Earth 2: Best Short-Run SciFi Show


I admit, I love 1950s SciFi, perhaps because it usually involved things coming to Earth and causing problems, but I rarely have gotten into space travel SciFi because it often gets so high-tech it loses all organic nuances that are part of the human condition.

My son was little when a SciFi show came on called "Earth 2" and after seeing one episode, we were hooked. Sort of imagine "Lost" with a space theme and a large cast of name actors. It was on a rough planet, very apocalyptic and super creepy/scary.

It ran for less than a year, 22 episodes, in 94/95.

Here was the plot per Wikipedia's good description:

In 2192,most of the human population had fled Earth to live on large orbiting space stations. Only a small number of humans remain on the Earth’s surface as the Earth had become mostly uninhabitable.

Billionaire Devon Adair's eight-year-old son, Ulysses Adair, had contracted a rare but fatal disease called "the syndrome",a condition whose existence is not acknowledged by the government and medical community. It is theorized that this disease, which affects only children, is somehow caused by the lack of an Earth-like environment. Most children who are born with the disease do not live past the age of nine.


Desperate to save her son, Devon puts together a group who will pioneer the effort to settle a planet 22 light-years away from Earth, on which other families with members thus afflicted can settle. The eventual colonization of the planet, however, is opposed by the government. Secret monitoring and agent infiltration threaten the creation of the colony of New Pacifica. Hours before Adair's group intends to leave, a bomb is discovered, set to explode the hour the ship would leave. The Eden Project leaves immediately, jettisoning the bomb before detonation. In "The Church of Morgan", it is revealed this bomb was planted by the Council to stop the ship from leaving.


Twenty-two years later, the ship arrives at G889, but it crash lands[16] shortly after arrival on the side of the planet opposite of the original plan. With her group scattered on the planet and supplies missing, Devon begins heading west to the planned site of New Pacifica.
During their travels, Adair and her companions learn that the Council—a government group that seems to wield most of the power on the space stations—wants to gain control of G889 for resettlement. But through their various experiments, they have learned that they cannot remove one of the planet's native species—a race called the Terrians—without killing the planet itself. (This is a nod to the Gaia hypothesis.) This complicates matters, because Devon's son, who has been healed by the Terrians and who had begun to exhibit some of their unique characteristics, has become the key to the Council's plan for the planet.


Here's some samples below of the show. I really miss it!







Comments

  1. I LOVED this show, and was very disappointed when they dropped it right in the middle of the story.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment