Apparently, alien starships can change direction between seasons.

Earth: Final Conflict is syndicated. Check for local airtimes. It’s a general rule of sci-fi dramas that they don’t really find their stride until the third season. That was established, in my head, with the most successful of the modern sci-fi series, Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s continued through the various Star Trek spin-offs (individual opinions about Voyager notwithstanding) and it applies to other speculative fiction series, like Hercules, Xena, Stargate: SG-1, etc., etc., etc. It seems that the first two seasons are a period of seeing where the characters want to go, seeing what plots really work and which don’t. Kind of a shakedown period, during which the makers of the series settle on the kind of course that they want to navigate. "Watch carefully and you'll notice the whole plot change from season to season!" Which brings me to Earth: Final Conflict. It really doesn’t help a series catch its stride when the course of the series changes with each season. I chanced across EFC a few years ago, my first year in Chicago. It was an alien invasion story, of the more subtle kind. The Taelons, sometimes called the Companions, came to Earth to help end the Sino-Indonesian War, another global-scale Vietnam-style conflict that would provide many of the human characters a military background including actual combat. Once arrived, they stayed and helped humans, introducing beneficial technology and trying to understand the mysteries of cross-species communication. Humans volunteered to serve as Companion Protectors, receiving biotechnology that enhanced their mental abilities and gave them "defensive" weapons of amazing flexibility. Naturally, the Taelons had a hidden agenda. Besides the hidden projects and experiments that they conducted, the biotechnology they gave to their Protectors has a behavioral imperative that made them care only about what was best for the Taelons. Humans being humans, an organized Resistance rose to oppose the alien invaders. The Resistance recruited William Boone (played by genuinely nice guy Kevin Kilner, possessor of an impressively deep voice), a hero of the S-I War, to receive a doctored bit of biotech, one in which the behavioral imperative was removed. Boone would be the inside man, a double agent. The true picture of the Taelons, as it came out through Boone's eyes in the first season, was tricky. Sure, they were doing sneaky, sometimes awful things to humans, but there were moments when Da'an, the Taelon cast as the representative of his species for the audience (a very smooth performance by Leni Parker), displayed a true compassion and honesty. It made the Taelons three-dimensional, complex, and the human characters, reacting to this complexity, were able to play on the shades of moral ambiguity. Okay, not usually a formula for an action-packed show, but it was subtle, intelligent, and interesting, and there was enough of an excuse for action to keep it moving along, as well… One of the more interesting things about the series was the way it treated the aliens. For a change, they were portrayed as actually alien, with motivations and reactions that were unguessable, to the human psychology. There was a sense of smugness, true, but also strangeness, and that made it more remarkable. Besides Mr. Kilner, there was a cast of excellent supporting players. Boone’s closest contact and friend, a woman fighter pilot Lili Marquette (Lisa Howard), and an old contact, outlaw techno-wizard Augur (Richard Chevolleau), backed him in his operations against the top Protector villian, Sandoval (Von Flores). All of them had dimension, background, and the actors had (and have) excellent range. Everybody had moments to shine episodes that dealt with their histories, so really became an ensemble show, although Boone was clearly the main character. Can you tell I enjoyed it? So, let’s see. Season finale, they have this shape-changing alien, a previous victim of sorts of the Taelons, who infuses this female Protector with energy to make her pregnant, in the typical bring-to-term-within-a-day alien pregnancies (why can’t alien pregnancies ever take, like years? Why is developing quickly considered a positive trait?), and by the show’s end, the fresh-born baby morphs into about ten years of growth and says "My name is Liam." Then they cut to the Taelon mothership, and disintegrate Boone. The hell? Pick up season two with young Liam morphing to adulthood, and taking his mother’s last name, Kincaid. Thus, Liam Kincaid (played by admittedly hunky and rugged Robert Leeshock) enters the picture, a human-seeming hybrid of, like, four species. At the same time, on the other side of the fence, they introduce another Taelon, Z’or (Anita LaSelva), who is as thorough-going a villain as could be hoped for. Had Taelons facial hair, he’d be twirling his long black moustache and cackling as he tied humanity to the train tracks… well, perhaps that would take too long. Suffice it to say that the tenor of the series had changed; the schemes were more obviously exploitative, and the major insight on the aliens would appear to be that power-hungry is power-hungry, regardless of species. Things were more black and white, less mysterious, and frankly, less interesting on an intellectual level. Apparently, someone felt they needed to appeal to a different demographic. So tone down the cerebral, dial up the action and stunts. I can’t say I’m not disappointed, but at least they’re still making the most out of the ensemble, and they’re exploring the strange powers and psychology that comes with being a hybrid of several different alien species. So I’ll adapt. So, the Taelons get more and more meddlesome in Earth politics, and start gearing up for this war, using humans as shock troops (oh, yes, did I mention they did away with the mystery and subtlety?). They’re fighting the Resistance, all sorts of police actions and politicking… and things get more and more out of hand until in the season finale, there’s a full-scale fascistic crack-down all over America… "Hey, weren't you on Star Trek?" When we come back, things get straightened out, but again, the tone of the series has shifted. The influence of the ensemble is lessened, and the focus is falling on Liam. Not that Leeshock can’t carry it, but the ensemble was part of the reason I stuck with the show over the past season. Ah, but they’ve still got a hook on me; now I’ve gotten all into the ongoing plots. Ah, damn me and my addictive personality! Okay, now they’ve given Z’or a metaphorical black cloak and stovepipe hat to wear, as well. And from what we can tell, life in America is getting ever more repressive, ever more controlled from above… way above. However, they’ve begun to hint that perhaps the behavioral imperatives built into the Protectors might not be enough to overcome the human will; perhaps Sandoval, able lackey though he is, may also be playing a double game on his own, with far fewer scruples than the Resistance. How does the new season work? Well, the effects keep getting better, and better integrated into the plots, rather than being flashy set-dressing. The plots are interesting, in a superficial action series kind of way. However, it has a tendency to be self-referential, and many of its plots these days seem to build on previous plots, making it more serial than episodic, much like Babylon 5. It may be confusing to newcomers. Part of it will draw you in, but part of it will have you going "How can people not realize they’re being duped with all the evidence?" In the series, the justification might be that slow changes are not as easy to detect; a frog will jump out of boiling water, but will not react when cool water is raised to boiling temperatures around it. However, new viewers will not have the benefit of more than two years of heating, so yeah, it’s going to be confusing. This grizzled old TV viewer’s opinion on Earth: Final Conflict: Decent show, with good production values and a crackerjack cast, hampered by a wandering aim and convoluted plot. Just like with Bab-5, if you give yourself some time to get into it, you’ll probably become a fan, but the difficult thing is putting up with the confusion until that happens. In my opinion, however, it’s worth it, but only just. If it takes yet another direction with yet another season, then I don’t know if even I, with my near-legendary tolerance for crap, will be able to take it. E. Mark "Skip" Mitchell is your duly appointed Tuber guide to sci-fi and other cool stuff on tv. Date: 4/14/2000 Copyright © 2000 by E. Mark Mitchell