Date of airing: February 26, 1995 (NBC)
Nielsen ratings information: 11.2 million viewers, 6.6/11 in Households
As it turned out, this two-parter of EARTH 2 was mostly a Yale-centric affair, in which he needed to find out who he was, what he has done in his past to deserve such cruel treatment from the powers that be, and if anything he does can save his life in any way. These episodes were not so much science-fiction-y after all, because... Well, mostly because going deep into the Terrian mythology wasn’t the agenda the writers went with for this two-parter, since it was mostly about Yale. It wasn’t even about the stupidity and actions of one disturbed man named Morgan Martin, because this episode focused more on Yale’s own redemption than it did on Morgan becoming a hero in this episode after he became the stupid villain in the previous one.
In the end, I wonder if the geolock event was just a plot device for
Yale to uncover the truth about his past, and if his revelation will do
anything with his character for the rest of the series. Because I can’t
imagine that Yale will be a much happier cyborg, now he figured out that
he wasn’t a criminal after all, and instead just a confused soldier of
sorts who prevented other evil soldiers from killing civilians. This
brings me to ask how the criminals were judged in the past of this
show’s universe. Obviously, some of them were sent to this planet as it
functioned as a prison of sorts, and some of them were seemingly turned
into cyborgs. But how were they sentenced when? In Yale’s case, there wasn’t
even a crime he could have been charged with (except, of course,
killing one of his fellow soldiers to stop them from genocide is a
crime)? It seems quite convenient that Yale was turned into a cyborg
just like that, especially since his existence as a cyborg is all about
being a teacher and servant, which may not be the most appropriate image
to give a black person in American scripted entertainment. Would there
have been a scandal looming on Earth and the space stations if anyone
had found out that the council made cyborgs out of innocent people, or
those wrongly prosecuted? Or just black people?
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| This is Julia talking to glowing stones. |
It was an interesting episode, despite the fact that Morgan needed to be turned into a hero by the end. Yes, it was his screw-up, and I got that he wanted to make things right, but let’s not forget that his stupidity led to the conflict with the Terrians in the first place, so maybe the colonists shouldn’t be trusting a representative from the stations who only takes care of himself by locking up an entire area in the middle of a forest for his own future enrichment. And yet, the characters were still hoping for Morgan to crack the abort code, because apparently, this wasn’t a job Julia could have done, or maybe even Danziger, just to keep Morgan away from all of this before he does something even more stupid and risks the lives of all members of the colony. Bess could have done the work for her husband, because she wanted to fix his mistakes anyway, giving him the chance for a bit of a redemption arc among the already angry colonists (and let’s be honest, Bess is the one wearing the pants in this relationship). But I guess that the image of a man, joined by two women, being the hero of the story needed to be delivered to the audience and there was no chance for either of the women to save the day.
The mythology of the sunstones seemed underdeveloped, in hindsight. It seemed like they were something like a nervous system to the planet and its indigenous inhabitants, although they also felt like dei ex machina when Julia realized they were learning, and most likely able to crack the unlock code within minutes (or unlock Yale’s memories). How convenient that some random glowing rocks can do that for your story. I know this is an alien planet and life on it runs differently than Earth-based life, but those sunstones, even if they had a nervous system, still had to follow some biology or physics or chemistry. If they were able to communicate between the geolock and Morgan and crack a code, they had to have a brain of sorts. Otherwise, the sunstones gave Morgan all the processing power he needed to crack the code, and going through billions of variations would have fried his brain. Morgan was more than a supercomputer in that scene, and he never should have survived that.
Meanwhile, I liked the legal-heavy premise between the Terrians, led by Mary (I was happy to see her return), and the humans, led by Devon. I was wondering halfway through if this episode would turn into a courtroom drama of sorts, in which Devon was trying to argue for Yale’s life, with the episode essentially getting a little more into how Terrians live on this planet, how they follow their customs. THE 100 did a similar episode, with a negative outcome for one of the main characters, and I was almost hoping for the same outcome to be part of this show as well, but it was evident that the writers and producers wouldn’t just kill off their only black character in the series after only half a season.
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| This is Yale sinking into the mystery fog. |
I also loved that Mary saved Yale and risked her own banishment from the Terrian culture in the process, even though I’m not sure she knew what she was doing turned out to be her exit from the native inhabitants of this planet. And now that Mary is all on her own, there were two options the writers could employ: Either have Mary return in a later episode after living on her own and realizing she is human and can only survive with the help of the colonists, or this was essentially the final piece with Mary in it and she will forever aimlessly roam the planet until she one day takes a wrong step and falls down a cliff to her death. The latter is possibly the better outcome for her, because then her character would be connected with Alonzo, and he isn’t the finest of characters on the show anyway.
