Terra Nova

_***

Things are bleak in the distant future, with strict regulations regarding population growth, an amount of pollution so excessive the moon hasn't shone for decades, and a severe lack of fresh fruits and vegetables. Fortunately for the Shannon family, they have been recruited for the upstart community of Terra Nova, 85 million years in the past.

Terra Nova had great names behind it, and was advertised very well; I will watch literally anything that has dinosaurs in it, so I was sold on this series from the get-go. This series started strong and quickly fizzled out, not living up to the hype, and I look forward to exploring why it is that this series failed to live up to its potential. Certainly there were good moments, and many of the bad moments were easy to overlook due to the excitement surrounding the series, but it should be interesting to see what this will amount to when taken as a whole.

The build up of tension as the Shannon family debate whether or not patriarch Jim, played by Jason O'Mara, will arrive in time. It's an extremely effective sequence, and the stress felt by these characters is absolutely palpable. Well-written, well-acted, this scene sets the tone for how great this show can be.

The narrative does a fantastic job of seeding the exposition into the script as the episode draws on rather than choosing to reveal it all at once, and it's a very natural way to tell the story. Despite a few moments where I found myself reaching for more information, any questions I might have had during my viewing would come to be answered as the story went on, and said complaints became moot.

It is unreasonable to expect your viewers to believe that a police officer and a high-ranking doctor would be so stupid as to have a third child in a society wherein population control is so strictly regulated. As officials in their community, they would likely be under great scrutiny considering the current global conditions, and there's no doubt in my mind that they would have been caught. It's unlikely that they would have managed to keep Elisabeth's (Shelley Conn) pregnancy a secret during her third trimester let alone during the three years Zoe (Alana Mansour) spent growing up in their small apartment. On a side note, who was looking after said infant when Mr. & Mrs. Shannon were working and both kids were at school?

At some point son Josh (Landon Liboiron) mentions how difficult it will be for his father to escape from the maximum-security prison in which he's held and later break into the maximum-security facility housing the portal to the past. The security shown is extremely lax, laughably so even for minimum-security systems, and it's just sloppy on the part of the show-runners.

The cast is largely excellent in this first episode, with a stand-out performance by Commander Taylor's Stephen Lang. The chemistry is good between everyone involved, and it seems like a highly solid group of people.

Alex Graves' direction of this episode is largely hit-and-miss; where some moments are spectacular in their showcasing of the environment, others are so clumsy that it's a wonder they weren't cut out of the final product. Positively, Graves does an excellent job of acclimating the characters to their surroundings, both old and new, and the pieces all seem to come together very organically. Negatively, it is never shown how Jim escapes from his prison cell, nor is it ever discussed afterwards, and it would have been nice to have seen proof of any of his jail-breaking skills aside from an elbow thrown to the face every now and then. Worse yet was the awkward slow-motion effect used as Zoe was revealed to have been inside the backpack; it was an unnecessary moment that distracted from the scene at hand.

The script is a culmination of four writing-forces; Kelly Marcel, Craig Silverstein, Brannon Braga, and David Fury. While they come together to create something that's fairly entertaining, it seems at times that there were a few too many cooks in the kitchen. Josh's misplaced anger at his father's prison term is played very realistically, but the lack of information given to Elisabeth as she begins seeing patients in this new world is questionably ignorant.

Having Stephen Spielberg's name on the series is one of the things that helped it get on the air, and while it certainly didn't help keep it on television, it's clear that there were great things that could have come for this show, and it's a shame that it never earned the opportunity to showcase what could have been.

Terra Nova is in the running to become the feature for Saturdays. The series ran in 2011 on FOX with a total of 13 episodes.