Personally, I would have thought it was too early to introduce more humans on the Earth 2 planet, but the very second episode brings us none other than Tim Curry! And he’s Tim Currying it up! I had no memory of this character from youth, so I genuinely didn’t know what was going on with him. Curry plays Gaal, who poses as an astronaut who had crashed on the planet 15 years ago and has been stranded awaiting rescue ever since.

When I rattled off the characters last time, I left out one Commander Broderick, because had been killed off in the pilot and I assumed he wouldn’t matter anymore. Not so! It turns out that the creature that seemingly killed him is actually only capable of putting humans into a deathlike coma for a couple days. Gaal makes rest of the humans think the Commander was dug up by aliens and captured, then Gaal arranges a deal with the aliens to get the Commander back. This proves how valuable Gaal’s knowledge of the world is and he positions himself as guide to the group, and when the Commander grows suspicious and goes to attack the aliens, Gaal arranges that he be killed off again, this time for real. And this time the aliens are to blame and everyone loves Gaal. Gaal, it turns out, was not an astronaut, but a prisoner sent to the planet by Earth government who were using the world as a penal colony. I suppose this is what the Terrians were talking about when they said humans had been there before. Gaal is the only survivor of the penal colony (or so he says anyway) and he killed a lot of his fellows to get that distinction.

The aliens that Gaal deals with are, by the way, not the Terrians and they’re not the little puppet guys from the first episode either. They are another species, seemingly intelligent and capable of language, and they’re pretty impressive for this kind of show. These are the Grendlers. They’re still basically humanoid, but big and more Star Wars quality than Star Trek. I don’t know that we’re going to be shown an interesting Grendler culture, but I like them nonetheless.

Anyway, perhaps it strains credibility that Gaal would just happen to be within walking distance of where our main characters come down on the planet, but whatever. It’s fine.

What else? It’s been clarified to me that Yale is a cyborg whose original memory has been overwritten by the Yale personality. I’d guess this was also something done with prisoners. The Yale series was known for the original, presumably criminal, personality to come back.

Clancy Brown’s character is named Danziger and his daughter is named True. True has screamed four times so far, so I guess I’m gonna need to keep track of that.

I don’t think I got into the mystical healing nature of the planet. Devon’s son Uly was sick, but has been healing because of the Terrians. In this episode she has to learn to stop worrying that he’ll be sick and let him live like a child. Uly, meanwhile, had a moment I thought was cute where he imagined a whole scenario where maybe he is the prince of the Terrians and they would obey him. It seems like something a child would imagine. How true it turns out to be on the show, I don’t know.

Morgan (the jerk character) gets paralyzed in the same way the Commander did and spends a couple days “dead”. He has a bit of afterlife anxiety from his near-death experience and he’s pretty sure he went to Hell. I know the show does grow an even more mystical sort of storyline as it goes, but I don’t remember if it ends up actually having literal spiritual stuff. I wonder if Morgan will be less of the jerk after this point.

That’s the important stuff from this one, I think. I’m still on board. I don’t think I mentioned it last time, but the ongoing plot (at this point anyway) is that the group needs to make it to a specific spot on the planet where their colony is intended to be started. It’s a kind of wagon train setup. I’ll be interested if that’s the case the whole time or if they actually make it to the spot and begin setting up. Time shall tell.

The show starts with what is essentially a movie (presumably meant to be cut up into two parts of syndication) that sets up the premise. It’s the future and humanity has ruined the planet Earth and have been living in space stations on Earth orbit for generations. Some sort of disease has been spreading among the populace cause by not being exposed to nature, so a group of about 200 families are making plans to settle on a distant world with an atmosphere and create a new home for humanity. The authorities on Earth don’t like this plan (because if it is successful, people will have somewhere else to go and won’t be beholden to them) and try to sabotage the mission. It doesn’t work and our intrepid explorers are off to another world.

But when they get there, the group (about a dozen people) are supposed to head down and set things up for the 200 families, but they crash instead. Not all of these are people who intended to colonize, some were just workers who were supposed to head back to Earth.

On the new world they begin to encounter the native lifeforms. Though the plant life there looks extremely Earth-like for PDR’s tastes, we do meet a small species of what I’d call little reptile-style monkey things. These ones are done with puppets. They do, I admit, conform to a humanoid body plan, but they’re small and look different. Better than most aliens on shows like this. But the more “intelligent” species on the world are called the Terrians. These ones are exactly humanoid with a bunch of makeup. They’d make it as better-than-average Star Trek aliens, but they’re still disappointing to me. But if they are too humanoid in form for me, at least they don’t just communicate like humans. As I thought I remembered before starting the show, they can only communicate to the cast in dreams, in scenes that have to have been at least partially inspired by the Prophet scenes on Deep Space Nine (but at least the Prophets could speak during their weird communication sessions, these Terrians can’t even do that). The Terrians rightfully fear the human aliens who have come to their planet and claim it has happened before. My prediction right now is that the government of Earth has tried to colonize this world before and were doing a bad job there as they had done on first Earth and the Terrians had to off them. I don’t know, we’ll see.

The human cast of the show is fine. The captain (or whatever her title is), Devon, is the mother of a child with that disease I mentioned, Uly. Clancy Brown’s guy, whose name I didn’t catch, is a single father who was just working on the ship, so he and his daughter shouldn’t even be on the planet. His daughter seems prone to getting into trouble. There’s Antonio Sabato Jr. as some other guy who slept through most of the pilot (at least he made contact with the aliens while he was sleeping). There’s a doctor who is young and not experienced but has to prove herself up to the task of being the only doctor for this group. There’s a regular Hateable Guy named Morgan in the group who is there to do all the selfish and stupid acts and to complain any time the likeable characters try to do anything. There’s also Morgan’s wife, who seems nice and you can’t help but wonder why she is with Morgan (she is played by Rebecca Gayheart and appealed greatly to Young PDR). There is also a guy named Yale who seems like a servant to the captain and I don’t know his deal yet. I don’t think he’s an android (there’s a much simpler robot around so I seen no reason they’d also have a human-looking one) but they talk about “the Yale series” as if he was a product. I have dim memories of liking Yale as a kid, but don’t remember what happened with him. The problem is Yale is one of only two or three Black persons in this group, and he’s the most prominent, so the fact he is some sort of product meant to serve the captain is a setup with issues. That’s all the cast I remember at this point.

So far, I’m on board. Going off my dim memories, I would have thought that the meeting with the Terrians happened many episodes down the line, so we’ve already made some progress. But with all this setup done, I’m intrigued to see the next episode and find out what the week-to-week sort of story for this crew shall be.

Hey, remember Earth 2? It was a sci-fi show that aired… (PDR goes to check Wikipedia)… in 1994 and 1995. I don’t remember a lot about it, but I do know that thirteen-year-old PDR liked it.

My memories are that it’s about a ship full of colonists who go to another world to start a new society. While there, they have a bunch of troubles, not least of which is some kind of native life form that I think was trying to contact them in their dreams. I feel like there may have been a months-long break in the airing of the show. I have no idea what parts of what I just said are correct, but that’s how it is in my memory.

I refuse to read past the date on that Wikipedia page, because PDR is going to rewatch Earth 2 and write about it here on this website that he likes to write it on. I expect to do more than one post a week until I get through, so for the next month or two I’m going to be steeped in Earth 2-ness.