The New "Spielberg Show" Terra Nova -OR- DINOSAURS!!!!

So a new TV show has aired with the usual two hour opening shebang, only what's interesting to me about this one is that it has a rather unique premises compared to most of what we see on television.  To sum up?  The world is fucked, brought down by the thoughtless and mindless ecological and social practices the rule the very real, non-tv, world around us.  Basically Al Gore and Roland Emmerich were right.

Luckily, or so we're led to believe after the pilot, Science has saved us from ourselves by discovering a rip in the fabric of space and time allowing us to colonize our own world, 85 million years ago.  A second chance to live on Earth without ruining it for ourselves if you will.


For anyone who's ever felt hopelessness when they look at the world around them, the problems it and we all face and then the attitudes your average person, or person of influence scarily enough, have towards them then the premises of Terra Nova, that of literally picking up, throwing the entirety of human history, civilization and society out the window and starting again from scratch, but with our modern scientific knowledge's, you know like advance agricultural techniques, plumbing, alternate energy sources, etc,  is a pretty damn engaging set up for a story.

I have to admit that part of me felt a little pandered to while watching the pilot, as if the show is targeted a little too directly at my demographic or something, but for the time being I think I'll just chalk that up to me not being used to have mainstream media cater to my mind set.  I'm just cynical is all.

But cynicism is  always trumped by Dinosaurs.  Did I mention there were dinosaurs in Terra Nova? Because there are.  I suspect that will be the initial draw for many viewers of Terra Nova; couple the word Dinosaurs with the name of Jurassic Part director Steven Spielberg and you have an event premier that will turn some heads on the pedigree of an unrelated film alone. Crazy huh?  But I'm essentially a big five year old so I'm no one to judge on what gets you to tune in.  For me it was the promise of dinosaurs eating people mixed with multiverses and social reform.  I wonder if Vegas takes bets on if new TV shows get cancelled? Seems like easy money at times.

So after a brief stint on the remains of our one time beautiful planet, a series of scenes that goes to establish just how bad things have gotten on Earth, both environmentally and socially, we find our leading family has been selected to go through the Portal and help colonize Terra Nova, setting up a new civilization for mankind.  However because they broke laws regarding the legal size of a family (it's illegal to have more then two children) the father and the third child needed to sneak past tight security in order to get away from this hell world and join their family, thus starting a new life, on the beautiful Terra Nova.

If the immigrant metaphor wasn't clear enough I thought it was a pretty cute touch of the show runners to not only have an ethnically mixed couple in the lead, but to have that brief period where the white guy, the father character Jim Shannon played very likeable by Jason O'Mara, is basically put into a situation where he broke the law, crossing the "border" illegally to get to  a better place, but is told that it's not that big of a deal, its fine if he stays but they're going to put him to work as a gardener.

 Jim however only sees the upswing of course, to him he's out of prison, with his family again in a new clean world, handed a home with naught but a slap on the wrist for how he got to Terra Nova and all he has to do in return is work a job he might not want.  A social message at every turn it seems.  How much do you want to bet later in the show there's some kind of disruption in Earth fed supply lines and people quickly turn on Jason, since he was never in the food budget to begin with, or some other "blame the outsider" scenario.

Once we get to Terra Nova though its immediately a new show.  Everything is done with the aura of big, open, clean, a stark contrast with how they portrayed Earth.  Even the friendly Dinosaurs are super friendly Dinosaurs.  You know it won't last, but its the kind of setting I think I could happily drift into after a long day if only because it makes itself so inviting.

They are very quick to point out, quick enough that I had honestly just begun to question this myself when they made a point of bringing it up, always a good sign, the notion of why this plan makes even a little sense.  The idea of going back in time to colonize prehistoric Earth is just rife with paradoxes, more importantly however is the idea of the extinction of the Dinosaurs.  We know the Dinosaurs go extinct, so isn't it a bit shortsighted to try to set up a second human civilization during a period where you know some Extinction Event level event is only a few hundred thousand, maybe a couple million, years away?  But perhaps that as well is just another metaphor, man never truly solves his own problems, he just does enough so that it won't be an issue until he's long dead and buried.

They don't address extinction directly, but they do tell us that this is a divergent timeline, an alternate universe essentially, that has its own subsequent flow and history.  So if someone hunts one of mans earliest ancestors into extinction on  Terra Nova it won't result in humanity never existing in the first place, meaning man could have never traveled back in time to kill itself to begin with, etc, etc, etc.  Viscous paradox.  A divergent timeline just means that by changing the past we now have two versions of reality that man can travel back and forth between.

Except of course they've established that you cannot return to Earth from Terra Nova.  They can't put Jim back on his raft and send him home.  Super important detail as it gives so much power and influence to the people who are there.  The opportunity to be the one who sets up a new society is a staggeringly significant one.  People will live by what you decide for generations to come if you do a good job.  Something that already has given rise to a conflict, the evil seepings-over of the corrupted Earth, where an interested party was able to essentially co-opt an entire colonist transplant, something that's established as a huge public deal back on Earth, so as to get a group entirely composed of single minded individuals onto Terra Nova for reasons as of yet unknown. A group at odds with the regular colonists.

Steven Lang is a standout of the supporting cast, playing the base commander Nathaniel Taylor, the old hard ass who is either an altruistic control freak or gaming the system entirely and in fact has his own agenda.  Who could blame a man for going loopy with power when he's been given direction over the future course of the species, immediately after playing Tarzan and the Dinosaurs for months on end alone.  The Sixes, what they call the compromised group of colonists,  might even be his men.

Should I have them call me Sir or Your Highness?

His mysterious son living out in the wilderness, taunting dear old dad with his cryptic rock scribbles, is also a big flag saying something is definitely up.   At the moment I'm left suspicious as to the whole divergent timeline thing to be honest.  I think his son is going to somehow prove that either what we do in the past does have a direct effect on the future, or that this is simply not the time and place they think it is, that is to say 85 million years into Earths past.  You see Dinos you think time travel, but I bet inside the town probe there's proof that this isn't Earth at all.

The daughter Maddy Shanon, Naomi Scott, has a little moment where she feels sheepish for basically saying something intelligent, which I think a lot of people can relate too.  But really the character moment that spoke most clearly to me was when the little girl, Zoe Shannon played by Alana Mansour, pops up again at seemingly the exact right moment to inform us that "I wanna see the dinosaurs again".  Again the show spoke my mind almost as I was having the thought.  Which led us to the first Dino Attack of Terra Nova.

This sequence serves to introduce not only the dangerous elements of not-friendly Dino's but also the Sixes themselves as being a real power on this world.  Inevitably mans worst enemy is always going to be man, which is a really important message to be clear on in genre entertainment, and Terra Nova is pretty much science fiction, especially shows that have big badass monsters running around eating people to potentially steal peoples attention.  I always like to draw analogies to the first two Alien films, the playbill says to come for the flesh eating monsters but the real badguy of those stories, and what made them such people stories, was always human greed and the frail lives of the people effected by it.  Monsters are just a force of nature in the world that the human characters need to live with, a direct metaphor for the more abstract evils of our lives as well  as something to give them a respect and humility to their setting that doesn't really exist for modern man.  Come to think about it Jurassic Park had the same message, the Dinosaurs there were just animals, all the death and destruction were all the avoidable follies of man in the face of his own created reality.

Lunch!

Terra Nova's monster are great though.  In both this sequence and the Slasher sequences we are shown both the danger presented by not being on the top of the food chain, but also our ability to defy this bit of nature via the forceful application of our ingenuity.  Weapons I suppose in this instance.  Always a healthy reminded to people like myself who maybe undervalue the benefits of civilization in contrast to the problems it causes.  Man is shown to live in a fragile balance here with their new world, going outside your comfort zone is a danger like unto what we, as viewers, can only conceive of in monster movies, but one that can be dealt with, and even peacefully coexisted with, so long as you have a healthy fear and respect for nature.

It's also great to me that the don't just arbitrarily blow away the Dinosaurs, as if they were monsters and not just hungry animals, on cite.  It's a small things, but I find the small things are almost always the things indicative of a stories quality.  This is a show whose premises hinges on the concept of "We screwed up the world by not being self aware of what we were doing to it and so we're starting over on Terra Nova" so by being respectful towards nature, trying to live with the dangerous Dinosaurs just outside the gates instead of taking a more forceful colonization approach and simply eliminating the indigenous "local fauna" by force, something they could easily do by shipping the occasional load of soldiers and weapons to Terra Nova instead of colonists and their families.  This sort of adherence to their own sensibilities is very enticing to me as, like all of us, we only have so much free time to dedicate to our passive interests, such as television.  Who has time to piss away on a bad TV show? If nothing else there's always a superior alternative our there to be found.

There's a great Dinosaur moment when Commander Taylor goes outside the main gates to draw the attention of the attacking Carnotaurus'.  Maybe I'm over thinking it but that Dinosaurs clearly knew the sound of gunfire.  When it spun around it wasn't looking for a loud noise, clearly this was an animal that recognized the sound for what it was and could instantly key in on its source; danger.  A nice touch and exploring the effects of having modern humans around on dinosaur behaviors is a direction I'd love to see them explore.  What if "Slashers" became adapted to hunting in urban environments for instance.  They got used to the humans settlement and found ways of sneaking in and out unnoticed, it'd just be a way of expanding their territory to an animal, into an environment with no other completion for prey in fact, the Carnotarus sure as hell can't get past the walls.

But despite what seems to be clear intent to take this seriously from a scientific perspective I wouldn't get to bogged down in facts and technical details.  It's enough that they wanted to give the dinosaurs feathers, even though it might not be a popular stance with small minded people who want to see them the way they're used to them.  So when the Slashers seemingly let one girl go after beating her up, don't hold it against it too hard.  I think the show is going to strike a great balance between the human relateability, the loftier social and scientific concepts presented and just plain being entertainment.  I mean a dinosaur ran up behind an APC and ate the gunner from his position on turret. It's that kind of show.

Terra Nova paints a pretty ambitious story and does so with big broad brush strokes.  I truly hope that taking this approach works out for the creators as I very much enjoy the premier and look forward to seeing more.  The ideas presented here are valuable ones, presented to us in fun and exciting ways and through simple and likeable characters that are really understandable and relateable across a wide cross section of peoples.  When you have such a complex story and setting you really do need to ease people into it somewhat before they'll be able to casually accept concepts like dinosaurs, alternate timelines, paradoxes, etc.  But I also believe that these really aren't hard concepts at their core, so if you take the time to get everyone on the same page Terra Nova has set a stage that could deliver immeasurably as time goes on.  We'll see where the next 85 million years take us.

Quick shout out to Allison Miller, who plays Skye, before I forget.  I've been watching a show called Kings on Netflix of late, cancelled, that prominently features Allison Miller.  I actually have a hard time buying her as the romantic interest for Jim's teenage son, emphasis on teenaged, because of it but she was good in Kings so hopefully they do something interesting with these two as well.  I thought the idea of kids going out into the woods to drink moonshine, even in a potentially dangerous dinosaurs filled alternate dimension, to be every bit as true to life as the evils of ecological disaster. Hopefully there's crossover appeal there.

Oh and did I mention there were Dinosaurs in Terra Nova? Because there are.