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.

And then I come to the last episode.

The Eden Project gang have finally got out of where they were camped for the winter when they all start getting sick and have to camp again. Then they discover a crashed Earth ship from decades before there were supposedly any humans on this planet and the ship has working cryogenics pods with people inside! This is truly an episode of revelations. Let’s just deal with them:

• These unfrozen humans used to be scientists working for the Council who had been sent to study G889. They created an artificial intelligence program called Eve that is in orbit.
• Reilly, the guy who was Julia’s connection to the Council, is also an AI. And not just any AI, he’s Eve, who created a secret identity for dealing with Julia (for reasons not given).
• Also, the scientists were trying to flee the planet and had installed a virus in Eve on their way out. They are convinced that humans do not belong on G889 and they were trying to sabotage the Council’s efforts.
• The illness that is affecting the Eden Project crew is being caused by monitoring chips that the Council secretly injected into all of the crew, which is now deteriorating. The scientists could fix this, but they think the humans don’t belong on G889, so they feel like they should die.
• Obviously the cast is cured (and the new scientist characters conveniently die off), but it turns out that Devon never had one of those Council chips and her illness is something else entirely. That means she’s still dying. The show ends with her being put into cryogenic sleep in a cliffhanger that we now know as the Clone High Gambit.

Stray thoughts: 1) One of the Eden Project dies from this illness! It’s a woman named Eben. I don’t even know if she was even an extra we had ever seen or not. Truly she will be missed. 2) I gave Morgan some credit last time for being a team player, but in this one he’s under a lot of stress and relapses into scheming and selfishness (we also see him retreating into VR for the first time in a long time). He is the first one that learns of the existence of the scientists and he manipulates the rest of the group to go to them. Ultimately a cure would benefit everyone (and it pays off in the end), but he doesn’t consult the others. 3) I have no fear for Devon’s life even though the show was cancelled. The one look at sixteen years in the future showed us that Devon will live on. 4) I will probably be back with a wrap-up thoughts post, but for now, more importantly…

CAMERON WATCH!!!

I didn’t notice Cameron in this one but least he wasn’t the group member who died. One thing that is not a cliffhanger: Cameron made it to the end of the season.

As the show has progressed, Morgan and Bess have gone from the troublemakers of the group to flawed people who are earnestly trying to help. It’s nice that, as we near the end of the show, they get a chance to shine one last time.

In this one Bess is exposed to mystical flower energy that is one part pollen, one part Ophiocordyceps, and one part super soldier serum. (Bess has made it clear that the fact she was raised on Earth means that she is better at wilderness than the rest, but it sure didn’t stop her from getting her face right in that dangerous plant.) This weird flower force triggers maternal feelings in Bess, making her want to protect it, gives her euphoric feelings and regenerates her wounds, and finally takes over her mind and impels her to hike to a volcano and jump in. During all this, Morgan is trying to protect his wife, but also notably trying to protect the rest of the group too. At one point their wedding vows had them forsake all others, but now Morgan is willing to hypospray Bess and keep her restrained in an attempt to protect the camp. But naturally when Bess escapes, Morgan tracks her down to protect her. And when he realizes the only way to help her is to get her to the volcano, he helps that and even takes in some flower force himself. The two of them would have died if they’d not been stopped by Julia and Alsonso from actually jumping in, but they do successfully deliver the flower force to where it needs to be. And somehow, this causes winter to end.

For the record, Danziger was also exposed to the pollen, but he wanted it out of him before it could really get into his head, so he mostly just spent the episode being sick in bed and allowing us to see what the illness could do to someone. We also see a Grendler who had been a carrier, but didn’t make it to the hole. And near the volcano we see a human skeleton, so presumable some penal colonist died long ago after being exposed. Flowers that force a living being to carry their life force to a volcano to instigate spring would seem like a pretty nonsensical way for an ecosystem to work, but it makes more sense than the space-folding subway system created by spiders, right?

Other thoughts: 1) We get Morgan with an eyepatch for a bit! That’s fun! 2) When most of the group want to force the flower force out of Bess and Bess wants to keep it, we get a debate among the cast and I like that sort of things. Morgan and Devon defend Bess’s bodily autonomy, but any actual comparison to debates like that about abortion are lessened by the fact that this one is an actual weird alien that intends to throw Bess into a volcano. That said, it had no ill intentions toward the rest of the group, which is what they were so worried about. 3) It’s worth noting that, before Julia knows what is actually going on, they think Bess is pregnant. Morgan is worried that their current living situation wouldn’t be ideal for a birth, though Julia points out that people during olden times on Earth gave birth with much less technology than they have access to. This is correct, but also G889 is throwing weird new supernatural threats at them every couple weeks, so it’s not exactly the same.

CAMERON WATCH!!!

Now that I know to look for Cameron, he’s all over the crowd shots. In this one we get to see him smile at one point and later drive one of the vehicles. He’s having a perfectly nice time.

Our intrepid crew are still running low on supplies as the winter continues (this show has been like half winter at this point) and four of them volunteer to go out and get supplies from a pod that landed during the original crash landing. Unfortunately, it doesn’t turn out well, as the pod has been emptied, either during the crash or by Grendlers after. Now these four (Danziger, Julia, Alonso, and Morgan) don’t even have enough rations to make it back to camp, and seem to be doomed.

But then the episode surprised me and we have Yale showing up to save them. You’d think the rescue would have been the whole point of the episode, but no! Instead they get safely back to camp and we learn that something bad happened while they were out there. It’s doled out in mildly-Rashomon-style flashbacks. The stranded crew were starving and Danziger followed a Grendler to its stash hoping to find supplies, but it went bad, he panicked and shot the Grendler. Then, it wasn’t an easy decision for them, but they ate some of the Grendler’s corpse. This is the only thing that kept them alive long enough to get rescued by Yale.

Back in the “present” of the episode, another Grendler comes to camp and Danziger assumes it is seeking revenge and threatening True. Instead, we eventually learn, it only wanted an answer for why its friend (Friendler?) was killed. Danziger is often depicted as the rugged, common sense guy of the show, and his manliness can chafe against my tastes, so seeing him get a chance here to tearfully admit that he made a mistake and that the Grendler didn’t die in vain because it helped them live made him a lot more appealing in my eyes (Clancy Brown, of course, does a great job with it). And honestly, the fact that the show let one of its star characters actually kill an innocent in a moment of panic without reneging on it at the end impressed me.

Anyway, I don’t have many other thoughts for this one. It was a good episode. I feel like the show considers the Terrians the star aliens of the show, but I like the Grendlers. They’ve got more character. I wish Star Trek, decades after this show, could give us one alien species in Starfleet as neat as the Grendlers. I guess if I need one other thing I can point out that there was acidic water in the Grendler’s cave and I liked that because it called back to that time they encountered acidic water before. Consistency like that makes the planet feel more alive.

Anyway…

CAMERON WATCH!!!

Though Baines, Walman, and Magus all get a bit of a role in this one, everyone’s favourite character, Cameron, doesn’t have much to do. When the rescued four are brought back to camp, Julia immediately starts giving Cameron orders. Maybe he’s been working as her assistant? That could be.

Somehow, even though they’ve been camped in the same spot for months now, the protagonists are still finding new stuff within walking distance. This time, they find a Terrian corpse that has been frozen for 300,000 years. Julia brings it back to camp for study, and unfortunately it brings an ancient evil with it. Creepy stuff happens around camp and then there’s a scene clearly inspired by The Thing in which they all have to find out which one of them is possessed by an ancient evil. It turns out it is Danziger, so Alonso has to fight the so-called demon in the dreamscape. The ancient evil is banished and everyone is happy.

ALIEN STUFF:

• The 300,000-year-old Terrian remains tell us a bit more about modern Terrians. Julia says that modern Terrians are like plants in that they take in nourishment via osmosis, but apparently this old Terrian ate is closer to humanity in form, so it probably ate. Also, the ancient Terrian has a spinal column and vertebrae, which apparently the modern ones do not.
• Although the ancient Terrian was more humanlike, Julia notes that it is still not either a “he” or a “she”. While we were told (by Alonso, I think) that all the modern Terrians are male, I’m taking this as a sign that the previous reference was a mistake and they are, in fact, sexless beings and the concept is too confusing for the dumb humans to get.
• But the most significant thing about the Oldie Terrian is that it comes from a time when Terrians had emotions! But they thought this was bad, so they wanted to pull the ol’ Vulcan Maneuver and become a less emotional species. They purged all their emotions by placing all that psychic into a single entity and having it “swallowed up by the earth”. You’d think that the Terrians, whose whole deal is going into dirt, would be able to better “swallow up” this frozen Terrian, but instead they’ve left it in ice that, even after 300,000 years, is still easily seen from someone walking by. Ah well, it’s dead now, so it all turned out okay.
• For the record, the reason that Alonso had to fight the “demon” in the dreamscape is because even this embodiment of all that they hated about themselves is still too Terrian for them to attack. Still, in the dream Alonso is able to gain Terrian powers for the fight.
• As for non-Terrian life on G889, WE SEE BIRDS!!! At one point, while we are hearing the omnipresent eagle sound, we see a couple of birds fly by. We don’t see them up close, though, so I can assume they are indeed weird alien-looking birds. I hope we never see anything to contradict that.

Other stuff: 1) When Devon wants to learn more about the evil entity attacking the camp, she heads back to the village of humans we met a couple episodes back. That’s a nice little bit of continuity I wasn’t expecting and do appreciate. 2) The minor characters like Baines and Magus and Walman (the latter two being the white woman and white guy I have identified in some previous post respectively) get more focus than usual in this one. It’s mostly so that there are more suspects for us to wonder about when we aren’t sure who is possessed, but I like seeing them fleshed out even a little bit more. Also, there’s some beardy guy named Cameron I’ve never noticed before. Let’s see if he will have time to do anything important before the show ends.