Date of airing: January 22, 1995 (NBC)
Nielsen ratings information: 13.0 million viewers, 7.9/12 in Households
This may have been the best episode of the series so far. This one and the previous hour felt like a two-part episode, focusing on Julia and her development from the council’s spy and potential antagonist for the settlement to a trusted group member and doctor with a background in conspiracies, who has received a second chance, even if both episodes had their individual storylines involving the character. Although I was hugely disappointed that there wasn’t an episode about how Julia needed to survive on her own (or the group having to go on without the only doctor in their midst, creating a bit of madness when one of them needed a doctor and there wasn’t one), but I loved this episode nonetheless, because a lot was done to advance the series plot of the growing danger of the council.
One of the questions that were answered destroyed my theory that the council was part of the Eden Project and crashed on the planet in one of the pods and therefore could be considered a Trojan horse for the planet and the Terrians, because it turns out that not only was the council not part of the Eden Project, they also aren’t even on the planet (although the question remains why). Now I’m wondering why the council wasn’t detecting the space station entering the orbit of the planet in the pilot episode, in addition to the crash, which should have been noticeable if you have a couple of artificial satellites around the planet that could have detected the radio chatter and frequencies of the spaceship as it closed in on the planet initially. Was the council on the other side of the planet, completely unable to catch any frequencies? They don’t have the technology to detect movement on the planet from its orbit? Was the council already in the planet’s orbit before Project Eden even arrived? I could understand that the council would surveil the five planets they considered suitable for human life beforehand, and it seemed logical that they would dump the arriving Penal colony and somewhat direct the slow takeover of the planet by putting a human presence on it, but if they were orbiting the planet (they couldn’t have landed and set up shop somewhere?), they should have been able to detect the Eden Project, its crash, and everything that followed after.
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| The villain of various TV shows returns to be a villain once more. |
But whatever, I’m starting to nitpick here. Julia definitely made use of her second chance, and I liked that Devon accepted her help immediately (well, she didn’t have any choice), since she didn’t have any reason to mistrust her while the group was being shot at from the distance WANTED-style. There might be another issue of inconsistency when Julia decided her loyalties were with the group and not the council (after she was loyal to the council for pretty much all of her life), but I can accept that inconsistency, since the group knows about the evil men in virtual reality now, they know that the council is orbiting the planet, looking for the Eden Project, and the group knows that the council is after Uly and that they won’t hesitate to kill the settlers, just to get to the boy before the Terrians do. After ten episodes, it’s a finely established threat, and the only thing the writers needed to do at this stage of the show was to find a way to get the council on the planet, so that a manhunt could happen and the heroes and the villains could meet face-to-face.
The Z.E.D. storyline was okay. For some reason, I couldn’t get a grip on the premise of artificially engineered humans, and how much humanity they had left in them while being the cyborg they were. During the pilot, I didn’t even notice that Yale was a cyborg (one who apparently can still bleed), and during this episode, I barely noticed that the sniper had some human traits left in him, even if most of those traits might have been visible while he was a “prisoner” at the end. There was this moment of the Z.E.D. asking “Who are you,” which probably showed his human side waking for a few seconds, since his artificial side was dying from the cyanide, before dying altogether. That probably means you could turn a Z.E.D. into a human with emotions and feelings again, as long as you get to delete the suicide program in time, right? I wondered if the council had more Z.E.D. units on the planet, reprogrammed to look for the Eden Project. It would only be logical, judging by how the council has acted so far. If they couldn’t find the group by themselves and Julia wasn’t much of a help, then why not send out the killer cyborgs to do the job they are too privileged to do themselves? But I guess the council also forgot to track the Z.E.D. units, otherwise they would have found the group immediately. But that is just a plot hole, right? Writers didn’t think about that kind of mid-1990s technology?
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| It's a business meeting in a virtual reality. |
Meanwhile, I was laughing a little bit about how quickly night fell on the planet. Danziger had one hour until the bullet exploded. He was shot during broad daylight, but the bullet was scheduled to explode at the darkest of nights. Night in this series must be falling faster than in an episode of TWENTY-FOUR, where the sun started going down at 5:58 p.m., but at 6:03 p.m. in the next episode, right after the “previously on” part finishes, it was pitch black outside. Sometimes, nitpicking is fun.
I was also quite amused by the special effects of the exploding bullets. The shock wave and the fireball had something cheap about themselves, almost as if EARTH 2 wasn’t a science-fiction television drama on NBC any longer and instead turned into a D movie with no budget to speak of. I assume that most of the budget of the series was already burned and the studio and network were asking the producers to cut down a little – which wouldn’t be a surprise, considering the way the show started, and it would explain why it doesn’t look very much like a sci-fi show at the moment.
