“The boy who wanted to know everything can know everything after all.”
Warning: Full spoilers for the episode follow.
As I alluded to in my non-spoiler review of the miniseries, the conclusion of Childhood’s End was incredibly grim, but at least we got (most of) the answers we were looking for. And similar to Syfy’s 2014 miniseries Ascension, a lot of the resolution was determined by children with powers — which also explains the title, I suppose.
Here, we jumped ahead another four years or so, when Jennifer was old enough to link the “hive mind,” as it were, and call on the other kids to unite. If nothing else, this certainly made for an unsettling start to Night Three. This of course spurred the Greggson family to move to New Athens, the last free city, which we had heard mentioned in the previous episode. I was almost half-expecting (and kind of hoping) that Colm Meaney’s Wainwright might return here since he was so obviously in favor of rejecting the Overlord’s utopia.
We want to hear it.
Instead, we met yet another lifeless side character, Jerry the Mayor, who set the Greggsons up with a new home. While these scenes weren’t particularly stimulating, Jerry’s notion that, “to the creative mind, peace is stupefying” seemed to ring true with Jake and allowed us glean a bit more of the differences between the free world and the Overlords’.
Meanwhile, for whatever reason, “The Children” also included another checkup with Ricky, who, several decades later, was still hung up on his dead wife and spent the better part of this episode hallucinating in Karellen’s trippy dream hotel. In addition to having almost nothing to do with the larger story, it didn’t seem very realistic that Ricky was still struggling to embrace Ellie as his one true love, nearly 20 years later. Aside from the clever Adam/Eve/Lilith metaphor, this whole storyline felt pretty unnecessary — especially considering Ricky died so shortly after telling Ellie she was the one.
By comparison, Milo had much more to contribute here, as he continued his research and stayed in touch with the Greggsons. (“Playing with fire is how we master it.”) And unlike Ricky’s weird, morbid love triangle, the addition of Milo’s love interest Rachel actually moved the plot forward, since she was directly tied to Boyce’s ark project. (Although, like the Wainwright thing, I thought it was a little weird that Boyce never came beck in this.) It seemed fitting then that Rachel would be the one to help smuggle Milo aboard the ship and find out the Overlords’ plan once and for all.
Of course, the climax on Earth was all the children ascending in a rapture-like fashion, and this is really where Childhood’s End took a nosedive into melancholy. Since we never really got to know Jake and Amy as people, the loss of their children and Jerry’s bomb going off at the end did little to stir any emotions. Rather, just the spectacle of it made you think, “Okay… what now?”
We want to hear it.
And I guess that’s where Milo’s story came back into play, which was easily the dreariest — but also the most engaging — part of the episode. First, it was mildly heartbreaking to find out that Milo’s time dilation theory was totally and completely wrong, as he woke up 40 (and then 40 more) years later to find out everyone he knew had died. I also thought it was interesting how the Overlord’s actually weren’t malicious after all, just servants of Overmind (aka God, aka the collective consciousness of the universe).
Ultimately, this caught us up to where we found Milo in the beginning: as the last man on Earth on the precipice of the planet’s destruction. (Personally, I would have rather stayed on the Overlords’ ship and traveled to other galaxies, but to each his own.) While this was definitely a depressing way to end the series, we did get the silver lining of Karellen leaving the song Milo used to listen to with the old man out in space for anyone who would care to listen — one last scrap of human culture.
To say “The Children” ended on a bittersweet note would be, in Karellen’s words, “sugaring the pill.” Indeed, Syfy’s miniseries didn’t pull any punches on Night Three, as literally every single character died. (Though, in fairness, we knew the infinite sadness was coming.) As for whether it was successful or not, I’d say a bit of both. Emotionally, it was hard to care about any of the characters’ personal outcomes since they were all walking corpses anyway.
That said, on a grander scale, the idea of Earth and humanity becoming a part of Overmind’s collective consciousness was a comforting thought — especially since humanity probably would have ended itself much sooner on its own. Ultimately, Childhood’s End was worth the journey for its compelling mystery and existential ideas.
