Like a Third World nation caught between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, Earth: Final Conflict is in the unenviable position of keeping its balance between the two giants of recent science-fiction television, Babylon 5 and Star Trek.
Moreover, while this perpetual balancing act is central to EFC's dramatic focus -- the troubled relationship between two intelligent species, humanity and the inscrutable Taelons -- in practice, it has translated into a lack of independent direction and a futile attempt to appeal to all the viewers all the time.
After an uneven second season, the series has yet to commit once and for all to a central story and let that story drive the characters toward their ultimate ends. Endless conspiracies and mysteries-of-the-week often make for fine stories, but without an ultimate payoff in the form of meaningful revelation, secrets are meaningless.
the EFC audience that, finally, this is the year the show gets on with the business of achieving its potential.
Strangers in familiar clothing
Much of that very potential is a result of the multiple layers of tension that the series has created for itself between present and future, human and alien, us and them. This "transitional" quality makes it far easier for the casual viewer to jump aboard EFC without the radical disorientation created by Babylon 5's hermetically complicated setting, but still evades the Star Trek trap of humanizing its aliens to the point of blandness.
This is both comfort and cross to bear for Earth: Final Conflict. The world of EFC, filled with familiar signs and situations, is only our world up to a point, at which time the unfamiliar symbols of a world transformed by contact with the alien Taelon Companions take over.
The soothing familiarity of a SF program set in the fields we know only lures the broader audience in so far before transforming itself into something strange and not altogether comforting -- an alien butterfly hatches from the mouth of an Amish farmer, while the barrow mounds of Ireland hide ancient starships and mummified Taelon prophets.
Ultimately, the Taelons are alien, as strange as anything found in Babylon 5's gloomy crowd scenes, but they are aliens in bumpy-headed Star Trek disguise. In a recursive balancing act, the tension between humanity and the alien -- or the everyday world and the unfamiliar milieu of science fiction -- is played out again in the struggle between Da'an's innocuous facade and Zo'or's inhuman distance from us.
The third way
Certainly, EFC's very existence as a "third way" in television SF between the opposing poles of B5 and Trek is an optimistic sign that, eventually, at least some balancing acts end in collaboration and synthesis.
Like Star Trek, EFC is the brainchild of Gene Roddenberry, and bears his philosophical watermark: optimism, idealism, trust in cooperation and hope for the future.
Like Babylon 5, however, the show tempers this optimism with a drive to show that actions have abiding consequences and that not all good deeds are rewarded, nor all sins punished before the tidy one-hour episode wraps up. EFC promised its audience that it would evolve over the years, with each episode building on what went before, and it has -- to some extent -- kept that promise. The series has darkened as the alien lurking behind the Companions' candy-colored benevolent masks chewed its way closer to the surface.
Perhaps, while Star Trek is the land where the revelation that those aliens are really just humans in funny headgear wipes away all problems, and Babylon 5 is the land where the Arc Is Everything, EFC is in the unenviable position of being the bridge between those countries.
If so, then it's not about whether the Taelons are good or evil, but how their relationship with humanity (and the show's relationship with its audience) unfolds over time. They started out as strangers. Will we grow together or apart as we learn more about each other?
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