Contributed by Marshall
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! So to begin with I don’t watch TV very often. That is to say rarely. That is to say almost never. It’s mostly a product of my upbringing, but increasingly it’s because television is so mindless and insulting to the viewer. And if that’s not enough, there is the added baggage that I know that the mindless crap I’m watching is loved and adored by millions of viewers. I saw an ad tonight that said Transformers 3: Dark Side of the Moon was the “greatest action movie ever”. Apparently whatever moron off the street they found to get that quote is not aware of Indiana Jones and the Raider of the Lost Ark, Terminator 2, or Die Hard… Did I mention that commercials piss me off? Anyway, Terra Nova!
Ever since Michael Crichton’s came along, sci-fi has been becoming more and more mainstream. And it was Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park that not only rocked the special effects world but also spurred public, and uneducated, interest in dinosaurs and cloning. Why I remember an Australian biotech company actually attempting to clone recently extinct animals from taxidermied samples, they never did it, but that the power of this idea got them initial funding should emphasize how much influence Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and the less awesome movie version were. It even spurred 3 sequels that got more ridiculous as time went on but they still put butts in seats so it was only a matter of time before we got another lost in dinoland story, this time airing on Fox, you know, because they love sci-fi so much. (read about Fox’s abuse of sci-fi series here)
Terra Nova is a series that starts in 2149 and mankind has finally destroyed the world…again! But as luck would have it we have just discovered the secret of time travel. But the portal was an uncontrolled accident or something so it only goes to one place. But that place is in the middle of the jungle 85 million years ago. Given this premise it sounds pretty cool. I thought so too until I started watching and realized that there is nothing new in this show.
We open on a scene of Jim, the loving father, coming home to his family bearing, GASP…an orange! I get the idea, the world is overpopulated and everyone’s lives are shit, but that doesn’t give you the right to blatantly steal from Soylent Green.
Population control then busts in looking for their youngest child, because she’s a dirty third! (see Ender’s Game…) The issue of population control through “one child policy” schemes has been approached before in sci-fi like The Fortress. This series went out of its way to talk about how much importance society places on a phrase like “a family is four” but then points out later in the episode that if Jim hadn’t struck one of the officers who found his daughter he would have gotten off with a fine instead of 6 years in prison. Oh, and nothing happened to the daughter. So the oppressive government they live under is actually not that oppressive and our protagonist is rash, quick to anger, and lived outside the law for 3 years before his daughter was discovered.
Now there is a lot about the first 10 minutes of this series that I could pick apart with a dull butter knife. Forget the fine toothed comb, the plot holes are miles wide, but I’m willing to let all this slide. It’s all to engineer a situation for the family to escape an “oppressive” society. I’ll even ignore the massive gaps in time travel logic, causality continuity, and failure at basic TV technobabble. What I will neither ignore nor condone are stupid characters we are supposed to identify with or ridiculous and implausible secret keeping that drives the plot.
For a long time there has been a genre, especially on TV, about a group of people cut off from all they know in a hostile environment. Lost in Space, Star Trek, Land of the Lost, Sliders, Andromeda, Star Trek: Voyager, Farscape, Stargate Atlantis, LOST, Stargate Universe… so there is plenty of precedence for the success of a series like this. However within the last 10 years the sitcom narrative structure has given way to a more continuous narrative with every episode as a to be continued, encouraged by series like 24 and LOST which were both wildly popular. Terra Nova is no different and that’s ok, there is nothing wrong with a narrative structure like this, but the shift away from the old style also came with a shift in character types as well which conform more to those of horror movie conventions.
I noticed this years ago but it didn’t hit me until I watched Sunshine. For those of you who don’t know, the plot of Sunshine is that the sun is dying so earth builds a giant spaceship to take a handful of earth’s best minds to the sun and do some pseudoscience to save the day, figuratively and literally. Well the screw up and are never heard from again, so we silly earthlings do it again and use up all of earths remaining resources to build a second ship with the second best handful of people on the planet to save the day. And wouldn’t you know it, this crew is at each other’s throats the whole way and there is not an ounce of common sense or survival instinct among them. You might think that psychological instability would raise a red flag in the approval process for a mission of such importance but no, making sure your characters are dumb as rocks so they can screw up and die makes for an entertaining movie. I can deal with all this. It hurts but I can deal with it. What I can’t stand is when I have to put up with this insanity for years in the form of a television series.
Let me list some of the horrible choices the characters make in episode 1:
The son doesn’t “read the pamphlet” or go to the orientation meeting on living in a dinosaur infested jungle.
The son leaves the compound with his new free spirit friends stealing a car and traveling into the forbidden zone.
Security does nothing when a patient in the hospital flips out taking the doctor hostage and stealing a gun.
The base commander has neglected to mention to the people in the future who keep sending people through the portal that he is dealing with a civil war which has effectively crippled the development of Terra Nova.
There are things that look like alien hieroglyphs on some rocks in the jungle but don’t tell anyone, it’s a secret…even though half the main characters know about them…
And then there’s the everyday TV stupidity of people running into dino infested jungles expecting to come out ok, typical horror movie fare. My major problem with series like this is the leap in logic that if this project is so important, why are the scientists, the soldiers, the administrators, everyone, so completely incompetent and not informed about anything? I got really mad when they had the audacity to quote Aliens with the lines “They mostly come out at night.” To which the other character responds, almost breaking the fourth wall, “mostly…” Sigh…
In a rare occurrence Fox gave funding for 13 episodes instead of just a pilot. It is also backed by producers Steven Spielberg and Brannon Braga of Star Trek fame, so there is definite possibility that funding will not be cut in the foreseeable future a la Firefly. Terra Nova has an average episode budget of $4 million. Sadly it looks like most of the cost of season 1 was construction of sets and paying supposedly high filming fees. There was speculation before this came out that the dinosaurs would rival the ones in Jurassic Park which is not the case. The dinosaurs also come across as extra creepy because they have human like eyes instead of lizard or general purpose animal eyes.
On the lighter side, I am tickled that they got Stephen Lang to play the base commander in Terra Nova, because he was my favorite character in Avatar. And did I mention that the people he’s fighting against are blocking his mining operation… Oh well, nothing new under the sun…
I suspect that this show is going to do very well. Action sells and it sells more when you have enough extra named characters to kill one off every once and a while. As much as this one episode got to me I’m going to keep watching, at least for now. While I take issue with the execution I find the basic concept of this series intriguing. And to be fair they had a lot to do in one episode and there were a lot of competing themes. Our characters are now free of the old world, and lots of things raised in the first episode will never matter again. So let’s hope there’s a little more continuity of thought from here on in. And for those of you who don’t mind any of the complaints I’ve brought up, watch this series, it will blow your mind!
Movies and TV Referenced:
2011-Terra Nova
2011-Transformers 3: Dark Side of the Moon
2009-Avatar
2009-Stargate Universe
2007-Sunshine
2004-Stargate Atlantis
2004-LOST
2002-Firefly
2001-24
2000-Andromeda
1999-Farscape
1995-Sliders
1995-Star Trek: Voyager
1993-Jurrassic Park
1992-The Fortress
1991-Terminator 2: Judgment Day
1988-Die Hard
1986-Aliens
1981-Indiana Jones and the Raider of the Lost Ark
1974-Land of the Lost
1973-Soylent Green
1965-Lost in Space
