Terra Nova

Ostensibly, a show is never truly about what the quick script makes it out to be. For example, The Simpsons is about a satirical look at a lower middle class family of five in brief summation, when in reality it’s a Dadaist examination of modern American life encompassing everything from family dynamics, politics, religion and pop culture. I bring this up because I’m not quite sure what Terra Nova was aiming for at a deeper level. It brings up subplots and possibly takes shape in various directions, but they all lead to nothing and go nowhere.

Terra Nova was a show in search of a deeper identity, and that’s just one of a menagerie of problems it comes loaded up with.

It already takes a large leap of faith and suppression of logic to try and buy into the premise – in the future the earth has been left so polluted and desolate that our only course of action is go back into the past and try again. But here’s the overarching problem with that concept: by going back in time to the prehistoric age, the colony has to manage to live through the comet that destroyed the dinosaurs and that ecosystem, the ice age and somehow find a way not to get involved with the natural course of evolution and human history. This is to say nothing of the fact that the prehistoric age had an atmosphere that wasn’t breathable or livable for humans.

All of that could have been forgiven if I had been given some characters to root for and care about, but Terra Nova is also fairly brainless in that regard. The first episode spends more time trying to put the emphasis on the budget and doesn’t bother to populate the various locations with characters of interest. Any changes in their behavior are abrupt and quickly reverted back to how they were at the beginning. The conflict between father and son, over an issue that is worth exploring and honest, is smoothed over very quickly and we’re soon back to the happy nuclear family we met in the beginning of episode one. There’s a distinct lack of dramatic tension or believable character archs at play here, nothing is at stake at any given moment.

The only characters of any worth or interest are side-lined for much of the series, only coming to the center towards the last few entries in the series. Commander Nathaniel Taylor, Lt. “Wash” Washington and Taylor’s estranged son are far more engaging as characters than the ones we spend a significant amount of time with. It’s almost unfair that the characters with dark secrets, hidden motivations and tension between each other are left in small supporting roles.

But not knowing what to focus in on is a reoccurring problem with Terra Nova. Much is made of how unsafe it is to leave the colony, yet every chance the characters get they go on random excursions into the wilderness. A fishing trip here, a group of youths deciding to make moonshine there, and so it continually goes as the show writes rules that it never bothers to follow through on cutting itself off at the knee for any sense of conflict or emotional stakes at play. We know for certain that anyone going out into the wilderness will only encounter PG-rated violence and danger, despite it being up against various carnivorous dinosaurs.

The worst offense here is the rebel group now as Sixers, who despite being of limited ammunition and medical supplies and numbers continually find ways to break into the colony and fire off obscene amounts of rounds in any given fight. If they truly had limited numbers and weapons/supplies – how could they be so wasteful or have such a large base in the middle of the jungle if things were as dire as they say?

No, maybe it was the fact that the dinosaurs were magically bulletproof. That may have been the worst and stupidest decision in the show. I’ll grant that it would take A LOT of bullets to take down a Carnotaurus, but they’re not bullet-proof. Nor would they probably be impervious to the sonic blasters and other weapons the characters possess.

I know, I know, it’s just a TV show – why can’t I just turn my brain off and enjoy? Well, I’d happily have gone along with it if it had given me some reason to care about anything. One episode is a who-done-it while another is a medical mystery and a third episode is something entirely different. Not to mention that the characters make some horrendously poor decisions – the central family has a third child which is against the law in a dystopian future in which most vegetation and water is in limited supply or died off, decide to hide her existence instead of paying a fee, get caught by the authorities and the father lands in jail, this makes them stupid in my eyes and they never failed to live up to this first series of poor decision-making.

I couldn’t find myself able to turn off the “logic” part of my brain and just watch the mindless, hollow spectacle on display. The offenses kept piling up higher and higher, and if there wasn’t a parade of attractive men (who were pretty liberal with the shirtless scenes in the first half of the series) and the occasionally cool and thrilling dinosaur-centric action center piece I would’ve stopped after the first two episodes.

Well, does Terra Nova do anything right? Sure. The production values are top-notch, the special effects are pretty fantastic for television, the sets are nice and the locations are gorgeous. It’s wonderful to look at, but it’s the things that make or break a TV series like well-developed characters, satisfying dramatic storytelling, conflict and good dialog that sank the thing so quickly. I somehow made it through the entire run, but it took me a very long time and I frequently had to busy myself with other tasks to get through it. Somewhere, buried within the rubble of poor execution, there was a kernel of a great idea.