(no subject)
I now have Season 1 of Earth: Final Conflict on DVD.
This is a big deal for me. EFC was the great, tragic story of my sci-fi-watching youth, and I've wanted to get my hands on DVDs of the show's first season basically ever since the medium was invented.
For those of you who don't know the story, EFC went from being one of the best sci-fi shows you've probably never heard of to easily one of the worst in the space of its five-year run; each new season redefined how low you thought the series could possibly drop. It began as a sort of mystery, focused on how humans would react to the arrival of this mysterious alien species and whether and how we could relate with them; but as the show went on, the plot and all the characters got more one-dimensional, the stories got more predictable, even the effects went to crap. Not to mention they seemed to replace half the cast with each season. By the time the fifth season came around, the only thing it had in common with the first was that it happened to have the same name.
It premiered in 1997, which was right around the time I became able to watch TV, so it was one of the first shows I could see over the air. And its descent into crap haunts me a little to this day.
For a long time, it seemed like the producers were going out of their way to torment me. They released DVDs of the third, fourth and fifth seasons, which ranged in quality from not very good to awful, but the first and reasonably decent second season seemed to have been swallowed in a dimensional vortex or something. So naturally when I was walking through Best Buy on Saturday, minding my own business, and saw the first season on display, I grabbed it as soon as I overcame my disbelief.
Now, I haven't seen the first season since I was fourteen years old, so I was a little concerned it wouldn't quite hold up to the ideal in my head. Now that I'm older and more experienced at evaluating film quality, the show does look like it got produced for not very much money - probably slightly less than Stargate SG-1, which launched a year later. But the effects are about on par or better than SG1's early work, and the writing is definitely better.
All of which reinforces my conviction that, had the producers simply stayed the course, the show could have truly been awesome. I mean, it got steadily more terrible with each passing year, and still made it for five seasons; even if the quality drop was actually boosting its ratings somehow, they probably could have made a really good show for three.
Ah, well. I have an anecdote that I could use to make a really sappy analogy for how I feel about having the DVDs, but it would contain a spoiler. And, you know, be incredibly dorky. So I'll refrain.
This is a big deal for me. EFC was the great, tragic story of my sci-fi-watching youth, and I've wanted to get my hands on DVDs of the show's first season basically ever since the medium was invented.
For those of you who don't know the story, EFC went from being one of the best sci-fi shows you've probably never heard of to easily one of the worst in the space of its five-year run; each new season redefined how low you thought the series could possibly drop. It began as a sort of mystery, focused on how humans would react to the arrival of this mysterious alien species and whether and how we could relate with them; but as the show went on, the plot and all the characters got more one-dimensional, the stories got more predictable, even the effects went to crap. Not to mention they seemed to replace half the cast with each season. By the time the fifth season came around, the only thing it had in common with the first was that it happened to have the same name.
It premiered in 1997, which was right around the time I became able to watch TV, so it was one of the first shows I could see over the air. And its descent into crap haunts me a little to this day.
For a long time, it seemed like the producers were going out of their way to torment me. They released DVDs of the third, fourth and fifth seasons, which ranged in quality from not very good to awful, but the first and reasonably decent second season seemed to have been swallowed in a dimensional vortex or something. So naturally when I was walking through Best Buy on Saturday, minding my own business, and saw the first season on display, I grabbed it as soon as I overcame my disbelief.
Now, I haven't seen the first season since I was fourteen years old, so I was a little concerned it wouldn't quite hold up to the ideal in my head. Now that I'm older and more experienced at evaluating film quality, the show does look like it got produced for not very much money - probably slightly less than Stargate SG-1, which launched a year later. But the effects are about on par or better than SG1's early work, and the writing is definitely better.
All of which reinforces my conviction that, had the producers simply stayed the course, the show could have truly been awesome. I mean, it got steadily more terrible with each passing year, and still made it for five seasons; even if the quality drop was actually boosting its ratings somehow, they probably could have made a really good show for three.
Ah, well. I have an anecdote that I could use to make a really sappy analogy for how I feel about having the DVDs, but it would contain a spoiler. And, you know, be incredibly dorky. So I'll refrain.