Date of airing: March 5, 1995 (NBC)
Nielsen ratings information: 11.6 million viewers, 7.4/12 in Households
Well, this was a complex and sometimes confusing episode. I didn’t get it at first, so I needed five to ten minutes to understand what was going on here and what the characters were dealing with. And in the end, I still didn’t fully get the story, because it didn’t make a lot of sense with the revelation the writers delivered, let alone the backstory that kickstarted the dreams and nightmares. It got even more confusing when the story wasn’t necessarily getting along with the predictions I had, even more so after those predictions turned out to be true.
For starters, I always thought that Dell’s transmissions were recordings, but the fact that they started as dreams with the colonists and then ran in real-time to confuse the characters as they were chasing the signal had even me question my sanity at times. Secondly, the introduction of Whalen, the mysterious masked person hunting down the signal, didn’t give any clues as to what happened in the past and how the man couldn’t have resolved this matter in any of the 20 years he was hunting down the origins of the signal. And thirdly, what happened after the conclusion? Is the man in the mask still around? Will he continue to roam around the planet in a mad state after 20 years of dreams about his dead mother? For some reason, this episode decided not to conclude the story at all, even though it looked like it delivered a conclusion.
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| This fire should keep the colony warm during the winter months. |
Seeing the whole thing just for itself, it was a pretty intriguing story. You could have analyzed how the life of a boy was ruined into madness, as he was “forced” to do the same thing over and over every 60 days for 20 years, but the story itself was destroyed by some irregularities that didn’t care a lot about logic. During these 20 years, Whalen never found the cave his mother was living in during her final days? During these 20 years, the Grendler never managed to get the message to Whalen? Whalen decided he would accept the message from the Grendler by the end, even though Whalen was hunting the animal, shooting it at one point? And how the heck did the Grendler even survive all these years if he was chased and hunted by Whalen during this time? And was Whalen really Dell’s son? Maybe I was not understanding the story, because it was riddled with mysteries and constant questions from the characters and the audience, which were then resolved with the simplest of all explanations: madness. So, that was the entire deal of this story? Madness was the moral of Whalen hunting for the source of his dreams for 20 years?
I liked the parental theme of the episode, though maybe the Danzigers could have been involved in it a little deeper, giving more attention to Danziger and how he was raising his daughter after the death of her mother. The backstory of True’s mother was too short to be noticeable, and the question of what happened to Ellen back in the day was too big and mysterious to be answered away like this at the end, even if the moment of True seeing her mother in virtual reality was somewhat touching and kind of reminiscent of Peter Quill envisioning his mother in the climactic ending of GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY. The story itself seemed separated from what else was going on in the episode, however. The only reason Bess and Yale were looking into the situation and the transmission was because of True’s dreams about her mother and their sudden interest in the person who gave birth to the girl, without ever asking Danziger what happened to her. I’m wondering if that couldn’t have been its own story, instead of being wasted here like it was supposed to be a mystery about what happened to True’s mother and if Danziger may be at fault for her disappearance like he is a murderer.
When Dell’s messages first started transmitting, I was thinking about the possibility that they might have come from the past, and that it wasn’t a live message from the other side of the forest. The pilot of LOST (the French SOS signal), and the fact that Devon has already been dealing with ghosts a couple of episodes ago, brought me to think that, as well as the random way Dell’s messages came up, connected with the dreams everyone had of her the night before (were the dreams synced with the transmission of the messages?). But then Devon and Julia were able to get into the VR and “meet” Dell, and conveniently couldn’t interact with her, and all of a sudden Dell was an actual person, alive and breathing, looking for her son, without Devon or Julia noticing in the virtual realm that what they encountered is a recording (how convenient).
The final twist ruined the logic of the story as established halfway through. Julia and her magic glove had it figured out that Dell was dehydrated – I never knew holograms can be dehydrated, except of course the holograms in the VR were also storing the physical and medical attributions of the people in the hologram as data. Then again, we remember that Julia was once unable to realize that she was in the virtual realm before, tricked by Devon and the other colonists during her time as a “traitor,” so maybe not realizing that Dell’s messages were a recording was kind of logical after all.
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| This ain't The Masked Singer! |
What all of this makes is a confusing episode that didn’t seem to have been properly thought through in the writers’ room. Or maybe I just didn’t fully get it because I was eating while watching this hour, and wasn’t completely focused on it – which happened when the initial story turned out to be less interesting than I had hoped, because my first thoughts of the messages being a recording were demolished by the narrative turning the story into something completely different. This episode could have been different if properly broken in the room before it was written. But it wasn’t, so it turned into a bit of a convoluted mess with an intriguing premise and a B story that should have been the focus of another episode. Now I’m not so surprised that EARTH 2 didn’t find an audienceship to guarantee a second season.
