Summary
Earth Abides delivers a merciful but predictably rubbish ending in Episode 6, the only saving grace being that the ill-advised adaptation is finally over.
It should come as a surprise to nobody that the ending of Earth Abides is as dreary, pointless, and drama-averse as the rest of it has been. While not as aggressively stupid as the ill-advised two-parter that preceded it, Episode 6, smugly titled “Forever Is Tomorrow Is Today”, is just a dramatically inert finale that lacks any of the book’s depth and resonance.
It does preserve its gimmicks, though, namely the frequent time skips, which I’ve already pointed out in these recaps play to the show’s weaknesses. Because it’s constantly shifting the narrative several years forward, it has no time or space to delve into some of the more intriguing character arcs or what one might assume would be the real hiccups of restarting humanity anew in the post-apocalypse. Instead, everything just feels easy and oddly empty.
What happened to Heather and Raif?
In the previous episode(s), Heather and Raif went on a little side quest adventure that occurred entirely off-screen and culminated, or so it seemed, with Heather returning home alone. Apparently unsatisfied with this, Episode 6 of Earth Abides begins by showing us what happened, despite the fact that the re-emergence of the mysterious illness at the end of the previous episode seemed much more urgent and interesting.
As it turns out, Raif was rather unceremoniously killed by Silas after a scuffle over food turned nasty. Heather more or less gets her revenge with a well-timed axe toss, but Raif bleeds out and leaves Heather alone to make her way back home, seemingly without any real friction whatsoever.
This entire deviation would be totally pointless except, later in the finale, Heather mentions a mysterious number that they saw everywhere in their travels which turns out to be a radio frequency. We’ll get to this in due course, but none of it really rings true. Learning of Raif’s fate in the previous episode means there’s no tension here, Heather’s return is then subsequently skipped over, and the frequency thing just feels like a way of retroactively making the whole matter worthwhile.
Joey’s Death
Raif and Heather in Earth Abides | Image via MGM+
The return of the illness turns out not to have been that big of a deal for everyone except Joey. While this strain apparently being weaker allows all of the infected to recover, Joey, unfortunately, succumbs to the illness, leading to a lot of moping and a bit of a personal crisis for Ish.
I understand that Ish would be mad at the world in these circumstances and yes, sure, he’d probably want to burn parts of it down. But the circuitous way in which this leads him to an environmentalist lecture to a classroom full of children is extremely bizarre. The thrust of his argument – that humanity needs to do better than the previous effort but living with nature instead of trying to exploit and control it – is fine, but the delivery is all off.
Joey’s death also spurs Ish into building a radio, which he uses to try and contact other survivors. While this is initially unsuccessful, the number Heather noticed while out on her travels turns out to be the golden ticket to hooking up with another community. Despite some initial reticence, both groups eventually decide to unite and form a new mega-community, which presumably goes quite well since time then skips forward another twenty-odd years.
Passing the Hammer
Ish’s hammer holds a lot of symbolic significance in the novel, or so I’m told, but here it’s just a thing. His passing it to Jack, Heather’s oldest son, is supposed to be one of the defining moments of Earth Abides’ ending, but it passes by mostly unnoticed since – like everything else in this show – it hasn’t been adequately set up or explained.
At this point, Ish is an old man and is wearing makeup and prosthetics so terrible that I burst out laughing at the sight of him. But his aging is supposed to do all of the heavy lifting here. The fact he has survived so long implies that the community has flourished, which is just as well since we see nothing of it; not the groups meeting, not any of the things that might have occurred in the meantime, nothing. We’re just supposed to assume everything went really well.
Maybe it did. That’d certainly fit with the show’s themes, which are neatly encapsulated by Ish repeating its title twice in the episode and a closing montage of flourishing nature. But all things considered, this was a remarkably convoluted and dull way of making that point. The only saving grace of this ending is that Earth Abides seems to really be over, which at this point is something of a mercy.
