Earth: Final Conflict Had Less Concern for its Main Characters Than Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead

Back in 2000 I moved into my first apartment.  I didn't have money for cable and there weren't all the apps and Rokus and stuff like there are nowadays for "cord cutters" so I pretty much had to rely on local TV for entertainment.  (Or the VCR or stereo, I guess.)

Saturday nights (or Sunday morning really) the local CBS affiliate would show Earth: Final Conflict and Sci-Fi Channel's The Invisible Man.  I actually liked the latter better so I would usually watch the former while waiting for it.  I guess I was watching the fourth season back then.  It was pretty good, but then it got to the fifth season and they did one of those annoying things where they completely changed the format and between that and moving to a place with cable I stopped watching it.

I had pretty much forgotten about that show until I saw it on the Roku Channel.  So I started watching it from the beginning.  I binged through it fairly quickly because while Netflix and Hulu usually keep things for a few months, you never know how long some of these lesser channels might keep something.  Anyway, I guess I could say it's an OK show but not as good as some of those from the same time like DS9, Voyager, Babylon 5, or X-Files.

But the show does have a modern touch.  We think of shows like Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead for being so willing to kill off characters, but not even they've killed or written off such a great proportion of main characters as this series.  Let me walk you through it.

The first season focuses mostly on William Boone.  Three years ago an alien race called the Taelons came to Earth.  Like the 80s miniseries/series V, they seem to be good aliens who are giving us a helping hand in eliminating disease, hunger, and so forth, but of course they have their own agenda.  Boone prevents the assassination of the Taelon ambassador Da'an.  He's offered to become Da'an's "Protector" but refuses because he's got a wife.  So the Taelons do the only natural thing:  they kill Boone's wife.  Though he outwardly doesn't let on that he knows this, Boone secretly knows the Taelons were behind it, so he joins up with the "Liberation" (later called the Resistance) and works as a double agent.  Through the first season he uncovers many instances where the Taelons have a project that seems benevolent but is secretly doing harm.  Or in one instance the Taelons give a girl two new hands but when the transplant starts to be rejected, they try to cover it up.

The last episode of the season has an alien named H'Gel show up on Earth.  He and Boone get into a firefight and Boone kills H'Gel but is badly injured.  While he's in something like a bacta tank in The Empire Strikes Back, the Taelons vaporize him.  Which is the end of our hero...until the fifth season when the evil Atavus somehow bring him back to life to try to trap the good guys.  Boone's sister is killed but he survives and decides to wander off into the sunset...until he's killed off screen.  They just couldn't give him a good death, could they?

Boone's partner in season 1 was Captain Lili Marquette.  She was a Marine and became a pilot of Taelon shuttles.  She survives to the end of Season 2.  Then she's supposedly captured by the Taelons.  While the other prisoners with her are freed, she's sent on a one-way journey into space.  She returns in the third season when her ship is picked up by the enemy of the Taelons, the Jaridians.  In a Star Trek-type episode she's trapped in a holographic simulation of an Earth hospital, which the Jaridians use so she can help them repair their ship.  Then she shows up at the end of the season with a Jaridian "husband" and has a human/Jaridian baby.  Then her, husband, and child leave Earth at the start of the fourth season.

Speaking of hybrid children, at the start of the second season the show goes full V in that a woman gives birth to an alien-human hybrid.  The pregnancy lasts about 5 minutes and in another 5 minutes the baby grows into an adult.  He's given the identity of Major Liam Kincaid.  At first he has these glowing spots on his hands that have an alien name but I just called them stigmata.  These stigmata disappear about halfway through the second season and from then on he's mostly just a regular guy.  The problem was the writers didn't give him any other awesome alien abilities like telekinesis or super strength or anything and he couldn't use those glowing spots or else people would wonder what the hell he was.  So they just backed off it and said that the longer he's on Earth the more human he is.  At least until the end of the fourth season where all the sudden he's the Chosen One of his parent race, the Kimera.

Liam takes Boone's place as a Protector and becomes the leader of the Resistance, though he's only a couple of months old.  He does basically the same stuff as Boone for the most part, only in a younger, sexier package that is kind of like a poor man's Val Kilmer.  But at the end of the fourth season he attempts to merge the Jaridians and Taelons and disappears until the last episode, when he gets to ride off into space.

First Boone and then Liam relied on an eccentric computer hacker called Augur.  He helped the Resistance but usually demanded payment in the form of valuable artwork.  He was a regular for the first three seasons but then at the fourth season he suddenly had to go on the run from the law and asked his friend Street to take over as the eccentric hacker for the Resistance.  He reappeared a few times in the fourth season, so at least he didn't die unceremoniously.

The founder of the Resistance was billionaire industrialist Jonathan Doors.  He fakes his own death in the first episode, but in the second season he comes out of hiding to run for president with his son managing the campaign.  But just before the election the Taelons arrange for the president to be shot non-fatally so he can win reelection.  Doors goes back to his company until he's killed in an accident at a lab owned by his son.  But he comes back in a later episode as an AI creation who tries to destroy the Taelons before being shut down.  Another one bites the dust.

At the start of the series Gene Roddenberry's wife Majel Barrett (also an Executive Producer of the show) appeared as a doctor who worked with Resistance.  She helped Boone with getting a Taelon implant but rigging it so it wouldn't make him a slave to the aliens.  Then she kind of just disappears during the first season.  When the Resistance needed a doctor they started seeing other people.  She appears briefly in the second season before disappearing for good.

If you're keeping score then by the start of the fourth season the entire first season roster of good guys have been killed or otherwise written off.  Even GOT and Walking Dead haven't gotten rid of everyone from the first season yet.

And you can add to that the two main Taelons.  The first Taelon they show is Da'an (pronounced Don) who is the ambassador to North America and largely benign.  He wants to try to elevate humanity to the level of Taelons to help both races, but that doesn't mean he's not above some underhanded deeds to this aim.  The other alien is Zo'or who is at first the Taelon envoy to the UN but at the start of the second season takes over as leader of the Taelons.  He's more overtly evil and cunning.  And it turns out later that he's Da'an's son.  Both aliens are killed in the final episode of the fourth season.  Zo'or goes out like a bad guy in an Indiana Jones movie by mishandling a relic only for it to melt him.  Da'an attempts merging with a Jaridian and so disappears.  In the fifth season the evil Atavus scrape Zo'or off the floor or something and bring him back to merge him into a female Atavus body, which is ironic because while the Taelons are referred to with male pronouns they were supposed to be asexual and were actually played by female actors.  Anyway, the new Zo'or is wounded in one episode, put into stasis, revived in another episode, and then blown up in an alien shuttle dogfight.

So not only did we eliminate all the good guys from the first season, we got rid of the bad guys too!  All except one.

The only one to last the whole series is the evil Ronald Sandoval.  He was an FBI agent who became a Protector.  Unlike Boone, his neural implant made him a slave to the Taelons.  He had such blind faith in them that when his wife complained, he had her committed and drugged into a stupor before Boone freed her.  While Sandoval first serves Da'an, he later becomes Zo'or's hatchetman.  While he's doing the bidding of the Taelons, he also has his own agendas.  He sent Lili Marquette to the Jaridians hoping to play both alien sides and thus come out ahead no matter who won.  When the Taelons and Jaridians join into the vampiric Atavus, Sandoval transfers his loyalty to them.  So he manages to live into the fifth season.  Hooray!  But then he dies in the final episode, because you can't talk your way out of three metal bars through the chest.

At the start of season 3, Lili Marquette is replaced by Renee Palmer, who's the CEO of Jonathan Doors's company and also a Resistance agent.  She and Liam Kincaid pretty much do what Boone and Marquette did as kind of a Mulder and Scully thing.  And like Mulder and Scully in the original run of that show they never hook up romantically, though they had ample opportunity to do so.  I mean at one point they escape the Taelon mothership in an escape pod that was pretty much designed for one.  So they're in really tight quarters and still not even a kiss?  I suppose that drove the "shippers" nuts.  There was probably plenty of fan fiction hooking them up.  But I think they did have decent chemistry even if they didn't hook up.

In the fifth season they change the whole premise of the show.  As I mentioned, the Taelons and Jaridians have turned into the Atavus, who use these Wolverine-type claws to suck energy from people.  And all the sudden Renee turns into this badass Ellen Ripley/Sarah Connor type bent on wiping out the Atavus.  It was maybe not a 180, but at least a 90 degree turn for the character.  The whole thing put me off the show.  Watching it now, I don't think I missed a lot.  In the end she and Liam go riding off into space together.  So I guess she at least got to survive her entire run on the show.  Hooray?

Since it was filmed in Canada, it's not surprising that a few of the actors from 90s Canadian-made show Due South guest star, including Tori Spelling's husband as one of Renee Palmer's boyfriends.  In the fifth season a young Rachel McAdams guest stars as a girl whose boyfriend starts a fan site for the evil Atavus.  That was pretty much it for recognizable guest stars.

Since the series began in 1997 the effects in many cases are kind of lame.  It's kind of funny that it's supposed to take place probably around 2010 or so and yet at the start they're still using those big, bulky monitors.  Their communicators are sponsored by MCI, which went under in the 2000s.  So if you watch it now a lot of stuff looks pretty unimpressive, but you have to remember this was the late 90s and it didn't have the biggest budget.

But some of the tech they use is kind of neat.  Augur has video display glasses that are almost like the Google Glass.  The humans use these communications devices called "Globals" that look more like a handheld video game system than a phone.  The neat thing though is the sides of the Global compress together so it can be easily dropped into a pocket or purse.  There has been some experimenting with flexible screens for phones, so maybe that will happen eventually.  It would save money on phone cases and screen protectors.

Something they could have controlled was continuity.  Like at the end of season 2 Liam's hair is brown but at the start of season 3 (which is only like minutes later) it's blond.  And then it's brown again in the last episode.  The same thing happens with Lili from season 1 to season 2.  I know they take a few months off from shooting but the differences really become apparent when you binge it.

As you'd expect not every episode is all that good.  The worst though are one episode in the second season, one in the third season, and two in the fifth season that are largely clip shows.  In the first one Liam's mother is dying in a cave and for some reason flashes back to things she couldn't even have seen.  It was pretty lame.  The other one features a TV network interviewing Zo'or and so they show a lot of footage from previous episodes.  In the fifth season Sandoval undergoes a mind probe where his memories look surprisingly like footage from old episodes!  In the penultimate episode a Taelon spirit visits Renee to basically review the whole series.  I know clip shows are cheaper to produce, but who actually likes them?

Like I said, it's not a terrible show, but it's not all that great either.  I'd say 2.5/5