This Friday on 'Earth 2' ep 22 'All About Eve'

Oh no!! You can't do this to me.
I WANT MORE!
Devon is left in limbo. Amazing cliffhanger ending. This happens so often, a cancelled series gets it right just too late. Why can't networks that cancel shows say to the production team "we'll give you a 90 minute special to wrap it all up" , but no it's all left in the air.
Christopher Neame was excellent , well known in U.K. for his roles in many major shows including the infamous Dr Who story Shada , infamous for ....enough said.
Top quality ending, Reilly a hologram , nice twist. One thing ; we know Devon survives as we see her in the future, though that was maybe a possible future only , though the possible future Uly did react with the solid present Devon , so its a definite future ,so Devon does survive.
Overall a mediocre series but it ended on a high.
10/10

Darn you, DALLAS. They didn’t invent the season-ending cliffhanger, but their “Who Shot J.R.?” season finale episode really made that trope supremely popular. After that, lots of shows went that route trying to get to the same ratings peak – which never happened. Worse still, to achieve that end, some shows often stooped to adding last minute characters and plotlines, or re-writing previous history - both of which occurred here.

Last minute characters: Morgan is contacted through his VR glasses by a Franklin Bennett who guides the colonists to his ship – a Venus class spacecraft that was supposed to be returning to Earth after 50 years in space but instead had left them in frozen sleep right there on G889. There are six people aboard, but 4 die in the attempt to revive them and the other 2 have suffered irreparable physical damage from the prolonged sleep so they both die as well. But not before they reveal that they have a supercomputer named Eve orbiting the planet, one that Franklin built but is intent on destroying.

Rewriting previous history: After all the drama about Reilly and the Council wanting to kidnap Uly to take control of the planet, we are told now that Reilly wasn’t real – it was only Eve posing as him. The Council was apparently phony as well – not clear whether they never existed at all or they were real but just not orbiting the planet. Strange how this Eve who was on this distant planet supposedly could have recruited Dr. Heller all the way from Earth to be a spy for a nonexistent Council. What a mess.

Though Franklin is adamant that his dying wish is to destroy Eve, he never really explains why. But he had set a virus to destroy her 50 years after they left the planet and so it is activating now. But somehow the colonists have also fallen prey to a virus due to the biostat chips implanted in them. One of their group actually died (more on that later) and the others are in bad shape. The devices link into the neuro-net so they can’t be removed. Eve can repair them but only if they give her the code to repair her own virus. Devon convinces Elizabeth, the other survivor, to give them the codes. Liz starts to tell Devon they made a terrible mistake, but is interrupted when Alonzo is brought in sick and they both just sort of forget about the conversation. Eve gets repaired and the other colonists are restored to health. Elizabeth, on her deathbed, broaches the subject once more with Devon to tell her the cliffhanger secret – the planet is rejecting them. But there’s a bunch of penal colonists who are alive and healthy and making phone calls to Earth using hibernating Terrians, Devon counters. Oh, they’re all dying too, says Elizabeth dismissively (more rewriting of the past.) The final revelation is that Devon didn’t have a biostat chip – she was getting sick because the planet was rejecting her. She is left in the cold sleep as the program ends, until the colonists can find some way to save her. I’m sure they would have, and that Eve would have proved to be a dangerous threat of some kind to everyone. But how or why, we’ll never know.

Now to the death of one of the colonists – the show opened with a funeral and Yale referred to the deceased as a she. Since Gail and Magus were visible and one of the regulars wasn’t about to be sacrificed that left the pretty dark-haired girl. She was buried wrapped in a sheet leaving me zero hope of ever finding out who played her – although they did show her name on the gravemarker – Eben Sinh. But later on, incredibly, Elizabeth asked for her to be dug up (which is how she found the biostat chip) and we briefly saw her face. So to my utter amazement – she was billed in the closing credits (although there her name was spelled Eben Synge). Yes, she never had a word of dialog in the entire series, but she got billed for being dead – just like those dead Grendlers in prior episodes. Well, fair is fair. Her real name was Erin Murphy (and no, she’s not the same Erin Murphy who played Tabitha on BEWITCHED). One of her credits was a show called GET REAL, in which she played “Unbelievable Babe.” Also in the cast of that show – Debrah Farentino!

But alas, we may never know who played Gail. That’s what comes of not having a line, but staying alive.

Other thoughts: This was the only episode to print the title on screen – with quotes no less.

At one point, when Devon collapses you see her full body for a few seconds and she does look very pregnant. (At least, that’s the way it seemed like to me – I didn’t have time to go back and look again.)

The show concludes with a shot of Devon alone in suspended animation. The series STARGATE UNIVERSE ended just the opposite – with one character being the only one on the ship not in suspended animation.

Though the episode was interesting enough by itself, because of its historical rewrites and unresolved cliffhangers I can only give it 6 biostat chips with no explanation on why Devon didn’t have one.

(from unaired tag scene at the end of the episode)
(Devon, in a cloudy limbo, comes across Elizabeth)
Devon: Elizabeth, you must tell me – how can we keep the planet from rejecting us?
Elizabeth: Only one of two things can save you – a girl named Mary, or a wild black horse.
Devon: (sighs) Oh, we are screwed now!

I don’t have much to say about the episode but more a comment about the show.

I have not liked Danziger for the last few episodes. I had always liked his character but he was changed to be reactionary and ballistic. Now I see that this may have been because the Devon character would not have been seen until at least later in the second season and he was going to have to be a mixture of the two of them, Devziger if you will. Unfortunately I don’t like that character.

I think a mistake that the writers made was the future episode. I can’t remember what I rated the future based episode when we watched it but it is how it fits into the greater scheme of the show that I have a problem with. By giving us the future we had no concern that Devon was going to die. We even know that Devon was the one who raised Uly. We also know that the planet does not reject the humans (thanks to Uly) so it did not create drama when they were told the planet would not let them stay. This episode would have had more punch if it had been shown before the future one.

I also think by showing us what the future was like we don’t get to play the guessing game. I would have envisioned the next 10 years as the western frontier. The first generation sacrificing and struggling so that the future generations would have it better. Maybe someone else would have seen the next 10 years as building skyscrapers or others a planet with large battles being fought. It would have been even worse if the show had been renewed because some of the drama of the unknown was removed.

I thought both the guest stars acted circles around our trusty group.
I do hate it when conveniently they have everyone die but the two characters we need for the story. Really, what luck! Just have two characters in the space craft to wake up.

As far as the episode I thought it was better than the last few have been and I will give it an 8 out of 10

brimfin

They didn’t invent the season-ending cliffhanger

(from unaired tag scene at the end of the episode)
(Devon, in a cloudy limbo, comes across Elizabeth)
Devon: Elizabeth, you must tell me – how can we keep the planet from rejecting us?
Elizabeth: Only one of two things can save you – a girl named Mary, or a wild black horse.
Devon: (sighs) Oh, we are screwed now!

And so we come to the end... I'm surprised that even though I had already seen this show, I managed to delete it from my mind so well that I got to be surprised by little details like Reilly being an AI, or the colonists having been chipped and finding a cure. I did remember the scene with Devon being put in the stasis pod, though, and I remember I had felt really cheated when I originally saw it, because it left us so horribly hanging in a cliff, so to speak.

However, this time I felt the Devon part was an accessory part of the main plot, possibly having to do with Ms. Farentino having to take time off to take care of her baby. Other than that, the colonists would merrily keep on their way to New Pacifica, now aided or hampered by Reilly the Computer. By the way, I really liked the way Eve/Reilly tricked Morgan into awakening the people in "cryo-suspension" or whatever. Even's Franklin Bennett impersonation was so obviously fake after we knew the truth (Even managed to create Bennett's appearance, but the erratic personality was the computer going crazy) that this prevented the coincidence of them coming across Bennett's team just by chance, like they met so many other characters.

Anyway, in a possible season 2, the colonists would eventually come back for Devon whenever Ms. Farentino was ready to rejoin the show. But I don't think I could've taken another season after all. The writing needed great improvements.

Well, isn't it curious that an anonymous lady colonist finally gets a name and an on-screen personality after she's dead. RIP, Eben Sinh. We barely knew you. More likely, we didn't know you at all! And I think that's ridiculous, because the death would have much more impact had we known her a little at least. Perhaps if they had killed Magus, for instance, that would've prompted more interesting moments.

Oh, and by the way, Ms. Farentino was so visibly pregnant, constantly wearing that heavy coat and pressing her stomach all the time for this or that reason. It's that or she ate too many spirulina burgers. I guess at some point the showrunners decided, "to hell with realism," and just hoped viewers would understand the actress was pregnant and had to pretend she wasn't.

I'd say this was a good and decent episode, but poor as a season finale. And by no means a series finale. At least it gets 8 VR jazz jam sessions with Morgan and Eve's split personalities forming the band.

The group is out of their former home and out in the range and someone has died and other people are ill. Morgan uses his video unit to escape and has an odd man giving him instruction. Morgan gets the group to stop in a spot where they find an old spaceship. It ends up that it's been in the ground for 30 years but they're still people in pods living in the ship. Morgan resuscitates them but 4 die in the process. The the other 2 tell the group they they were original colonists who left 30 years ago and put into deep sleep. They didn't get back to Earth but instead crashed back into the planet.

We then get a computer character called Eve who is something like a super computer controlling the planet. We find one of the survivors actually created Eve as a kind AI character and she is also Riley so he was never a real person. The Dr. tells them that the group has a bio chip inside their bodies and that the computer and the chip is dtysfunctioning. It ends up that the computer is causing this they end up gerry rigging Yale to go in and fix the problem and disarm the system. The people from the pods die but the group is ok. Then we learn that Devon was never actually sick from that bio chip and there's a cliff hanger where's she's put in deep sleep.

Random thoughts.

*Ok we learn that the planet will reject these people and that they all are going to die but didn't Uly live and what about all they penal colonists??? What about Gaal? What about Mary?? I never took this threat seriously but there's some lousy continuity.

*I found the whole AI thing about the computer very confusing. What was the point? So there wasn't a council? There was no RileY?

*The cliffhanger with Devon was really to cover up her pregnancy. Ully lives in that future episode, we see future Devon and he's raised by Devon so there's no real danger that she will be killed off.

*So there was no council so what was the point about Julia's story???

*I don't understand why they would self destruct the AI after they left the planet 50 years later?

*People die on this show but we don't really care because they're all extras. Having a funeral for an extra is creating a false sense of emotion.

*Did they ever explain how they were able to have deep space colonists 30-50 years in the past and no one knew about it.

The story started out ok but it gets into a mess with a lack of continuity from the entire series. And then none of the main cast is going to die so it's all a matter of waiting for the clock. I give it a 5/10

Thank God this series is finally over.

De-lurking to offer thoughts about this interesting project you all had going with this thorough watch of Earth 2.

When I first watched this show back in the '90s, I remember liking it a lot. I became invested in the characters, their predicament, their adventures. The never-to-be-resolved cliffhanger "ending" was so thoroughly disappointing, I swore I'd never watch another NBC program again, in protest of what I perceived to be the most criminally wrong decision on TV, ever. (Hey, I was young and naive.)

Eventually, the show was released on DVD, and I was able to re-live the episodes with a fresh perspective, and was surprised at how my perception of certain events and how my attitude towards certain characters had changed. Some things remained the same, of course, but overall I still highly enjoyed the show the second time around, despite its many creative, scientific, and technical flaws.

Earth 2 was built upon a pretty cool premise: "This time...we are the aliens."

This was around the time of X-Files' ascendancy to sci-fi cult status (which would eventually transform into a pop culture icon). There was even a line in an episode of XF where one of the Lone Gunmen mentions to Mulder they're going to hop online later to nitpick all the scientific inaccuracies of Earth 2. This was probably not meant to be a mean jab (I don't think), but a way of welcoming the new kid on the block.

Secret government conspiracies and aliens were suddenly all the rage on TV, and shows with sci-fi elements were popping up on all the networks to tap into that vein, in hopes it would capture audience eyeballs.

The characters:

I was not initially inclined to like Devon, the fearless leader of the group. She seemed to run rough-shod over people and disregarded their knowledge, experience and skill-set. I felt instantly bad for Julia when she overhears Devon's misgivings about her being the most junior member of Dr. Vasquez' team, and I felt bad for how she seemed to be ordering Danziger around, plus I wasn’t ever impressed with how she seemed to treat Bess with mild contempt. That said, her love and devotion to Uly and to helping the hundreds of Syndrome children made me realise there was more to her than just a “bossy” lady with too much money on her hands.

I was not a fan of the kids. Uly riled me fiercely when he took ownership of Pegasus, further alienating True when he really ought to have been more sensitive towards her. I could not stand True's screaming, or her lack of obedience. But at least both kids showed their usefulness from time to time.

During my first go-around with the series on broadcast TV, I disliked the Morgans intensely. I didn't appreciate them much, especially after their selfish use of the geolock, and Morgan's constant whining. On my second go-around, I was surprised to find my opinion about them vastly changed, in particular towards Morgan. Yes, he was still a whiner, but it was his total commitment to Bess and his desire to make amends for his geolock box catastrophe that turned me around.

From the beginning, I think Julia and Danziger were my favorites. Julia, because I felt sorry for her after Devon's brusque manner with her and her interesting backstory (genetically engineered to be gifted in the medical arts). She was shown to be caring despite being taken for granted.

Danziger was my other favorite—again because of his interesting background (a "drone" from the Quadrant who was not supposed to have stayed on the planet). I liked his prickly personality and how he did his best not to totally blow a gasket every time Devon needed something from him or when she was critical or ignoring his advice.

I remember being absolutely heartsick when we were given the scene of Julia puking up the transmitter at the conclusion of The Church of Morgan. All of a sudden, everything we thought we knew about the good Dr. Heller was thrown into disarray. She was a spy! She was a villain! She was working with that secret shadow government, The Council!

For me, that was a pivotal scene. No longer were these people just trying to make it across a hostile environment to New Pacifica; now the evil plans for termination they thought they had escaped had followed them to G889. And that evil had a face, or at least a proxy, and it was the one person they all thought (and we did, too) they could trust. It was with great relief that the episode Redemption came along, giving Julia an opportunity to make a definite choice in where her loyalties would ultimately lie.

The Natives.

The Terrians were, to me, freaking cool. Instead of little green men (or little grey men, as per the X-Files), we had tall, powerful beings with an intense physical and metaphysical connection to the planet. They sustained each other, and the Terrians were also somehow willing to share that life-force with Uly, who would somehow become a bridge between the two species.

The Grendlers. They might be hideously ugly creatures that discovered human blood is the tastiest thing they ever tried, but we learned they have a family structure, know how to barter like experts, and experience emotions similar to humans. I noticed Survival of the Fittest was the most polarizing episode during the course of this whole project you all had going. This intrigued me, because I personally found it to be one of the strongest episodes, despite the subject-matter. That the Grendler whose mate had been killed by Danziger wanted the humans to show remorse for what they had done was something totally unexpected. It showed they were more than just hulking brutes capable of tearing man to pieces; that they were more than just sources of cure-all saliva. These beings had intelligence, thoughts, emotions, and even forgiveness, as it did not persist in seeking retribution or justice after Danziger showed he was truly sorry for what had transpired.

I won’t mention much about the Kobas, because they were simply a vehicle to make me dislike True and to show the many ways she could be disobedient. I’m sure in some future episode, Julia might have found some amazing medical application for the Koba venom (maybe a field anesthetic because she’d run out of any other compounds on the planet with which to manufacture a good knock-out drug).

Oh, the spider-caves in “Brave New Pacifica”. I think I equally loathed and like that episode. The transportation tunnels were an interesting idea, but I think the way the concept was carried out fell short. Perhaps they were trying for a Star Trek-like homage, but the notion the currents could be caused by the spiders and the webs and the polar opposites, along with the romantic attractions thrown in there… Yikes, what a mess. I did like the notion Julia proposed about the tunnels being part of the planet’s “circulatory system” (for lack of a better term) since we were supposed to regard G889 as a living organism. That could have been explored more; maybe if the show had continued, the tunnels could have been utilized as an eco-friendly, mass transportation service.

I am massively surprised how much many of you liked Flower Child. I counted that as one of the worst. Pollen? Pollen is going to spur the planet out of eternal winter? Really?!

(oh, and did anyone notice the technical goof in this episode where they filmed a single moon ascending in the sky? G889 is supposed to have two moons... Whoops.)

The ZED units, penal colonists, Mary, Whelan, and all the other human people dwelling on G889…

Unless these people were all holograms produced by EVE, I think it is pretty safe to say Franklin Bennett and Elizabeth Anson were very wrong about the planet rejecting humans.

The writers clearly had to find a way to wrap up the show. By conveniently claiming there was no Council, no Reilly, no threat against the Eden Crew, this concludes the show in a very messy, slip-shod manner. Had they received a green light, Season 2 would have seen the show drastically re-tooled. This was the promo made to pitch that re-tooled series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VGW8P06dKc

Recycled footage was used, of course, but this is what was planned. As you can see, it would have been terrible.





Certa Bonum Certamen

TesubCalle
Thank you for your summery. It is interesting to see the show through the eyes of someone who was a fan in its original run.
I do think I would have liked the show more if they had gone more in depth of how Julia’s genetic makeup influenced her or how Danzigers debt worked. I also think that it would have been interesting to see more of the ‘I’m from Earth suckers’ attitude from Bess.
I think the pilot showed more promise than the show evolved into but I can see how this could have been must see TV for some.
As for the Grendlers I think I may have been the only one who liked them. They always gave me the feeling one would get from a dog. Depending on who ‘trains’ them they could be loving and loyal or murderers (Gaal). The overall feeling I had for them was pity. It seemed like the group always thought the worse of them no matter how many times it turned out that the projection that the humans put on the Grendlers was wrong.

Watched your link:
So they had already decided to let Yale and Morgan go? I guess a single Bess was a writer’s dream that could not be ignored. Maybe we would finally see who she was fantasizing about that made Morgan so mad.
It looks like they still were not sure what to do with the show. It was supposed to be a group of settlers struggling to make it in a new land but also a rip roaring sci-fi with aliens aplenty.
I noticed this in one of the comments:
“I watched this on netflix recently and since it has been on there it has been gaining some fans. Now would be the time to do something as this has gotten fairly popular again.”
Oops, do you think this may just be a reflection of an uptick because our group was watching it? I know we are not many but to go from 0 to 6 could be considered an uptick especially if you are a fan of the show and still have hope.

about this interesting project you all had going with this thorough watch of Earth 2.