Shark Bytes

The end of Season 4 when Liam, Zoor and Daan were written out - the heart of the series was gone and it was no longer the same. It was indeed a "Point of No Return" just as the episode title said.

Season 5 - total waste

Universal studios, just a bunch of assinines. Seasons 1 & 2 were the best and they can't get their heads out of their butts in order to get them released to the fans of Earth Final Conflict.

The show did not jump with the death of Boone at the end of Season 1 - it was able to survive okay without him since Robert Leeshock was a good replacement for him as Liam in Seasons 2-4. What caused the show's demise was writing out Robert Leeshock at the end of Season 4 and writing out the Taelons (Leni Parker and Anita La Selva) and introducing the unnecessary Atavists plot of Season 5. It lost the subtlety and philosophical depth of the earlier seasons and turned it into a joke with the Atavist obsession with sex and screaming fits.

I enjoyed seasons 1-4, but several season transitions brought the show closer to oblivion. Boone's death was a huge blow, and it earned my vote for the jump-the-shark moment. Liam was cool in season 2, but they neutered him in season 3. The regeneration chamber at the end of season 4 killed the show's whole premise. Season 5 was simply a waste of film.

Lamest aliens ever. That is all.

Another potential lost, thanks to dumbass production companies who think people want "dumbed-down" rather than depth and meaning.

I was a really big fan of season 1. Why, because we were presented with a storyline where the protagonist begins his journey with a "black and white" premise and discovers, much like real life, things are more "shades of gray" when it comes to the companions.

Just watch an episode like Sandoval's Run, where the character who was presented as a human jack booted authoritarian thug for the companions who when his CVI fails, becomes a more sympathetic and tragic figure.

On the topic of tragic, yes, I was one of those who felt like a dagger was plunged into my heart as I watched how all season one was flush down the toilet. I was on the Usenet boards for the show at that time and there was an active disdain for where they took the show in season 2.What was interesting was a show representative came on the boards and told us the show was never meant to have an over arching storyline. That such things were too complicated for new viewers so this format was just more "viewer friendly" aka "dumbed down"

I went back each season to see what they did to the show after season 1. It was nothing but schlocky syndicated sci-fi with shallow characters and your usual "good/evil" one dimensional archetypes.

I would die to get season 1 dvd set, but here is an interesting story, seems a different company has the rights to season 1. Hmm, makes one wonder what really happened between seasons 1 and 2.

Yes I agree with the majority of you. I to was hooked on Season 1 of Earth Final Conflict, I loved the characters and the way the brought meaning to the show, I enjoyed the way "Lili Marquette"
and "AUGUR" flirted back and forth and the way "William Boone" presented himself as a "Liberation Fighter" and a "Companion Representitive" but like with all great things there is script writers and they ruin it for the rest of us, I love Sci Fi shows, I have watched almost all they have put out, and I tell you sometimes I would like to roll the script up and smack them upside the head. Like frig do these people not have any imagination, I know myself I can think of thousands of show ideas and I know as a long time viewer what I love in a show. but I hope that they can read these and bring us another series that was as enjoyable as Earth Final Conflict but with this one give it a great story line.

[quote]I found efc halfway through the first season and could not >believe how badly they ruined the show in the second season. > It was a thoughtful intelligent and emotional show, but no more! I >stopped watching halfway through the second season. >as far as I'm concerned the series ended at Boones funeral. > I'm very surprised to see on other sites how many people >love the new garbage and are glad to see the old characters >gone. For me it will always be the series that could have been. Does anyone >else feel this way ?[/quote]


Yes, Me!!!

Well, I started watching the show at season 2, and i was only 7 or something like that. I loved it! Then I stopped watching it when they got rid of Liam and the Taelons and introduced that other species...that was just stupid.

Season... five? There wasn't a season "five", was there...?

The death of Boone was the first dive, then as the series dragged on and on occasion took a semblance of interest, Liam disappeared and all of a sudden you look around and no one is left from the beginning except Sandoval i think, but he wasn't really Sandoval anymore

Earth: The Final Conflict wasted more potential than any sci-fi show in recent memory. But the reaction I most closely associate with watching it is, "What the ..?" That's the sound that constantly escaped my lips practically every time I watched the show, at least after the first season. I remember missing the first part of the "meet Liam" episode, staring at the new hero on the screen and saying, "What the ...?" Of course, the same remark applied practically anytime they introduced some sort of ridiculously complex technology, including even the CVI (Cyber-Viral Implant). Viral Implant??? Sounds more like a disease ... or something that would make your computer flip its screen and display the words, "You are a dork" as it starts whistling Dixie repeatedly. (That particular device was interesting, however; it just needed a new name.) But the biggest flaw in "Final Conflict" was the use of the self-contained episode, in which (as another writer has already noted) Sandoval could travel into an alien dimension because of his obsession for some chick who looks exactly like a chick he knows on earth, but isn't really, but never mind, he's not going back and we're never going to hear of her again, so you can forget all about her, and the alien dimension, next week. ("What the ...?") The same concept also spawned an endless array of interesting characters who, predictably, get killed off before the final credits roll. There was also the episode in which Sandoval splits from the Taelons and goes on the run, to be naively aided by the Resistance (who reveal their loyalties to him), yet, for whatever reason, he eventually rejoins the Companions and seemingly has no memory of the Resistance. ("What the ...?") Frankly, I never bought into the whole good-guy notion of the Resistance anyway -- I mean, let's see, you've got highly advanced aliens terrorizing your people, and you can't even bring yourself to target that sycophant Sandoval and banish him to the land of wind and ghosts? Sheesh, General Patton would have ordered one of his best snipers to pick off that little weasel so fast, they'd have both had time to finish their morning coffee. By the end of this series' run, we'd seen such "classics" as (1) some kind of monitoring device implanted in Liam's vision (so why didn't he just hold a notepad behind his back and write it all down?); (2) main cast members dropping out faster than the contestants on "Survivor" ("Wait ... what happened to the chick with the dark hair ... where's that hip bald dude with the subterranean hideaway ... I thought the hero's name was Boone .. wait, he was a redhead ... what the ...?"); and (3) we were eventually treated to a retro race of villains who were as one-dimensional as Jimmy "Dyn-O-Mite" Walker. I particularly loved the brilliance of naming one of the Atavus "Howlyn" -- awoooooooo! -- and (as has already been noted) Street falling for one of these handsome vampire wanna-be's, which got several people killed before Street wised up and Miss Palmer dismissed it as an "oopsy." And of course, instead of wiping the Atavus off the face of the universe at the end of the series, the politically correct Earthlings wind up regarding all life forms as interconnected. Ah yes, all that was missing were the strains of "We Are the World" in the background. For this I wasted five years of my television life? Gene Roddenberry must have been spinning like a lathe.

The "story arc" that Gene set up in season one gradually degraded over time, but I think this was as much a result of trying to change a single long story into 100+ episodes as any other factor. The show jumped the shark in the middle of the season 4 finale. The suspense was building very well...Ma'el's riddle solved, a global race to fix the problem. Taelons are trying to save themselves at any cost, the Zo'or Da'an relationship is finally revealed (and is one of the few times something like that has made complete sense-even if La Salva overplayed the rebellious teen)...and then they start actually get to the chamber Ma'el created. You don't realize it at this point, because you are caught up in the suspense...but the way the Taelons will be saved will create the single biggest flop I know to exist in TV: the atavus. Renee has no meaning without Liam, Zo'or has no meaning without Da'an. Da'an's gone, Liam is gone. Show=suck. It had its bad moments (especially following Boone's death, and the increasingly strange storylines) but there were some good episodes among those as well (Dark Matter, the Kimmerah storyline). Season 5 was the trebuchet for this show.