Fox’s dinosaur time travel family drama premiered this week.
Here’s the basic premise: In the year 2149, Earth is a polluted, overcrowded, dystopian crap-hole. Families are limited to two children. People wear breathing masks. Street urchins watch broken ipads. Everything is dirty. Fortunately, scientists discover a crack in time! What? Yes! A crack in time! And we can ease the burden of the surplus population by letting people go through the crack, to colonize the past. Not just any past, though–it’s the Dinosaur Past! You can become one of the lucky colonists in the Terra Nova settlement by winning a lottery, or by having special skills.
The show chronicles the Shannon family, as they deal with the Dinosaur Past, community squabbles, and their own family dysfunction. The Shannons broke the law, and had a third kid. Pa Shannon (Jason O’Mara) went to jail, which is ironic because he’s a cop. Ma Shannon (Shelly Conn) is a surgeon, and her skills get her and her legal children, Bitchy Wesley Crusher* (Landon Liboiron) and Exposition Daughter* (Naomi Scott) a spot in the colony. Pa Shannon and Illegal Third Child (Alana Mansour) have to sneak through the portal.
As a science fiction nerd, I was interested in how they would handle the world of the 22nd century and the time travel. As an academic with research interests in how displaced people form communities, I was interested in how the social dynamics of the colony would be depicted. I liked the portrayal of the 22nd century. The first twenty minutes or so look like a remake of Soylent Green, and I mean that in a good way.
The time travel was a little more problematic. How does the time travel work, here? Well, once, in Star Trek, Spock explained time as kind of like a river. It has eddies, and whirlpools, and if Captain Kirk takes his shirt off and splashes around in it, time can get messed up. In Terra Nova, time is like a well. You can fall down the well, and maybe you can shout up at the people on top, but you can’t get back out. You’re stuck at the bottom of the well. Presumably, the people at the top of the well can throw more stuff down to you–the settlement in Terra Nova has buildings and vehicles and computers, it’s not people making things out of coconuts like on Gilligan’s Island–but people can’t travel back. We are repeatedly told it’s a one way trip. So, if no one ever went back, not even probes, how does the 22nd Century know that the time portal actually goes anywhere? That doesn’t make… Look out! Dinosaurs! Run! BANG! BANG!
Aren’t these people tramping around 85 million years ago screwing up the timeline? No, explains Exposition Daughter cheerfully. See, the scientists sent a probe down the time crack, and they never heard from it again, which means we’re in an alternate timeline! I see. The probe disappears, so the scientists conclude that it’s in an alternate universe and it’s therefore safe to start shoveling people into the time maw. Wait, what? That’s craz…BANG! BANG! Dinosaurs! Flee!
The colony dynamics are, well, tense. The Shannon’s irritating son, Bitchy Wesley Crusher, falls in with moon-shine making delinquents. There are apparently dissidents and a splinter colony, called Sixers. Presumably, much of the show will revolve around community issues in the Terra Nova colony rather than the mechanics of time travel. The show is called Terra Nova, after all, not Time Crack. The conflicts are all a bit broad-brush, but pilots can be clunky. It may get better. Well, at least there are dinosaurs. There aren’t tons of dinosaurs, this is a TV show, not mega-budget Jurassic Park, after all, but still—dinosaurs.
Good things:
Well, it has that guy from Avatar. Stephen Lang is charismatic as the colony leader, and he has good chemistry with Jason O’Mara.
Steven Spielberg is one of the producers. Maybe that will keep Fox from cancelling it or jerking it around at the drop of a hat like they did Firefly.
Decent enough production values. Dinosaurs!
Not so good things:
Exposition Daughter. Shut up, Exposition Daughter! Shut up! Every time something needs to be explained–what dinosaurs eat, how time travel works–Exposition Daughter hawks up a big bolus of explanation. Terra Nova writers, please, stop doing this.
Bitchy Wesley Crusher Seriously, did we need a bitchy teenager? No, we did not. And yet, we have one anyway.
Science Fiction Cliche Buffet
The producers went through the Cliche Buffet and piled their plates extra high.There are shout-outs/homages/rip-offs of Aliens, Avatar, Jurassic Park, Lost, Land of the Lost, Soylent Green, Stargate. Maybe this is just part of the intrinsic clunkiness of pilot episodes, but it’s a little heavy handed.
There were some execution issues, but I’ll give it a couple more episodes, unless it devolves into The Bitchy Wesley Crusher Show.
If you want to see previews and whatnot, you can go here. Images are from here.
*h/t for the nicknames to Captain Snarky.
