Earth: Final Conflict

[MacLeod]

True, but I started to see signs of decline in the latter half of season 1, the introduction of Zo'or being the main one. IIRC, "Sandoval's Run" -- easily the finest episode of the series -- was the last one that developer Richard Okie oversaw as showrunner, although his influence would've probably been felt on most of the rest of the season, because of his work on the scripts or outlines. (Robert Hewitt Wolfe was let go halfway through Andromeda's second season, after "Ouroboros," but he had a hand in the scripting or outlining of all but two of the remaining episodes of that season.)

Andromeda was another show that went downhill though in S2 as opposed to S1, the common element seems to be when the shows initial creator/developer etc.. leaves the show takes a turn for the worse.

Sliders has been mentioned and I think the show suffered when John Rhys-Davies left and it never fully recovered. As for Seaquest DSV, there was a fair bit of fluctuation in the quality of the episodes but that could be because it never stuck with one identity it changed from season to season.

 

[JD]

I watched a few episode of E:FC here and there, but never on a regular basis. I remember enjoying what I saw, but I don't think I saw enough to really judge the whole series. I found it on Amazon Prime Video a few weeks ago, and I've been thinking about giving it another go.
I remember seeing stuff for Season 5 and being really confused because it seemed to have almost nothing to do with the previous seasons.

 

[Christopher]

Sliders has been mentioned and I think the show suffered when John Rhys-Davies left and it never fully recovered.

It was already in decline well before JRD left. But as I said, it improved immensely when it moved to the Sci-Fi Channel. Seasons 4-5 weren't as good as season 1, but they were fairly good, whereas late season 3 was agonizingly atrocious. And Kari Wuhrer's Maggie Beckett actually gained a personality in season 4 after having none to speak of in season 3, and that vastly better character writing allowed Wuhrer to prove that she was actually a good actress after all.

I remember seeing stuff for Season 5 and being really confused because it seemed to have almost nothing to do with the previous seasons.

Yeah, the "Renee the Atavus Slayer" season. Like I said, season 5 was made solely to pad out the syndication package, and I think it was a while before Tribune decided to go ahead with a fifth season, so the season 4 finale was written to work as a series finale. So when they did renew the show for a final year, it was basically a whole new story.

 

[JD]

Ah, I see.

 

[Sketcher]

The most heartbreaking thing to me, is that even season 5 had so much potential. Season 4 left off with a promising cliffhanger of a new species merged from the Taelons and Jaridians. The season could've built on the intertwining mythologies of both species, and how in their hubris, the Atavus decide to conquer Earth in a way their forefathers couldn't. Sandoval's descent, while a bit cliche, could've been a strong centerpiece as he tries to wrestle control of both humanity and the Atavus, and perhaps in the finale, both species have to work together to end that common threat. I personally would've liked to have seen Boone come back as the lead. After the mothership was damaged during the nuclear attack, maybe whatever stasis Boone was in could've failed, and he escapes back to Earth to face the next alien threat. But I guess the massive budget slash would've made affording Kevin Kilner full time impossible. Either way, why they decided to make it just Renee vs sex vampires when they knew it was their last season going in, is beyond me.

 

[Christopher]

Either way, why they decided to make it just Renee vs sex vampires when they knew it was their last season going in, is beyond me.

Like I said, Tribune couldn't have cared less about quality storytelling; they just wanted to fill out the syndication package so they could make more money. Like Galactica 1980, its existence was motivated purely by business and financial considerations, so all that mattered was adding more episodes to the package to improve the long-term return on their investment, regardless of whether they were any good.

Anyway, I was horribly disappointed in the Jaridians. Sure, the first season indicated that the Taelons were cultivating humanity to protect us, or use us to protect them, from some greater alien threat. But the hints of that threat in the first season suggested something really, really alien and weird. Richard Okie briefly dropped in on the ExIsle message board in answer to a question I raised there back in 2005, and he said their original goal on E:FC was to make the aliens as alien as possible and strive for enigma and mystery, a goal that was quickly lost thanks to Tribune's constant pressure to dumb things down. (Unfortunately he never made a followup post, for whatever reason.) But when the mysterious, all-powerful enemies finally showed up, they were just your run-of-the-mill humanoid warrior race, and even their name was in the stock Trekkish pattern of a 4-syllable word ending in "-ian." It just seemed so cliched and creatively lazy compared to the enigmas that were hinted at in season 1.

 

[diankra]

A couple of quick thoughts

1st season had good world building. But then 2nd season had each episode do a different sci fi cliche...from time travel to parallel universe to dinosaurs if I remember right.

Season 4 felt like they were going back to season 1 quality..then season 5 trashed EVERY thing


By the way, our modern cell phones work pretty much like a Global does...only thing missing is a collapsible screen into the size of a dry erase marker...incredible foresight (though not so much with the MCI product placement)

I'm with Chris on pretty much everything he said, and as mentioned in an earlier thread, I once requested some S2 plot PR for work... But they came with the studio comments, pointing out plot problems, and in one case noting that the script had previously been rejected, and could only be oked for production if the alternative was a no-script shutdown.

 

[diankra]

Sliders actually rebounded when it moved to the Sci-Fi Channel for its last two seasons. By the back half of season 3, it had become one of the most unwatchably awful shows I've ever seen, an incoherent mess by incompetent writers who thought that science fiction meant ripping off old B-movie plots and that character conflict meant gratuitous petty bickering. The third-season finale was so horrifically awful that forcing someone to watch it could constitute a war crime. (Though it's not quite as bad as the series finale of M.A.N.T.I.S. from the same network two years earlier.) But when it moved to SFC for season 4, it brought in an almost completely new writing staff consisting of people who actually understood what science fiction was and how characterization worked, and it actually became good once more -- still with some notable flaws, but better than anything since season 1. I've never seen a show degenerate so far and rebound so strongly.

But you're so right about SeaQuest. Its first season wasn't great -- there were only two episodes that I really loved, "Bad Water" and "Photon Bullet" -- but for a hard-SF fan like me, it was refreshing, because it was one of the only SFTV shows ever that really tried for scientific plausibility and intelligent futurism, at least until late in the season when they began bringing in more fanciful concepts like psi powers and aliens. What frustrated me was that the producers of the show kept saying in interviews, "SeaQuest isn't science fiction, it's a plausible extrapolation of the future development of real science." That's literally the definition of "science fiction"! That's the whole reason the word "science" is in there!!! But the general public had been conditioned for so long to think that SF was fanciful, ludicrous stuff like Lost in Space and Star Wars that they didn't realize that. So when they brought in new producers for SeaQuest season 2, they said "Okay, this year we're going to start doing science fiction stories," and instead they abandoned the hard-SF sensibilities of season 1 and started doing utterly stupid, ludicrous fantasy stuff and turning it into basically a remake of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Which was really insulting to me as an SF fan and aspiring writer, that they believed SF was something so idiotic.

As for season 3, I barely even watched it. What I saw wasn't quite as dumb as season 2, but it was just too great a departure to interest me.

I liked SQ season3, a real recovery from season 2. But in the 90s that "We're not SF" trope was widespread, and often telling.
In the UK, the producers of Invasion Earth were all "Not SF! Doctor Who, horrid, awful", whereas the Ultraviolet lot were "Well, we're not SF, more horror, but wasn't Blake's 7 great? FX look rubbish now, but..."