Well, I’ve reached the end of my watch-through of Earth 2 and I’ve got to say the show holds up pretty well.
It’s a shame the show ends on a cliffhanger, though obviously that is the risk of watching any short-lived sci-fi show. As I said in the post about the last episode, I don’t fear for Devon and her mystery illness. I have to assume the next season would have opened with Devon coming out of suspended animation and having to be caught up on whatever changes had occurred. No, the real unfinished business for the show is that the Eden Project group never made it to New Pacifica. Even if we’d never seen the other colonists arrive, getting the cast there would have felt like a victory for them.
What would I have expected to see in season 2? Well, for one thing I bet they would have been able to build another puppet, so we’d have had at least one more type of lifeform on G889. Then they would have continued the arcs for the characters: Yale would learn more about his life. Julia and Alonso would probably have had relationship turmoil. The kids would have each had at least two episodes focusing on them. Morgan and Bess, I figure, would have become even more useful to the group which would set up a situation where more colonists arrive, let’s say in season three, and Morgan is tempted back into the political high society lifestyle. It’s a shame the last episode was kind of a dud, because toward the end the show was really finding its legs. Sci-fi shows seem to either get better as they go, or drop hard, and I feel like this show would have only gotten better (unless the pseudo-mystical stuff got too out there for its own good).
I admit, in this age of shows returning after decades, it would be amusing to imagine that Earth 2 could come back. There would never be an audience for such a show, and so much time has passed for the characters that the show would have to be entirely different. For the story to pick up decades later, we’d have to lose the wagon train aspect and delve into the plot with bureaucratic human regime oppressing the Terrians that was first glimpsed in the time-travel episode. Some of the cast could return (though, obviously not the ones whose actors have died since the show), but with the planet now colonized, you could easily introduce many new humans to drive the plot. I have to admit, I’d check it out.
Anyway, to end this all I can only think of one way: Stray thoughts: 1) I never found a good place to talk about it, but I liked the little headsets that they used for communications and VR and some other purposes. They were just colloquially called “gear” which I liked as a worldbuilding conceit, in the way we call out multi-purpose devices “phones” even though that is a minor part of their function. 2) I was going to keep track of how often True screamed in the series, but I don’t think it happened once more after I last mentioned it back when she reached six times. If only I had been prepared when I began, I could have counted the Eagle Screeches and that would have resulted in an amusingly large number. I do wonder if they got mockery from the audience about True screaming so much early on, so they stopped. It also didn’t help that True never got as big a role as she had in that Gaal arc. 3) I hope that someone got to take home a Grendler face puppet.
