This Friday on 'Earth 2' ep 19 'After the Thaw'

First, I’m glad to be even doing this review today. Last Wednesday, I was checking to see if there were any new posts at this site, and all our reviews were gone. I went back to other shows we’d done and they had been wiped there as well. All that was left was a couple of my “by the numbers.” I remembered madp once saying he’d gotten some warnings from IMDB, and wondered if they’d followed through on that – or if we were simply taking up too much space on the board so they decided to purge us out. But when I told madp about it, he said everything was still there on his end. It turned out somehow madp had gotten on my “ignore” list under “preferences”. I’ve never set anyone to “ignore” so either I got hacked, or somehow pushed a wrong button – maybe when reading from my smartphone. Either way, once I removed the “ignore” all the reviews came back. But for a few hours there, I was thinking our group would have to be disbanded before we even got to finish this show.

Okay, on to the review. When I saw the title “After the Thaw,” I thought that meant the winter would finally be over and we’d be moving on to other places. No such luck. The thaw referred to Julia thawing an ancient iced Terrian she stumbled across – literally. (Well, "stumbled" may be understating it; she practically slid down a mountain to land on it.)

Danzinger just wants to leave it there while Julia wants to take it back and do research on it. Looks like since Danzinger is so often “wrong” when he argues with Devon, he gets to be “right” here arguing with Julia. It’s not really fair, because she was right about the things they could learn from the creature. How was she to know all this chaos would ensue involving ancient Terrian demon emotions? Even Yale’s claim that the Terrians may be upset because she “dug up someone’s grandfather” is nonsense. He was not under a burial site and appeared to have just frozen to death in the ice. If anything, she was taking him out so he could be given a formal burial – until Danzinger just decided on his own to cremate him. (Sorry for saying “him”. I know Julia said he was “neither male nor female”, but he sure looked like a male – and we were told earlier that all Terrians were male.

Give the writers credit here – they tried to work just about everyone into this episode – Terrians, Grendlers, even the Elder. The idea is that the creature was an ancient Terrian who had emotions, which the current Vulcans – I mean Terrians – do not. His body was dead but his uncontrollable emotions lived on for 300,000 years and sought a body to inhabit. It tried a Grendler – who was howling from almost the beginning of the episode, although I never remember one howling before. But he was too much for the Grendler and it blew apart. That’s all we actually saw of the Grendler, when Magus found it and started screaming. She does not have the blood-curdling scream of True, though. But I guess they couldn’t find a good excuse for True to be alone and stumble on it, when everyone was cowering in a big tent, and Baines was hiding in a trans-rover. (Baines was a real scaredy-cat in this one.)

The mystery of the Terrians had to be explained by the Elder. How convenient that he knew old Terrian lore – even recognized the story right away. And he’s the one that reveals one of the colonists must be possessed, and later tells them how to defeat it. The caves that the Elder lived in were supposed to be far away, where Danzinger ended up when he got lost. But the writers had the “ragamuffin” find Devon and Danzinger while they were scouting, and he said this was the back entrance to the caves. Since caves can extend for miles, that actually made sense.

The possessed colonists destroyed the device Julia could have used to detect the Terrian’s presence, so Danzinger fakes that he fixed the device and tries to bluff someone into confessing. He’d have made a good crooked cop – telling Alonzo he sees some readings and making him look suspicious until we find out Danzinger himself is the possessed one. The Elder tells Alonzo how to defeat the Terrian by destroying him on the dream plane. The Terrians can’t help because they have no emotions, so they can’t work up the aggression to fight this thing. Alonzo chokes Danzinger to force the creature into himself, then uses his emotions to destroy it in the dream plane. Crisis solved. Well, that one anyway. We were told at the beginning of the show that they were down to 2 weeks worth of food, but they forgot all about that once the creature started to thaw.

Random thoughts:
Alonzo’s narration says, “The land, which seemed so abundant” was now frozen over. When was this land ever “abundant?” They were complaining about the food shortage since episode 5, when Bess traded VR gear for a couple of lousy melons.

Danzinger loses track of Julia when he and Walman are walking through the snow, causing her to trip and fall and find the creature while trying to catch up. So not only is he a lousy scout, he’s a lousy scoutmaster. At least he seems to be keeping better track of True this episode.

They put the ancient Terrian in a big tent, calling it the “alien tent.” The irony was not lost on me – on this planet, the colonists are the “aliens”. The Terrians have been around for at least 300,000 years, so I’m pretty sure that makes them natives.

When the Elder tells Alonzo he must fight the Terrian on the dream plane, Alonzo says the creature nearly killed him. “But he did not yet succeed,” the Elder reminds him. Maybe it’s just me, but I’d have let the “yet” out. That way it would sound like, “He didn’t kill you before; you have the strength to fight him,” rather than “Well, he hasn’t killed you yet. But hey, give him another shot at it!”

Finally, gotta love those closing credits. They bill Grendler #1 and Grendler #2, even though there was only one Grendler and it was dead. They didn’t even need an actor for it; it looked like an empty torn costume.

I’ll give this one 7 over-worked shankin’ winches. I might have given it more, but they blew a golden opportunity here, which I will now elaborate on:

I’ve been trying for weeks to ID the unidentified colonists. In this episode, they “all” hide out in a big tent. So, Danzinger calls out all their names to see if they’re present. No, he doesn’t – he only calls out the regular’s names. They couldn’t even be bothered to invent names for the other colonists. “Hey, Smith, Johnson, you here too?” If you looked carefully, in one scene the pretty dark-haired girl is standing next to Julia in one scene, and “Wesley” and the slender Black lady were visible in a group shot for a few seconds, so they were all actually there – but no one mentioned them. I got excited when Danzinger said “Solace” and I thought, “Oh good, a name I haven’t heard before.” Then later, he says “I’m going to check on Solace now.” That was the most exciting moment for me – until I found out he only meant Alonzo. I remembered then that the opening credits do call him “Alonzo Solace.” But he’s been just called Alonzo for so long, I forget he even had a last name!

It looks like that we finally did get an episode worthy of being called "The Enemy Within" after all. Remember the fake synopsis I wrote for that one?

In a routine mission, a transporter malfunction creates an evil doppelganger of John Danzinger (just like his character in “The Shawshank Redemption”) and then he tries to take over the Enterprise.

So, I got it close enough, just a few episodes ahead. Of course Clancy Brown had to play an evil psychopath at some point. But it was interesting to see that even when he was possessed with pure evil, he didn't mistreat his innocent daughter. After all, this is a family show.

As usual, the writers make use of a situation and try to stretch it as long as they can. In this case, I thought the "spooky camp" situation lasted too long and it got me tired of having people freaking out at nothing really (though it turned out to be something really). At least we had three subsequent subplots: the "demon ghost loose in the camp," then "who is possessed?," then "Alonzo on the run."

I just thought ther reveal of what the ancient Terrian was was a bit anticlimatic. Instead of a depository of negative emotions, it would have given us more information about how Terrians were much more like humans and what kind of society they had. Anyway, the episode was not bad.

This time I shall borrow dtmuller's grading scale, as Magnus established a new record, and rate this episode with 7 shrieks.

This is not a bad episode, it moves along quite nicely. As we get to the end of the series we're getting more traditional Sci Fi stories with recognizable tropes.
Was the scenes where Julia was testing to see who was possessed a homage to The Thing?
It just reminded me of it , anyway luckily when you're possessed your eyes glow , makes it nice and easy for the audience.
The Elder and his community appear again, I wonder what the future has in store for them ,will they be just left on their own when the Eden group head off for New Pacifica ?
There presence wouldn't seem to fit in with the future we saw last week.
An okay episode but to be honest I'm looking forward to the end of this show ,6/10.

Still winter! Not sure why they did this. Money saving? The snow is a way to keep them in the same place thus the same set. It gets old seeing them trudge through the snow episode after episode.

You would think by this time they would have some kind of buddy system. Hey guys ‘where’s Julia’?

I thought Julia came off bad this week. Kind of ‘mini Devon’. But I also thought everyone came off bad. A lot of yelling at each other. I really thought the episode was going to be a spores story where everybody was infected and were acting out. Maybe they were trying to show they were getting cabin fever.

I have to agree with Danziger on the food vs digging up the frozen Terrian. I am all for scientific study but food and water have to come first. All that knowledge is not going to do you any good when you starve to death.

Got a kick out of our great scientist when someone said something smells terrible (Danziger cremation) and Julia says “Don’t breathe too deeply”. Ah, for added protection should we also plug our noses?

So the old man could sense Alonzo’s was ‘different’ but he could not sense all the powerful Terrain in Danziger?

I think this premise could have been interesting but it is so slow. It is like they can come up with the idea but the filler stuff is just off. For me it seems they are not good at writing conversation.
Also, it seemed like everyone didn’t like everyone in this episode and I am not sure where that all came from.

7 out of 10

madp

As usual, the writers make use of a situation and try to stretch it as long as they can

I just leave a score because I'm late to this one. This was a decent episode with some good twists and turns, I give it a 6/10.