of worry for his mother Devon. As it turns out, Gaal is back in business, keeping a group of Terrians as his slaves, including torture, and what Terrians don’t want is being kept as slaves. While Gaal continues to manipulate True into being his first human follower, Devon and Danziger start devising a plan to not just help the Terrians and make Uly better, but also finish Gaal once and for all.
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| On this strange planet, the only worry you have is for your child. |
In hindsight, the episode didn’t bring a lot to the table. Gaal was already an unlikable villain, thanks to Tim Curry’s dickish portrayal of the role. For some reason he wasn’t the killer he said he was, and for another reason yet to be explained, he held his Terrian slaves all by himself, and not with the tiny Grendler army he had in “The Man Who Fell to Earth (Two).” If he wanted all of the colonists’ vehicles and devices, he would have devised a plan of getting rid of them by slicing all of their throats, with or without the help of the Grendlers he once led and the Terrians he now enslaves. All of this made Gaal an inconsistent villain, made worse by his crazy attire and attitude, where he was monologuing his way through a scene that ended with his maniac smile or laugh, just to make it visibly obvious that the man who looks like the enemy truly is the enemy.
But because EARTH 2 was a family-friendly show on Sunday evenings, things needed to be toned down, and all Gaal could do as a villain was to play mind games with True, who continued to not be a smart girl when being around Gaal. It turns out that it hurt the show being made as family-friendly entertainment because the writers were most likely forced to get rid of all the dangerous and dark potential the premise could have brought and replaced it with stories that are not too violent or crazy. That led to some dumb moves by the characters, which in this episode included True who searched out Gaal and hoped to see a new father figure in him when it was as big as Jupiter’s Great Red Spot that Gaal was not a good guy to hang out with.
When talking about inconsistencies, one cannot forget to mention how the writers screwed up the character of cyborg Yale during this episode. Midway through the hour, he mentioned that his programming disallows him from using and discharging weapons, but when it came to saving True from Gaal, he had no problem ripping the big bazooka out of Danziger’s hand to prevent Gaal from taking his own bazooka to shoot Danziger with. All of a sudden Yale was able to circumvent his programming and the how is never mentioned in the episode, and due to the proceduralized nature of the show, most likely not in the next episode either.
Likewise, Uly’s status after the Terrians were freed of Gaal’s slavery was of equal inconsistency – did the kid get better, or was he still stuck in that ugly grey shock suit? Another thing besides the softening of the premise that killed the show for an interested audience was the way the writers wrote themselves out of story predicaments. They didn’t think about how it looks for the show when characters make decisions that don’t make sense, or writers forget to follow up on a part of the narrative that seemed important in the beginning.
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| True regrets ever having been Gaal's friend. |
At least Alonzo became a little more interesting with this episode, even if the writers stagnated his character development by having him remain with a broken leg and with the ability to communicate with the Terrians. He is useless on most fronts (like Antonio Sabato Jr. would have been useless as a United States Congressman), but it turns out he is the only one being able to talk with the planet’s natives, making him essentially an important person within the group, which should help him to get over his depression and become a fun person. Because if that doesn’t happen, EARTH 2 is a show without any worthwhile character development, which wouldn’t bode well for the show being part of television history. In fact, do people even remember the show almost 30 years after it premiered? Do people want it to come back in some form or fashion? Is there potential for a revival that could either be a reboot or even a continuation?
