What happened?
Earth in the 22nd century is over-polluted and oxygen-deficient. The Shannon family have contravened the laws that state only two children per couple, and the father Jim Shannon is locked away as a consequence. However, his wife Liz is granted passage to Terra Nova – a colony set up from a discovered crack in time and space leading to Earth 85 million years earlier. The Shannon family manage to all escape together to Terra Nova, and there set up life in the prehistoric compound.
Liz Shannon is enlisted as a doctor, whilst Jim Shannon is at first given agricultural duties before his instincts as a cop prompt Terra Nova founder and leader, Nathaniel Taylor, to give him a badge and a gun. He needs it when he is called out to rescue his son, Josh, and a bunch of other kids that ventured outside the fence and got caught up with Sixers (a rogue faction of colonists that splintered from Terra Nova) and attacking dinosaurs.
Everyone is brought home safe, though the kids all discovered a secret that Nathaniel would rather remained unknown; an area of diagrams and equations that the Sixers believe was written by Nathaniel’s missing son, harbouring information about the truth of Terra Nova.
Thoughts
Ah, that tricky first episode. Carrying the burden of introducing new characters, a new world, a new concept, and having to make the whole thing quickly appealing, engaging, but also providing fertile ground from which the show can grow and develop. It’s no mean feat, and as such, so long as a show keeps my interest, I am prepared to overlook other deficiencies at first on the basis that with time the actors, writers and crew will all settle down into understanding what their show is, what its strengths are, and grow into itself.
Terra Nova definitely has room for improvement.
Main character Jim Shannon was rather problematic for me – I didn’t really take to him. He basically came across as a bit of a dork. That would be fine if that was his character, but instead he’s supposed to be straddling both the everyman and action man role (which he does also manage) so these douche-elements aren’t blending well.
His wife Liz fares better (helped by the fact that she’s gorgeous) in terms of her credibility, but she doesn’t escape the trap of being rather one-note. It’s a fate that the Shannon family share. Son Josh does petulant, the geeky daughter is really unsubtly sold as being brainy (much of the exposition falls to her but her shoehorned in dialogue ain’t as pretty on the ear as she is on the eye) and youngest daughter Zoe has little to do but look cute.
As stated, this is just the first episode so there’s time for these people to be fleshed out. And Terra Nova did do the smart thing in focusing on them for the majority of the time rather than deluge us with an extended cast. Keep it simple, let the complex stuff come later.
The only other non-Shannon family characters to get any kind of exposure were founding father, Nathaniel Taylor and hot girl with balls, Sky. The relationship between Sky and Josh felt rather unlikely (Sky’s group were altogether way too trusting of the new boy with their secret booze and rule-breaking exploits!) but that one moment where she looked over at Josh being hugged by his parents, given she had been orphaned, was a bittersweet moment that did more for her as a person than all of her previous screentime.
Nathaniel Taylor was the real star of the show. It was perhaps hard to shake off Quaritch from Avatar (gruff man in charge in a foreign environment!) at first but, eventually, his founding father role was slowly earned. However, shows like Battlestar Galactica and even the ill-fated Outcasts, which have dealt with similar premises of a small pocket of humanity forging a new civilisation, generally involve more political and social structure emphasis. I don’t see Taylor as being realistically capable of maintaining law, order, social structure, government as well as defending the camp – but whether the show really gets into other authoritative hierarchy is another matter (they do tend to get a bit boring and perhaps Terra Nova would rather avoid the political aspect).
The CG-effects were a major talking point of the hype for the show, mainly because any show that is attempting to have dinosaurs as a fundamental part of its world is going to have to work hard to not make them look dreadful. Whilst the dinosaurs themselves looked decent (not exactly Jurassic Park standard but better than your average television effect) in a pilot episode with a lot of money thrown at it, I would expect either the quality to diminish or there to be less direct dinosaur action on the scale of, say, the brilliant cars versus Carnosaurs sequence during the regular episodes. Hopefully my cynicism will prove unfounded as there’s no question that dinosaurs are cool and some top notch man vs monster action will go a long way to cover plot holes and bad dialogue!
Steven Spielberg’s presence as executive producer kind of worries me, especially because the show seems to be favouring a safer, more wholesome feel than the opening scenes on Earth might have suggested. Hopefully I am wrong, because what Terra Nova really needs is to retain some kind of raw edge to compensate for the cheesy dialogue and lack of genuine peril. (Was anyone under any illusions that any key character wouldn’t survive?)
There’s promising plot threads trickling through to give the series somewhere to go. Nathaniel’s long lost son was one, with the strange markings he was leaving that hint at a truth about Terra Nova clearly being pencilled in early to pave the way for big mysteries and revelations to come. The key question would be to challenge the validity of the claim that Terra Nova is in a different “timestream” to the Earth they left. Just because that’s the official story doesn’t necessarily make it so.
I’d be willing to bet there’s a good chance that they really are part of Earth’s history and the potential effects of that are yet to be revealed (like, for example, why they can’t go back!). Failing that, they may not even be on Earth at all. So far there’s been nothing to substantiate that ‘given’ (admittedly they would therefore have to be on Earth-like planet that also has a moon similar to our own, so the odds of this being an alien world are pretty remote!).
So Terra Nova opened with a fairly predictable ‘kids in danger’ plotline to get our heroes outside of the compound and face-to-face with dinosaurs, and Sixers. It was eventful, served as a good introduction but did nothing particularly daring or groundbreaking. Again, with a show that cost this much money, you have to wonder how ‘risky’ it’s willing to go (in its favour, there were some moments of violence and gore that were stronger than I might have expected).
Terra Nova survived the test of the pilot episode in that it kept my interest throughout and has done enough to keep me willing to come back for more. Fingers crossed it gets better because I am intrigued to see where it’s going.
What was the best part?
As good as Terra Nova looked, and as exciting as a couple of the dinosaur attacks were, the most arresting sequences were back on Earth. The Shannon family hiding their daughter, the advertising boards and smoke-filled air, and then the walk towards the portal – these all had atmosphere and drama that loaned proceedings a sense of edge. Once the family were at Terra Nova that level of jeopardy just wasn’t present; it was entertaining but it felt safe.
What do I think will happen next?
I would anticipate that the next few episodes probably won’t look too deeply at the ‘bigger’ mysteries of the show, and will hopefully instead concentrate on the characters and everyday life in Terra Nova. I would also expect the Sixers would retain their presence, if only to create conflict, but maybe we’ll get to see them in a more sympathetic light and uncover why they split and what they’re all about. Mostly I expect exploration of both family and new world in the immediate few episodes, and I think that is precisely what the show can afford to spend some time on.
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