Terra Nova

Here are some things:

1. If you pay close attention, they explain in the background noise why they aren't, say, using the time machine to go back to the 1960s and give us all pollution-free nuclear fusion and tell us to stop raping the planet - they are using a wormhole that is one-way only, and they do not have the technology to AIM the thing. So its 85 m.y.a. or bust.It's pretty much "we happened to find a natural, stable wormhole, and have the ability to make use of it".

2. The dinosaurs that never really existed thing doesn't bug me so much, and I'm a dinosaur nut. Here's why: only so many species get fossilized. It is at least plausible that there were, in fact, smaller pack-hunting carnosaurs in the Jurassic with razors on their tails that for whatever reason never left behind a fossil record. That, I can let slide. What I can't let them get away with are the giant bugs - the atmospheric conditions that allowed large land-dwelling arthropods to flourish were long gone by the time Allosaurus showed up. In fact, if the oxygen-rich atmosphere of the Permian had persisted through to the Jurassic, I submit that invertebrates would have been rulers of the planet, not vertebrates - but hey, its the Jurassic, we've just got to have a giant bug or two!

3. Here's what bugs ME: sure, they establish that it is a "different time-stream" (doing so in the laziest, most irresponsible, and worse way possible. See #4.), so that it is therefore safe to go and live there without worrying about the butterfly effect. But just because it isn't THEIR timestream, doesn't mean that it isn't SOMEBODY'S timestream. So for all their talk of starting over and fixing the mistakes of the past, they have already blundered right back into old habits - not giving a crap about the future generations. It doesn't matter that said future isn't YOURS, it is still wrong to go about wrecking the timeline of Terra Nova just for your own sake.

Hell, that is probably what the Sixers are all about- they come from Terra Nova's distant future, and have realized that these temporal invaders from another universe have a real solid chance of undoing THEIR history, so they went back in time to stop these Earth Prime jackasses from mucking up history. Did I just spoil the plot? oops.

4. Now, about the probe - really bad idea, that. For starters, the thing already looks rusty, and its been there at most a decade. I'm just not seeing it surviving for the next 85 million years sitting around in a Jurassic swamp. Also, if they were concerned enough about possible temporal paradoxes to check things out with a probe first, isn't the probe itself a danger? I mean, the thing has got to be powered by some long-term fuel-source, and have sophisticated technology in it, for scientists to even expect to be able to find the thing after its been sitting around for all of time. You know, the kind of technology that could give Hitler a jetpack. And I mean, they just let it sit around on the ground like that, when they surely have the technology to make a probe capable of launching itself in orbit, where it can wait safely on the Moon until mankind is ready to discover it...or something. Just seems like the whole thing was badly thought out.

I'm sure the probe would have been buried deep underground and not even found. It looked like it was dug out of whatever crater it was found in by the first few teams to make it through.so that they could put it up on a monument. And just because it's called a probe, doesn't mean it's like a space probe. It could have just been a large non-functioning sphere.

(V)(;,,;)(V)

Maybe AMC's shows have spoiled me, but network television, with the exception of Fringe, continues to disappoint.

The show has great production values. Beardman is awesome. That's it.

1. All of the conflicts are cliched and contrived.

2. The writing's crap.

3. The cinematography is crap.

4. The acting's crap.

5. The blatant pandering to demographics annoys me to Hell and back. Specifically, the son (whose name I don't care about) getting in with the truant "cool kids" that go swimming, drink moonshine, and get attacked by dinosaurs for their idiocy. GEE. THAT'S NEVER OCCURED IN FICTION BEFORE.

6. It's too feel good.

7. The environmentalism also annoys me. They can colonize the past, but not develop basic atmosphere processors?

Keep in mind this is one day after watching the Breaking Bad episode Crawl Space, which pretty much raped everything else on television.

"Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person that doesn't get it."

I'd watch this for a few more episodes to see if it catches my interest but I found their use of the word pilgrimage to describe their temporal immigrations to be rather unusual.

Why? They were pilgrims. So it would be a valid use of the phrase.

(V)(;,,;)(V)

Aren't pilgrims people who goes on religious journeys? Or is there another meaning to that word that I'm not aware of?

Edit: Ah, just looked it up in dictionary.com. So pilgrim has non-religious meanings, didn't know that.

edited 26th Sep '11 9:58:15 PM by nightwyrm_zero

I'd like to add to Pyroninja's list "the dinosaurs are crap". With Spielberg on board I thought we'd see some quality animatronics, instead we get pretty dated/bad CGI dinosaurs that look like something out of a cartoon. I just wasn't feeling at all terrified of the obviously fake dinosaurs. I'm trying to like this show, but unless the plot goes somewhere, its hard to stay interested when the entire draw of the series - the dinos - look like something you'd expect of Dinosaur Fight Club or another History Channel pennies-on-the-dollar affair.

I recall hearing some rumor that Spielberg may be deliberately trying to make the show's dinosaurs less awesome than Jurassic Park's, just to keep Jurassic Park fresh in everybody's minds. Same reason why he moved the show to Australia instead of Hawaii....

Well I'll have to take your word for it that the dinosaurs didn't look good since everything looks like crap on my TV, but I agree that the teenagers were pretty consistently annoying. Can't a show have teenagers that aren't bratty assholes? You've just been flung 85 million years in the past, and instead of marveling you behave like a total tool and act disinterested in everything? I'm a little disappointed there wasn't a scene of the oldest kid puking his guts out from eating all that past food too soon.

^Or die from alcohol poisoning from drinking rotten fruit water. Or get his legs bitten off. Or his girlfriend from the future finally makes it to the Jurassic, discovers his infidelity (the dude didn't wait a single afternoon to replace her. A. Single. Afternoon.) and murders him by hitting him over the head with a dinosaur bone, or he gets a massive ear infection from swimming in the waterfalls that the village chief told him to avoid and dies when a swarm of amoebas eat his brain, or he throws up after eating fruit he was told to hold off on for a single measly day.

I don't care for his character, just saying. I DO like nerdy dinosaur teen girl, though but fear she just won't see much screentime.

That girl was way better than her brother. Every time she spoke I was like, "Yes! Someone who is actually fascinated by the fact they've just gone back in time. Exposit at me." But then everyone else would look at her like she was crazy and I would hate them all a little bit more.

Nerdy dinosaur girl was totally awesome.

The eldest brother was just stupid. You would've figure the eldest teenage child of three in a family where the father was in jail for two years would have picked up some common sense and responsibility, but nooooo....let's skip orientation for learning to live in a strange world where everything can kill you and just get drunk and hook up.

edited 27th Sep '11 2:21:25 AM by nightwyrm_zero

Nerdy dinosaur rocks....and is quite the looker, now if only I could find someone like that.

Also apparently the Slashers are supposed to be Ovaraptors....that sort of makes it better since instead of creating something new wholecloth they adapted a pretty "lame" dinosaur and made it cool.

Also am I the only one who noticed a ton little visual similarities to Firefly? The son (if you squint) sort of looks like Simon, while Nerdy Dinosaur Girl seems to shop at the same store River does. Light dress and big combat boots look very familiar!

edited 27th Sep '11 4:26:30 AM by syvaris

You will never love a women as much as George Lucas hates his fans.

Wow, a surprising amount of hate for something that's just out of the gate, especially given what it did.

1. Tech A doesn't mean Tech B, usually. After all if you have steel you obviously had to have iron to develop it. However just because you have steel doesn't mean you've figured out guns, chainmail, or other techs like that. It certainly doesn't guarantee you have ocean going ships. So just because they have the ability to travel back in time doesn't mean you have to have the ability to go to other worlds. The show even makes a point of telling you that this stable wormhole was found by accident in an experiment that had nothing to do with time travel. Hell, colonizing another planet would be far harder than what they're doing. And that's if you can find a planet that can support life at all to begin with AND figure out a way to get the colonists there in their life times. It's also not something you can do on any kind of regular basis. Why don't they have atomospheric processors? Why don't we, or how would you make them, or can you make them in the quantity and size to stop whatever's happening? Dunno.

2. The quality of the CGI. Overall it's not too bad, but not spectacular. Of course the issue here is that we're not talking about a movie. This is a TV show, one that presumably will be on on a weekly basis and will undoubtedly have instances of dinosaurs on every single episode. Animatronics aren't cheap. The T-Rex in Jurrassic Park cost a small fortune and was incredibly tempermental. A weekly TV show can't afford something that costs a small fortune, is tempermental, and is limited in what it can do. Going full CGI only makes sense. I really do hope the quality of the CGI picks up but it doesn't ruin the show for me. Actually let me amend that. The scene with them on the mountain... that sucked. That's inexcusable.

How is it pandering? Pandering would have been the teenagers getting out of trouble on their own, or not getting into that trouble at all. Instead because they were doing something stupid three of them wound up in the hospital. Their "plan" to escape was pretty much a total bust from the word go. Only the timely arrival of the adults and parents saved the kids from being eaten. Hell, the oldest son had to be saved at the last minute by his father. That's not pandering.

Yeah, fuck this show for not being dark and depressing constantly. Seriously, what's wrong with having a show that you can feel good about? Given the world they were coming from this would seem to be a paradise so why wouldn't these people be excited and happy?

Which is odd since I loathe most enviornmentalists and yet for me it wasn't bothersome. I looked at the wife and chuckled, "Well I guess Al Gore was right," and went right on watching the show. It's background at best. Since the portal is one way (yay) we're unlikely to ever see the 2169 world ever again, at least in any major capacity.

It's not the greatest, but this is also a premier episode of a sci-fi show with a very different premise. There's a ton of set up and exposition that HAS to get done so you can move on without the viewer going, "Yeah, but...". too much. In other words expect people to info dump at the drop of a hat.

Well, there's the fact that most teenagers are bratty assholes. Also good well behaved teenagers aren't particularly compelling. After all you completely forgot the well mannered, obedient, and intelligent teenage daughter.

For a domestic in this kind of environment it's a smart clothing choice. It'd be hot and humid as all hell but they don't have paved roads.

Ugh, I'll do another post with my thoughts and semi-play by play.

edited 27th Sep '11 6:09:17 AM by Tyyrlym

"Tyyr's a necessary evil. " Spirit

My comments were in no way to be insulting. Also, I must have missed where they said it was found by mistake.

(V)(;,,;)(V)

It's in the background, sort of. As the family is headed to the wormhole station it's being said in the voiceover news cast.

"Tyyr's a necessary evil. " Spirit

Not true, I specifically mentioned liking her more than her brother in my next post.

Honestly, the only thing I seriously disliked were some of the kids, and hopefully nearly getting eaten by dinos will make them behave less like idiots in the future. Other than that my only complaints are minor and can easily go away as the show finds its footing. I enjoyed it enough that I'll stick around for the season.

Thank you. I've seen people wondering why they don't just terraform other planets if they have the technology to travel through time, completely ignoring the fact that even if they can get to other planets terraforming a planet would take hundreds or thousands of years, which is probably more time than they have.

^Economics wise a lot of what they are doing makes sense, even going so far as Fridge Brilliance.

For example, they don't have atmosphere processors because you can make far more money charging people for gas masks than producing clean air for the entire planet (I mean, how exactly do you charge people for that? You third world people are breathing Air EZ Inc air, so we are going to sue you for not paying appropriate fees?). This is a world that has been driven to environmental collapse by greed, after all.

Also, just colonizing someone else's timeline in the ancient past - as I pointed out before, this is somebody's timeline that they are destroying, even if it isn't their own - also fits with the "we destroyed our planet with irresponsibility and greed" theme. They are still committing the same sins - destroying a timestream for their own benefit, without through for the consequences - even as they strive to undo the mistakes of the past. It's kind of deep, really, and I am oh so hoping that they explore that angle some more.

Like I said, I really think that the Sixers have an agenda, and that agenda is to save THEIR Terra Nova timestream from these inter-dimensional interlopers from Crapsack World.

So, it's good? Is it like Lost with dinosaurs?

Never trust anyone who uses "degenerate" as an insult.

Lost+ Dinosaurs +Avatar basically.

Its a little bit more clumsy then Lost with its mystery elements. Its not horrendous and its not great. If they are given the time and budget I could see this getting better, but for now...its serviceable.

You will never love a women as much as George Lucas hates his fans.

I don't see the similarities with Avatar...

Please.

The Quadritch guy. Or whatever his name is.

(V)(;,,;)(V)

I would just like the respond to the comment about how they're screwing up someone else's timeline.

Are they really? Since they bothered to handwave them not deleting their society I assume the writers have a basic understanding of alternate histories. Now how are we to say that humans would have evolved in this alternate timeline? How can we know if them arriving wasn't just a natural fact of this reality's history like the dinosaurs dying in this one was?

The alternate timestream raises a lot of questions that a handwave shouldn't....

How do they know in the future that Terra Nova is stable, if it's one way? How do they even know what's on the other side?

Dumbo

How are they supposed to know? I think the point of this is that it's a last resort type thing and any chance is better than none.

They realized it was 85 mya somehow so I think they have at least some idea of where it goes.

I like it over all, I'm not a fan of the Idiot Ball being handed out so freely (let's not bring any wireless communications herpaderp), but it's something I've come to expect from writers, being the lazy gits they are.

Fight smart, not fair.