YMMV / Terra Nova

• Draco in Leather Pants: Lucas is a favorite character of a considerable minority of the show's fans, mostly of females who find him attractive.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Nathaniel Taylor, thanks to being played by Stephen Lang and his Fan Nickname "Santa Steroids" (which originated from Jeremy Jahn's review of the show).
• Iron Woobie: Taylor. His wife dies in what is suggested to be very poor circumstances (he was ready to commit suicide over the fact) which in turn causes a life-long hatred towards him by his son. And then Washington, someone implied to have helped him over his issues, gets killed during an attack on what now amounts to Taylor's life's work — preserving humanity's future from really evil forces.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Many people probably only watched this show because DINOSAURS, and were probably very disappointed that there was only about six minutes worth of dinosaurs in the entire show.
• The Scrappy: Josh is overall considered pretty unlikable mainly from the pilot.
• Special Effects Failure: For a television show that was reported to have one of the largest production budgets in the medium's history, a keen eye is able to see several painted Nerf guns make cameos in the hands of numerous characters during episodes.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Nathaniel Taylor having to kill his own mentor and banish his son for the good of the colony.
  • Washington's death. Taylor can barely hold himself together, especially when Zoe is trying to cheer him up by talking about the things the Washington taught her. Then she hugs him. Daawww.
  • To some extent, Kara's death. Nowhere near as wrenching as Washington's demise, not to mention completely off-screen, but it makes you feel bad for a character and actress who got maybe half-a-dozen actual lines of dialogue in the entire season and then promptly had the proverbial bridge dropped on her within seconds of finally arriving in Terra Nova.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: For a network TV program, the CGI was pretty damn good and the show looked awesome as a result. Unfortunately, this was part of the reason that the show was dropped so quickly, as the large amounts of CGI needed to uphold the standard made it prohibitively expensive to produce.

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