TV Series: Earth Final Conflict

This was one of the series planned by Gene Roddenberry while he was still alive. If I vaguely remember interviews from when it was first broadcast he had his first ideas for the series way back in the sixties, but he shelved his plans when "Star Trek" flopped. Today it's difficult to believe that "Star Trek" was cancelled because of low viewing figures. But let's not get off the subject.

"Earth Final Conflict" was intended as a series in contrast to "Star Trek". "Star Trek" was (or should have been) a five-year sci-fi series about men going into space, whereas EFC was a five-year sci-fi series about aliens coming to Earth. Robbenberry's widow Majel oversaw the making of EFC. When I sent fan mail to the EFC web site during the broadcast of the second season Majel replied herself, which I thought was a nice touch.

To summarize the series briefly: in the early 21st Century an alien race called the Taelons arrive on Earth. They come in peace and give mankind help with eradicating famine and disease. The Taelons are vastly popular throughout the world, but a resistance movement arises which claims that the Taelons have a hidden agenda. The first season is based on the adventures of an ex-policeman called William Boone who works for the Taelons but is an undercover agent for the Resistance. The first season is full of moral dilemmas as Boone discovers that both the Taelons and the Resistance have their dark sides.

At the end of the first season Boone is killed, and the main character for the next three seasons is a half-human half-alien called Liam Kincaid, who like Boone works for both the Taelons and the Resistance. Many EFC fans say the series fell apart when Boone left, but in my eyes it was a logical step. Boone's story had been played out, and Kincaid was the logical successor. I found the second season to be the best of all, because the moral dilemmas of the first season escalated to a dizzying state, with all the main characters following personal agendas, nobody following a strict party line.

The third and fourth seasons followed the same moral issues of the first two seasons, but the character of Kincaid changed for the worse. My biggest criticism of the entire series is that from the third season onwards his alien nature was played down and he kept stating "I'm a man". This is a point I'd like to discuss with anyone who knows the series. When Kincaid acted as if he were "only a man" his role became more and more superfluous, and the other characters took on a larger role, such as Renee Palmer, who was introduced in the third season but didn't become the central character until the fifth season.

At the end of the fourth season all but one of the Taelons are destroyed, and season five focuses on Renee Palmer's battle against a new alien race, the Atavus. The fifth season was more of a straight-forward sci-fi series, less thought-provoking than the earlier seasons, but it had value in its own right. It was weakened by the removal of most of the supporting characters from the previous seasons. A lot of EFC fans call the fifth season awful. I wouldn't put it quite so strongly, but I agree that the transition from the fourth season was abrupt. Supposedly it was part of Roddenberry's original notes for the Taelons to be destroyed at the end of the fourth year, but the series would have flowed more smoothly if the supporting characters had been kept.

EFC was very popular when it was first broadcast in America, if the viewing figures are anything to go by. From 1998 to 2000 it was regularly in the top three series, with more viewers than "X-Files", "Star Trek: Deep Space 9", "Star Trek: Voyager" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer". Only "Hercules" and "Xena" had more viewers. Its popularity slumped in the fourth season, and the long delay before the DVD release helped people forget it. Now the series is finally being released. I'm hoping that there will be a new generation of fans for this flawed but nevertheless great series.