Date of airing: February 19, 1995 (NBC)
Nielsen ratings information: 11.0 million viewers, 6.7/11 in Households
In which you realize that one of the main characters defines the word “stupidity” and may even be a reason why some viewers decided to drop the series. Morgan is neither the brightest nor one of the greatest characters on television, but he takes the cake by being the most annoying one. He must have been a special kind of stupid in this hour. The way he risked Bess’s life (let alone his own), as well as the entire group’s life, just to promise himself some money for the future by staking a claim for a rock he doesn’t even know what it does or what it’s worth, was extremely dumb and shortsighted of him. He just stuck the geolock somewhere in the ground, enter a range, and thought that everything would be fine. The fact that he didn’t even think of the base sitting smack in the middle of that area didn’t seem to come to him, making him one of the dumbest and most dangerous characters out there. All the time the characters were talking about having to shoot Yale before the cyborg risks the lives of the colonists, but it turns out Morgan was the one to be watched over this entire time. It makes you question why this white man, who has always done and said questionable things, was not considered a threat, while the black man amongst them, a cyborg, a person who was once a criminal, needed to be distrusted. Not that racism was at play here, but damn, if this episode didn’t show how white superiority led to almost everyone being in danger...
It’s frustrating how Morgan has become the focal point of my annoyance with EARTH 2. If it weren’t for this review blog and if I had watched this series back in 1994/95, I would most likely have given up the show after this episode. I simply could not deal with Morgan any longer, and when I start wishing for a main character to die because of their nutty and horrible attitude, even though the writers never intended to write the character that way, why would I want to continue watching the show? EARTH 2 has the advantage that it is something of an ensemble drama, so every time Morgan has screentime, I can just force myself through his appearances and hope for something better to come along with the other characters in a few minutes. Congratulations, Morgan Martin, you are now the most annoying character I have had the luck of watching – you are even more unbearable than most of the Disney Channel characters who are the brothers of the central characters.
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| Morgan is the one making the terrible decision here. |
But this episode delivered the science-fiction elements for once. Mysterious glowing rocks that seem to have a nervous system; technology that petrifies the ground, so that it can be unlocked by a special key later (that alone kind of made my eyes roll); a Yale unit that started to become erratic because of memories... In a way, it was a good episode for the genre (especially when you have a tiny budget to work with), and it was an opportunity for the writers to pause the hiking trips for a few episodes and let the characters rest for a while while focusing on storytelling that could take in the scenery of the planet. Granted, barely any information about “Morganite” has been given to the audience but Julia figured out that they were kind of alive, and the group theorized that they were part of the planet and the Terrians, their communications system (how convenient that the characters came to that conclusion this quickly). The episode went a little further into the mythology of Terrians, which I liked, even if the rocks being communication devices or part of the nervous system is quite the cheap plot development. After all, the rocks can’t be anything bigger than that, otherwise, the Terrians would have made themselves visible as soon as the colonists stole a couple of the rocks for themselves. Would the Terrians allow their nervous system to be taken away by humankind for study? I don’t think so, which means the rocks were nothing of the sort, with the exception of being a living organism that confused Yale’s ears for a minute.
And I’m pretty sure the conflict in the next episode (this is a two-parter after all) won’t just be about the missing rocks, but about the death of a Terrian that was caused by a human being. The two Terrians looking at their petrified fellow did not seem happy about what just transpired, and after what Morgan did in this episode, I wouldn’t have a problem for the Terrians to rip his head off in front of Bess and Yale. Bess can learn how crappy of a husband Morgan is, and Yale can use this opportunity to get some of the aggression going against the Terrians. Because in this series, only the black folks are threatening when they are aggressive. Oh yes, there is definitely some subconscious racism baked into the scripts.
The rest of the episode was okay. After eleven episodes, the black half-human finally got a story, and it was a nice one (if you look past the aforementioned racism), because I didn’t even expect a cyborg to have a storyline connected to his emotions. With that, the writers delivered a backstory I appreciated and wanted to see more of, and I loved the emotional connection between Yale and Devon, even though their shared history came a little short and abruptly. I got that this particular Yale unit was in Devon’s family before and that Devon saw in Yale a family figure more than the group did. There was a reason for her to be protective over Yale, and I wondered if it is going to be a storyline in the next episode, when Devon and Danziger stand face-to-face, arguing about whether or not to “deactivate” Yale. There is conflict material here that could finally cause a rift within the group, although I doubt that such a rift will even come to be, after Julia’s antics in the previous episodes (is she a spy for the council?) didn’t cause a major conflict between the members of the group.
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| Yale has had enough of his "nightmares." |
What I didn’t get is why Yale would go manic about his memories. Yale knows about his previous life, so he should have expected memories from his criminal past to emerge at some point. But how were those memories even able to manipulate a cyborg like this? Was Yale not able to override his emotion chip (if he has one – I kind of see Yale as a version of STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION's Data right now), or block it from his memories? Did the makers of this class of cyborgs not think about the fact that the memories of the human would possibly come back to haunt the cyborg? And did all Yale unites go berserk when they discovered their dark memories? If so, why were the units even created in the first place when it was clear they would nuke themselves after a couple of years, due to bad memories from when they were bad guys? Plus, I would love to know if all Yale units were black. This series only depicts one of them, but considering the subconscious racism of TV shows before the millennium, I can imagine that the writers were unknowingly thinking about Yale units being servants. That is what Yale essentially was during Devon’s childhood.
