This Friday on 'Earth 2' ep 17 'Brave New Pacifica'

This is a total calamity from start to finish. An insult to the viewers intelligence.
Spiders generating current, time folds that you can travel along. But if a spider of the wrong polarization ends up in the wrong end of the time fold then holy cow!! it all grinds to a halt. Christ what a plot.
Only one of the writing team was responsible for this garbage, the others must have politely excused themselves.
I've not seen anything this bad since the talking carrot in Lost in Space.
Zero points would be generous.
MINUS TEN POINTS

This is probably the point at which the network decided to cancel this show. Not every single season show was a victim of unreasoning "suits" viciously axing a promising work of genius , occasionally they got it right and put the show out of our misery .

After Danzinger’s huge success with last week’s scouting trip, he comes up with a brilliant idea – take Alonzo and scout ahead 12 kilometers at a time trying to locate New Pacifica. Before he gets a chance to try this feat and get lost again, Dr. Heller comes forward with a fruit basket dropped off by a Grendler – who asked nothing in return! The fruit is fresh - meaning it must have come from nearby. And there was also a futuristic SIMcard of sorts with it showing an ocean nearby. Our two sets of couples (Alonzo and Julia – semi-declared, and John and Devon – inching their way toward it) follow the Grendler in hopes of seeing where he got the fruit. (This never occurred to them in “Natural Born Grendlers.” They’re getting smarter.)

What they discover in the Grendler’s cave is some weird phenomenon which may be a time-space portal. Alonzo talks about checking it out for an adventure, but it’s Julia who ends up being the first human passenger on it – after running into the (presumably) mate of the first Grendler, who is ticked off that her hubby gave away their food to Dr. Heller. She knocks her unconscious (well, Julia actually fell backward and knocked herself out) and drags her off to their cave at the other end of the portal. There Julia finds the secret that we learned in the teaser – the Grendlers drink human blood. Fortunately, they don’t yet know they already have a large supply of it inside her; they think she manufactures it in vials like they found the Eden Project blood specimens in. They hold her prisoner while Devon, Danzinger and Alonzo go through the portal to find her. Devon and Alonzo end up at the beach, while poor John ends up in a rock tunnel he has to crawl through. At least as he reaches the end, he overhears Devon and Alonzo talking about him and Devon admitting she doesn’t want him to go scouting ahead of them; she’s really “gotten to depend on that man”.

Julie tricks the female Grendler into accepting a vial with a spider in it thinking it’s blood. She tries to drink it but gets a spider bite for her trouble and is knocked out. Seems spider venom won’t kill you on this planet – just knock you out for a few hours. Good thing for Alonzo, because later he gets bitten by a spider from the pocket of John’s coat but is okay. Julia tries to crawl out of the cave over a wall but a loose rock bops the Grendler and wakes her back up. Fortunately, her mate comes in see what’s going on and Julia slips out the big rock door that was left “open”. The female Grendler saw her bleeding though, so the secret of the true source of human blood may be out now.

Our friends are then planning how to bring everyone over through the portal to New Pacifica only to have John point out that the sun is setting on the wrong side – meaning they are on the East Coast rather than the West Coast – 6,000 kilometers in the wrong direction. Worse yet, the portal seems to have vanished. There’s no way for them to get back.

Fortunately, Alonzo’s spider bite caused him to declare his love out loud – for Devon? As Julia tries to figure that one out, Alonzo starts talking about how special Devon is and what special care she needs, so Danzinger slugs him – snapping him out of it and getting his thoughts back to Julia. (Where would modern medicine be if we hadn’t discovered that a bop on the head cures so many things – like amnesia for example?)

However, this whole “attraction” versus “repulsion” helps Julia figure out what’s going on. It seems there are two types of spiders – one positively “charged”, one negatively “charged.” Having at least one on each on either side of the portal is what causes the breach. The positive “charge” also causes an attraction to the first person you see if it bites you. Hence, that’s why Alonzo suddenly had the hots for Devon, and why the Grendler gave his bag of goodies to Julia for free – he was attracted to her. They need to separate the negatively charged spider from the positive one, but how to tell which is which? Julia gets the male Grendler, who’s still sweet on her, to get bitten by three spiders one at a time until he has a negative reaction. Then they separate the negative spider from the positive (which had made them cancel out and cease causing the portal to exist.) They take the negative spider back with them and run back home.

Danzinger is glad to be back home and gives up his silly idea of going scouting with Alonzo. Julia comments about the power of creation caused by the attraction between the two spiders and gets a big kiss from Alonzo.

Random thoughts:

Well, wouldn’t you know it? For once when the word "Grendlers" was not in the title, there actually were two Grendlers. One male, one female, I would say – even though they both looked exactly the same.

When the spider bites the female Grendler it knocks her out. When it bites the male Grendler it causes either attraction or repulsion without the annoying knockout effect. Guess their blood chemistry is different – even though they look exactly the same. (The only way I could tell them apart was attitude – the male was nice, the female always angry.) Truth is, it was really plot convenience – can’t have the male Grendler bitten three times if he’s going to be knocked out each time.

So John now knows that Devon has some feelings for him; we know he has feelings for her, but she doesn’t. Julia and Alonzo are getting closer. He was supposed to leave on the ship which will meet them in New Pacifica, but he’s wanting to stay now since Julia is planning to stay on the planet.

We learned that Grendlers drink blood, but are they like vampires or is blood just a delicacy like someone who likes their steaks really rare? Is the fact that at least one Grendler knows humans bleed going to come back and bite them later on – maybe literally?

Looks like the recurring co-stars are now going to be billed first in the closing credits each week whether they appear or not. I did see Walman, Magus, and Baines – but I don’t recall seeing Zero, who was billed first. After the four of them were billed (three of whom only appeared for a few seconds when the main characters came back from their portal journey), only then were the Grendlers billed – even though they had lots more scenes and were central to the storyline.

Despite the silly science (like that a positively charged spider also causes attraction between people and a negatively charged one causes repulsion), this was a fun episode, and I thought the twist that the portal took them backward instead of forward was clever. Besides, any episode featuring lots of Julia is going to look good to me; she’s still my favorite character. I’ll give this one 8 brilliant observations from Julia.

Ok this one starts out with some Grendlers freaking out over human blood like crack addicts. One thing I've noticed is they've done away with the voice narration for these episodes. So the Grendlers are looking for blood and decide to got into the camp to make a trade. In the camp Danziger and Alonzo want to go on a long snow trek to scout the area.

They find out that the Grendler has some Eden project material so they decide to follow him back to his cave. In the cave they discover a kind of time/space warp that a person can use to travel long distances rather quickly. They debate what to do about it when Julia gets kidnapped by a Grendler who is going crazy looking for blood. There's also spiders all over the place but more of that later on.

Alonzo, Devin and Danziger go into the time/space warp and end up on a beach. It ends up that they landed in new Pacifica so they all start going crazy happy. Julia fakes out the Grendler with a spider bite and then try's to escape. While escaping another Grendler comes in who is horny for Julia and starts a fight with the first Grendler. Julia escapes and it ends up she's right on the beach so they all go crazy until Danziger crashes the party and tells them they're on the wrong coast and this is the east coast. Oh man, it was just a fake out, what a cheap plot ploy. I'm surprised it wasn't just a dream.

No big deal right….There's still 15 minutes so they had to come up with a convoluted way to end this episode. The time/space warp doesn't work anymore because the spiders work as a negative/positive power system and there's a positive spider on the wrong side. It ends up that Julia must lure the horny Grendler back to the web so he can be bite numerous times. They find the positive spider and all is right in the world.

Random Thoughts:

*So this "new" planet is just like the continental U.S. where they are surrounded by two large oceans, one on the west coast and one on the east coast. There's only one large land mass on this planet? Why is there an automatic assumption that they are on the east coast of this continent? Couldn't they have transported to a land mass on the opposite side of the ocean of "New Pacifica" sort of like landing in a land mass like Japan where the Pacific ocean is facing east? Everything on this show is so skewed from an American's perspective.

*It's such an odd use of cast members. One week Yale is a big deal and then he's basically an extra again. True disappeared for 5 episodes then she came back no she disappeared again. Uly is basically an extra. What ever happened to Bess and Morgan??? I don't think we've heard from them since the Morganite episode.

*I guess they want to force the whole Danziger/Devon relationship but there's zero chemistry between the actors and there's no screen presence whatsoever.

*So this planet has spiders just like on Earth? But these spider control a wacky space time continuum like battery cables.

*The Pacifica fake out was such a cheap plot device. Again why don't you just say the whole thing was a dream.

*I don't get these Grendlers, sometimes they're all over the place and then they disappear for 3-4 episodes.

*It looks like they just reused the set from last weeks episode.

*I guess they wanted to make an "opposites" attract episode as a metaphor for Devon/Danzinger and Alonzo and Julia. I don't get the opposite part with Julia and Alonzo. They have screen chemistry and they're both very good looking actors. If anything there's no opposite.

Weak episode all around with some really stupid spider polarity and the cheap fake out for New Pacifica, 3/10.

Observations
Unless the spiders are super intelligent and created the time-fold travel thing deliberately to avoid having to scuttle around,then it must be a natural phenomena created by their biology. So unless they're only found in these passages we have time folds all over the planet! yeah right.
Also why is fruit so hard to find? There's enough trees around. We also never see the Grendlers naked they're clothed ,so they have clothes makers therefore a community, a village of some sort which we never see or mentioned.
Poor poor writing which is running out of steam already.
Fun episodes are fine in a fun show but this is supposed to be a serious show. This did remind me of Lost in Space all that was missing was Dr Smith running down
the passage screaming " Devon Devon the spiders are on me help"
ROBOT " Do not worry Dr Smith the spiders cannot make you attractive or any more repulsive"
SMITH "Shut up you bubble headed booby "

The Grendlers have not bothered me as much as they have others in the past. This episode changed that for me. I do feel sorry for whoever is in those costumes. For the obvious reasons but also trying to act. When the first Grendler got bitten by the spider I thought he was trying to tell Julia so she would save him from something that was lethal to him. But no, all that ear stroking and hand gesturing he was doing was supposed to be ‘coy’ love language.
So Grendlers will
Murder on command: Gaal
Loyal to the end: Gaal and Dell
Have abusive relationships: Somebody needs to do an intervention on this relationship.

Any way you look at it Grendlers are not the ones you want to have the information of where human blood comes from. I could see New Pacifica being a place that one has to be careful about going out alone because Grendlers will pick off the strays for their blood. So much for paradise!

I know they are trying to make Devon look to be a forceful leader but the way Devon keeps jumping in and insisting she has to be the one to do every dangerous thing is making her look like an idiot.

They tried to make a whole thing about opposites attracting but really Devon and Danziger are mirror images of each other. Stubborn, bossy and both have to be in the middle of anything that is dangerous. We have lost our doctor and friend who should we send in to the unknown to get them. Alonzo, makes sense, but how about both the people who the group looks to as leaders and also the only two who are PARENTS. Also, if Danziger disappears who is going to tinker on all the equipment?

I got a laugh out of all the running to each other on the beach. I can see the director now “Everybody run”. You can’t have a beach scene without running but it got comical.

How many see a limited future for these spiders once it is figured out that they carry a real ‘love potion’. Many a story and song have been made about the search for such a potion. I will name it ‘love potion #9”.

If they truly were now trying to make this a children’s show I have the feeling there were a lot of very confused ten year olds sitting around the TV after that whole spider plot point.

I was not a fan of this episode but it was better than last week’s so I will give it a
3 out of 10

michaellevenson1

Also why is fruit so hard to find

Once I read an article about spiders trying to weave a web under the influence of determined substances, and I remember caffeine produced some of the most deleterious effects on the spider's ability to weave. So, this is what we had today, a badly woven plot involving lots of elements haphazardly put together trying to make a story, but failing.

We had Grendlers drinking human blood, a Grendler in love and another one not so much, the colonists taking a rapid tunnel to New York, when in fact, they needed the one leading to Los Angeles, spiders, polarities, opposites attract, Alonzo falling for Devon and an unfulfilled promise of something remotely related to New Pacifica.

Basically the characters spend their time going from point A to point B (Oh, well, isn't that just the "point" of the whole show anyway?) or looking for someone (Julia and Danzinger). Lots of senseless action to fill the hour which culminated in a theory about spiders, polarity, opposites attracting and the Rapid Transit System that made even less sense. Oh, and if I hear the expression "strong metaphysical plane" once more I think I'll have a fit.

A couple pearls of wisdom:

**
"I've already asked Devon to look after True." True doesn't need looking after, John. She'll do what she'll do. probably halfway to New Pacifica, the scout team would find True hidden in someone's backpack.

**
"Spiders..."
"Insects are one of the things I still have problems with on this planet."
Then you'll be all right Devon, since spiders are arachnids. Where did you study ichthyology, Devon? (Just kidding! Every kid knows it's entomology. But that would only help if spiders were insects...)

This episode gets 2 lonely insect spiders in love and on caffeine trying to weave a patchwork quilt at the beach.