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EARTH 2
A film review by James Parry
Copyright 1994 James Parry
EARTH 2, NBC, Sundays at 7 (before "SeaQuest DSV") Two-hour pilot film
This is the show which is actually so bad that Steven Spielberg wouldn't allow his name to appear in the credits; keep in mind that he *did* have his name on "SeaQuest DSV."
The first ten minutes or so were a lot like "SeaQuest"--quite poor, and nonsensical--and then they *got* to the planet, and I damn near fell asleep. It should also be noted that these people are stranded on an alien planet with a land-crawler and a robot whose glass head is filled with blinking lights, and Dr. Smith's presence is sorely missed--It's exactly the same concept as Lost In Space, and once they got to the planet, the production values (and writing) weren't that much better. (The big difference is that there's no bumbling evil saboteur aboard. Like Dr. Smith, there's one of those in the EARTH 2 pilot, and like Dr. Smith, he gets trapped aboard at takeoff, but the difference is he doesn't make it to the planet with the colonists.)
The premise is that children who are born anywhere but on overpopulated Earth get "The Syndrome" which means they die at age nine, but "the scientific and medical community" declare that this doesn't exist, and they do not want this colonization ship (full of families of sick children) to leave Earth orbit because "they'll lose control" (yeah, it's one of those shows where "the scientific community" is the most evil force in the universe.) So they plant a bomb (represented by a little box with enormous LED numbers conveniently displayed on it) on board hidden on the back of one of the video screens, and the heroes find this and discover that it's set to go off when they turn off the video screen and so they throw the screen out the airlock while the guy on it is still talking (aparently in the future you don't need to plug things in.) Then they all go into hibernation for twenty-two years. We see the ship plummeting to the new planet out of control, then we see an Apollo capsule ejecting from it, then we see the same shot again, and our dozen heroes crash on the planet without the other hundreds of colonists. You can tell it's an alien planet because it looks just like Arizona except there are feathers blowing through the air (I think they were meant to be really big snowflakes.) They trek across the desert and encounter three kinds of aliens: tall guys in rubber suits with mystical healing powers, midgets in rubber suits, and little puppets that look a *lot* like E.T. Of course the kids immediately befriend the little aliens; the show is focused on the child characters for obvious reasons.
There was nothing new in it anywhere, and I was *amazed* that someone could spend $30,000,000 on something without better production values. The model work in the first few minutes was quite nice, but not $30,000,000 worth! The robot was a guy in a plastic suit with blinking lights on top of his head, the crawler was a Humvee (with a *gigantic* "Hummer" logo on the front) with some randomly-rotating antennae on it, the E.T.-derivative alien walked like an audio-animatronic robot from Disneyland, and the special effects (after the scenes with the space station) consisted of *endless* fuzzy slo-mo sequences representing mystical inner journeys (i.e. dreams). Oh, yeah, and a kid got sucked into a vermiculite pit, Lost In Space-style. I actually found it very similar to the "SeaQuest" pilot: quite disentertaining, and dull enough so that I didn't get the crucial "bad laughs" from it that I can get from most things this poor. There are about a dozen characters, and I didn't learn any of their names, which doesn't really matter since none of them seems to have a personality (the closest we get is there's the token black genius--as always--and a sick boy who has to wear a night retainer that goes up his nose.)
EARTH 2's pilot was about as interesting as EARTH II's pilot (from 20 years ago, starring Gary Lockwood--in a stunning display of originality, they picked a name someone had already used for a bad show.)
I hope that Spielberg has his standard "Ha! Ha! You're stuck with this bomb for *two years*!" contract like he did with "Amazing Stories" and "SeaQuest," because then it'll get renewed in spite of amazingly low ratings and the producers will know it can't possibly survive another year and then they just won't *care*, and they'll do something like the second season of "SeaQuest" where the show just goes totally nuts.
Basically, I liked nothing about EARTH 2 except the model space station, which looked quite good, particularly since it was the same design as the one in 2001. This show bites the big one, even by the standards of network science fiction series. And it *especially* bites the big one when you realize they threw thirty million dollars at it, and that Irwin Allen made the same show in 1965 for a tenth the cost. Given that there are four people listed under "Created By" in the opening credits, I thought that they were having a competition to see who could make EARTH 2 the most derivative. Of course, this hypothesis was proven wrong when I read the TV GUIDE interview where one of the writers bragged about never having worked with science fiction before, saying, "We won't have the tried and true ideas to fall back on." Essentially, what we have here is a show by people who don't have a clue about science fiction, and by not knowing what they're doing have simply recapitulated some of the tiredest concepts, in an uninteresting way.
-- K.
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