The new craze sweeping the world is a Taelon ritual turned into a game known as pad'ar. However, the contestants conceal a secret...

So soon Earth: Final Conflict forgets the lessons of its earlier episodes this season and returns to the kind of storytelling that plagued season two. Any episode that kicks off with a Gladiators-inspired fight is clearly going to be rather unimpressive and thus it is so. The bigger disaster, however, is that by watching the 'Previously' sequence at the start, you can easily work out just what is going on and that the fighters are bio-surrogates. It could have at least approximated a revelation if this wasn't included.

Clearly the actress playing the main Pad'ar fighter Pulsar has only been chosen for her body (although this is half-heartedly put down as being intentional to convince humans to accept her) and her emotional connection to Renee never really cuts it. On top of this, if the secret about the game that Zo'or refers to is merely that it's played by bio-surrogates, it's hardly a terrible revelation that could seriously harm the Taelons.

Yes, so the choreography of the game itself is pretty cool with some clever special effects and I don't know how they were done, but that doesn't excuse the fact that if I wanted to see a couple of people fighting with big sticks, I'd just tune in to Gladiators. At some point this episode might turn out to hold great significance to the ongoing storyline. But I doubt it.

**

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