For the purpose of narration and such, the focal point of this episode is Alonso, the character played by the Shark Hunter himself, Antonio Sabato Jr. Of the main cast, Alonso has probably been the least interesting character to me so far. His deal is that he was the pilot on the ship that crashed and he was never supposed to see the surface, so he never took the pills that the rest of the group took to keep themselves healthy, so he was more wounded than the rest in the crash and is still recovering, but he also has the strongest connection to the Terrians and communicates with them in the dreamscape. Anyway, he narrates this episode, but it isn’t really his episode. This is a direct continuation of True’s plot from last time.

I assumed Gaal was going to be gone for the show for a while, but absolutely not. He is back in this very episode and he has managed to capture a tribe of Terrians and is making slaves of them using shock collars that were presumably used when the planet was a penal colony. We also learn that the bone necklace that Gaal has been wearing all along has been made with Terrian bones and that Terrians are unable to hurt one another and also that wearing a necklace of Terrian bones is sufficient to make them unable to attack you as well. The enslaved Terrians reach out through the dreamscape to get the group’s help (Gaal calls the group “the Utopians” so is that what I should be calling them?) and it turns out that there is now a link between the Terrians and Uly, the child they healed. When Terrians suffer, so too does Uly.

The group is willing to help the Terrians (even if some only to help Uly), but young True is still torn. She still trusts the manipulative bastard. She goes to him and warns him and he lies to her and all that. But he messes up when he shows off his enslaved Terrians and tortures on so that it dies. That turns True against him at last and she sneakily gets a message to the group. In the ensuing scuffle is is actually True who defeats Gaal, destroying his necklace, so that the freed Terrians can exact their revenge. The Terrians drag Gaal into the dirt to maybe never be seen again (or maybe he will, I have no idea if Tim Curry will be back).

And then Alonso gets a scene where he is sad that a Terrian died, just to remind us that this was his episode. Good for you, Alonso. You really knocked it out of the park there, pal. Really you did.

Some other thoughts on the episode:

1) Danziger isn’t fond of Terrians and has a tendency to call them “Diggers” in a way I don’t care for. Most of the time Danziger is intended to be a character the audience roots for, but his racism is unbecoming (but does allow for more nuance). 2) The Utopians encounter rain on the new world for the first time and I like the scene. At first they panic and run for cover until Dr. Julia can scan it and make sure it is safe. Once that is confirmed, they love the rain. 3) Morgan is still the character used to voice the unpopular opinions. If his near-death experience has had a lasting effect on him, it is taking its time. 4) It is confirmed that Pegasus the horse ran away. Presumably he’s out there having weird horse-on-an-alien-planet adventures until he turns up again (and if he doesn’t turn up again, definitely he was eaten by Grendlers). 5) Yale’s behaviour-modifying cybernetics are supposed to include an aversion to using weapons, but in a moment of stress he overcomes this. The risk of him going criminal increases.

ALIEN STUFF: We learn a bit more about the Terrians here. In spite of their general humanoid appearance, Dr. Julia’s scanners can’t even say if they’re animal, vegetable, or mineral. We’re also told that they are all male, for whatever that means in a species that is utterly different from Earth life. But in the end, Alonso says that in spite of the biological differences, humans and Terrians may be more alike that they realize. Shut up, Alonso. Go hunt some sharks or something.

This episode’s focal character is True, the young daughter of Danziger (Clancy Brown’s character). She’s pretty unhappy with things, which is understandable given that she’s crashed onto a planet she was never meant to be on, and her father is busy keeping the equipment that everyone needs running. She feels ignored and chafes against the rules she’s expected to follow. Gaal, our Tim Curry-portrayed “stranded astronaut” who is really a penal colony survivor sees True’s dissatisfaction and uses it to manipulate her.

I still don’t have a handle on Gaal’s motives. He claims he wants off the planet, but he’s scheming and sabotaging and working with the Grendlers. If he actually wanted to leave the planet, he’d be working with the humans, rather than against them. Today he is specifically trying to steal one of the group’s vehicles. What he wants it for, I don’t know. But we do learn that he’s giving the Grendlers a periodic taste of his blood to keep them working for him. Gaal is up to something.

But for all his scheming, Gaal isn’t the mastermind he hopes. Danziger is suspicious of him, so he makes sure the vehicles aren’t stealable. And, though Danziger thinks Devon is too trusting of Gaal, even she is having Yale do an investigation on the mysterious stranger (It turns out that one of Yale’s cyborg powers is a computobrain that lets him surf an Internet-like database). Yale notes that Gaal has a tattoo that says “E2” that connects him to the penal colony program that we, the viewers, learned about last episode (and it also is like “Earth 2”, y’know?). Essentially the group, except True, has lost any reason to trust Gaal.

Gaal bonds with True by agreeing with her that the rest of the group are jerks and making her feel special. He tries, but fails, to get her help in stealing a vehicle. She successfully steals a horse* but that’s not really what he wanted. Still, he rolls with it and continues to manipulate the little girl. In the end, she is rescued by her father and Gaal is driven away at gunpoint, but True remains loyal to the stranger who treated her well. She assumes, as do I, that their paths shall cross again.

* Oh, by the way, they grow a horse in this one. The group find some canisters that were part of their lost cargo. It turns out they’re cans of horse. As in, they activate the can and a couple hours later it grows into a horse. This miracle technology is apparently advanced even within the sci-fi future of the show and it isn’t without its flaws. The horse grows to adult stature over the course of a day and it is only through the hard work of young Dr. Julia that it doesn’t continue aging until it dies. Uly names the horse Pegasus and, I’ll be honest, I can’t tell if Gaal gets the horse in the end or if we’re meant to assume it ran back to camp. I’d assume the latter, but I figure we’ll find out next time.

Most importantly, this episode gave us this:

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.