Date of airing: May 21, 1995 (NBC)
Nielsen ratings information: 7.1 million viewers, 5.1/10 in Households
written by: Robert Crais
directed by: John Harrison
This happens when you air episodes out of order: This season finale happened to air before what NBC aired as the season finale, which means the tens of viewers who stuck with the show never got to find out how and why Devon was removed from the cryo chamber she was in at the end of the episode, and how the colonists could have beaten the “sickness” that was going around, knowing that the Council could come back later and find a backdoor into the tracker they have implanted in all the settlers. Because this episode did not air as the intended final hour of the show, I was wondering how audiences reacted to seeing Devon back among the living in the following episode, how she made it out of the cryo chamber, and why this episode ended the way it did when none of it came back to keep the characters busy for another two episodes. I do not care much about out-of-order airings of TV shows when the series happens to mostly deliver stand-alone episodes, but in the case of EARTH 2, NBC may have shot itself in the foot. Granted, the show was not a success from the second episode onwards, meaning the viewers were not getting what they hoped to get with EARTH 2, but considering the price tag of the series and the fact that the network stuck with it for the entire season, at least give the viewers proper closure. And proper closure does not mean leaving the audience hanging with a generic episode that had Bess make Spring on the planet.
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| Reilly will not give you any porn to watch |
For a season finale that could have been turned into a series finale (the writers knew about the low ratings, they could have anticipated a cancellation and worked towards an actual conclusion), it was quite a spectacle of an episode. The settlers found a crashed ship that went to the planet way before the Eden Project, and the reveal of Reilly being a computer program was a pretty neat one, and one I would have loved to see developed further in an eventual second season. I do not know if it was a necessary twist, but I liked the premise of a small colony of council members orbiting the planet, looking for the settlers (apparently they could not tap into the tracking system), being a constant danger for the people on the planet, especially when you look at the fact that the Terrians also had something to say about all of this. Maybe it would have brought some technology into the show’s second-season premise, since the settlers found out they were antagonizing a computer program, instead of human council members. With Reilly being a computer program, it explained why he was never able to find the settlers or do anything about their presence on the planet. As a computer program, Reilly knew the entire time where the Eden Project was, but could not send anyone to stop them, or force them to hand over Uly. Though I would have loved to know what a computer program wanted with Devon’s son, or why Reilly was so interested in the connection between humans and Terrians. It is almost like Reilly developed way past being artificial intelligence, and the threat of the computer program becoming sentient would have been a possibility in the future of the show, if it had gotten a bigger future. Would the series have turned into a conflict between human settlers, an artificial intelligence, and villainous council members?
I was also surprised to see that the episode had wonderful emotional depth. Bennett and Elizabeth were characters I did not want to see die – mostly because they were not villains and they were betrayed by the ones they thought friends and partners and bosses, so I would have rooted for them if they had gotten the opportunity for revenge. They were the victims of a group of people that did not think highly of humanity, and the idea of disappointment and anger about not being on Earth after a long journey in cryo-stasis opened up a whole different opportunity for the series if the characters had survived. Bennett and Elizabeth’s fates reminded me a bit of ALIEN, and the Nostromo crew getting awakened by Mother to check out an SOS signal, even though the crew was somewhat expecting to be home by the time they woke up. Imagine you are in that situation, waking up after a long nap, expecting to be home, but you are still light-years away from Earth and have to undergo a dangerous adventure that could kill you instead. Bennett and Elizabeth, besides being linked romantically somewhat (although not fully established), were betrayed by their own invention, and by artificial intelligence that should have never been smarter than them. When Elizabeth died, I felt for her, because she was dying with the knowledge that her original mission had failed.
Meanwhile, I sort of liked the ending, even though it was planted into the episode like the writers needed a cliffhanger ending, to push NBC to renew the series, even though it was quite obvious by then that EARTH 2 would never get more than ten million viewers any longer. The premise of Devon in the chamber while the rest of Eden Project moved on, was intriguing to me though, and who knows, maybe the final image of the show was from a far-away future, the Eden Project has long died, and the only survivor is Devon, waiting to be woken up by yet another colony of settlers. Maybe there was never any hope for Devon to return to the living, and it was her fate to be in the chamber for the rest of eternity, with her character being written out of the series for the second season, even if it would not make any sense timeline-wise, considering there was an episode that depicted the future with her in it.
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| Cyberspace is shockingly real. |
One thing you need to take from this episode is that networks should
never air episodes out of order. A season finale should be aired as a
season finale, even if the majority of the show delivered proceduralized
episodes that begin and end in the same hour. If you have episodes to
burn off, put them in front of the season finale. Granted, no one cares
about this stuff any longer these days, with streaming and other kinds
of home media having taken over the lives of TV and movie watchers, but
there is a reason that TV shows with wildly shuffled episodes in the
airing order were a failure with the audience. If you do not care about
giving the audience the experience as intended by the writers, why
should the audience trust you with their attention and eyeballs? Then again, networks used to push "useless" episodes into the season finale slots in the 1980s and before, when no one even bothered to think about how to get your audience to remember your show when it goes into the summer hiatus. When nobody had the idea to end a season with excitement and a cliffhanger, and with the potentially greatest episode of all time.
