Was there many fans of this? It was a favorite of mine but never really knew anyone else who watched it. I have all the DVDs, see it is on Roku tv at the moment, and even read some of the books.
Earth: Final Conflict
- Thread starter Captain Tokyo187
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The show started out really good for about half a season, but unfortunately, it was from Tribune Entertainment, a production company that prioritized cheapness over quality, and so they kept firing showrunners and cast members and revamping the show, losing the original smart, sophisticated concepts and dumbing things down more and more as it went. The original developer and showrunner, Richard C. Okie, was let go halfway through the first season, and the conceptual erosion was starting to show by the latter half of that season, especially through the introduction of the Zo'or character, whose one-note villainy detracted from the moral ambiguity that Da'an and the Taelons were supposed to have. I think I finally gave up on it sometime in season 3, though I first considered bailing even earlier.
It's a shame, because E:FC was an intriguing, thoughtful show at the start, a serious attempt at intelligent, philosophical science fiction asking challenging questions and commenting on human nature through the perspective of truly alien beings. The dialogues between Boone and Da'an in season 1 were the highlights of the show, even though I always found Kevin Kilner thoroughly bland and emotionless as a performer. Losing Boone and that relationship after the first season tore the heart out of the show, and it was never as worthwhile thereafter.
The other Tribune show based on a Gene Roddenberry concept, Andromeda, went through the same kind of deterioration, though at least its developer Robert Hewitt Wolfe lasted a whole season and a half before being fired, which I think is a record for a Tribune show's developer. I've always been so sad that Majel Roddenberry chose such an unsuitable production company for those shows, one that had no faith in the intelligence and credibility she was striving for and progressively dumbed them down to the lowest possible level. Both shows started out among the best of SFTV but ended up being among the very worst -- and the worst part lasted far longer than the best.
It's a shame, because E:FC was an intriguing, thoughtful show at the start, a serious attempt at intelligent, philosophical science fiction asking challenging questions and commenting on human nature through the perspective of truly alien beings. The dialogues between Boone and Da'an in season 1 were the highlights of the show, even though I always found Kevin Kilner thoroughly bland and emotionless as a performer. Losing Boone and that relationship after the first season tore the heart out of the show, and it was never as worthwhile thereafter.
The other Tribune show based on a Gene Roddenberry concept, Andromeda, went through the same kind of deterioration, though at least its developer Robert Hewitt Wolfe lasted a whole season and a half before being fired, which I think is a record for a Tribune show's developer. I've always been so sad that Majel Roddenberry chose such an unsuitable production company for those shows, one that had no faith in the intelligence and credibility she was striving for and progressively dumbed them down to the lowest possible level. Both shows started out among the best of SFTV but ended up being among the very worst -- and the worst part lasted far longer than the best.
I agree it went through ups and downs but after revisiting I still really enjoy them
I'd say, rather, that it went pretty steadily down. Maybe it had a bit of an upturn in season 4, but was still way, way down from the heights at which it began. I mean, Boone may have been poorly acted, but at least he was an interesting lead character, as was Lili Marquette. By season 4, the only character development that Liam Kincaid and Renee Palmer had was that they were getting progressively blonder over time.
I think where they really lost me was when Zo'or started getting obsessed with gold and riches. How far they'd fallen from the original premise where the Taelons were neither good nor evil, just profoundly alien in their worldview and values, so that their perception of what was for our own good was often incompatible with our needs and beliefs. It was a pretty good illustration of "benevolent" colonialism from the viewpoint of the colonized, but it ended up just being a mustache-twirling villain craving wealth and power.
I did that on andromeda then came back last season and looked like it was weird. 5th season of efc was the one I thought was weird and was glad it was over
Frankly, the only reason either Roddenberry/Tribune show got a fifth season was to surpass the 100-episode "magic number" that was preferred for rerun syndication packages. Most shows take a loss during production and make up their profits later on in syndication or home video (more the latter these days, I imagine), and a syndication package of 100 episodes or more has long been considered more desirable, so both shows were given fifth seasons made as inexpensively as possible, purely in order to pad out their episode count past 100. Otherwise they probably would've ended after four seasons, if that.
The show's fandom are usually split between two groups, those who only accept season 1 and those who also accept seasons 2-4. I am the latter. Indeed, I'm even so bold as to prefer Liam Kincaid over William Boone.
Everyone agrees the fifth season was crap.
Everyone agrees the fifth season was crap.
I agree with that
Actor-wise, I agree. Kevin Kilner was such a stiff that he made Spock look overemotional. I guess that fit into the kind of reserved, intellectual hero mode that Roddenberry had liked, but I found him frustratingly bland. Robert Leeshock was kind of a generic male lead, but at least he could show feelings. But Kincaid's origin was stupid as hell (fast-growing babies are a staple of SFTV, but this was some kind of a record), and he was written inconsistently and increasingly uninterestingly as his tenure went on.
Plus I was always miffed that they felt the need to bring in another white male lead when the obvious right choice was to promote Lisa Howard (Lili) to the lead role. After all, Lili had formed a relationship of her own with Da'an in the late first season, so she could've taken over Boone's role as the human who had philosophical discussions about human nature with Da'an. But I guess they weren't yet enlightened enough to consider having a female lead, although they were willing to three years later. And the philosophical discussions fell by the wayside soon enough anyway.
THIS. Every bit of this.
My wife and I had high hopes for both shows, but especially E: FC was very intruiging, with very alien aliens and a lot of mystery to be plumbed. But they squandered all that potential at a surprisingly rapid pace. As Christopher said, Zo'or started out annoying and quickly proceeded to become a major irritant. And there were a number of ham-handed retcons too, as I recall. We bailed in the second or third season. Sadly, I remember it mostly as a hot mess, unworthy to be revisited.
I enjoyed the initial worldbuilding in the show, but my reaction was much like everyone else's here--disappointment as each season became less intelligent and more incoherent, with a fifth season that seems like an utterly different series.
As mentioned, Andromeda went through a very similar decline, though this seems to have been an unfortunate trend for some genre series in that era with promising first seasons (seaQuest DSV and Sliders also come to mind, for instance).
As mentioned, Andromeda went through a very similar decline, though this seems to have been an unfortunate trend for some genre series in that era with promising first seasons (seaQuest DSV and Sliders also come to mind, for instance).
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)
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)
And all of he monitors were Sceptre though not sure if it was a wal mart brand back then
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 remember watching about seven years ago. Thought it was okay - nothing special.
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.)
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