Date of airing: September 26, 2011 (FOX)
Nielsen ratings information: 9.22 million viewers, 5.5/8 in Households, 3.1/8 with Adults 18-49
I was probably hate-watching the show when I went into it in the Fall of 2011, almost knowing before I watched the pilot that TERRA NOVA won’t be a success. Too troubled the production history was, too bland the cast is (talent-wise), and too obvious the upcoming problems with about a dozen executive producers, each of them with their own ideas of how the show should look and feel. I remember I watched the show and I hated it because the storytelling delivered all the cliches and tropes that were available to the many writers. I hated TERRA NOVA because I wanted a great science-fiction time travel dinosaur action show and what I got was a Brannon Braga STAR TREK slash STARGATE SG-1 family show that drove the safe road all the way to the season finale. Twelve years later, and knowing that the show was bad, maybe TERRA NOVA will be a different experience? I decided to rewatch the show to find out, and because it only has twelve episodes, it’s a quickly watched show for this blog and for when you’re bored and want to watch something that can be compared to comfort food.
And even twelve years later, TERRA NOVA has proven that you should never expect anything from a series premiere on a network broadcaster. After two years of pre-production, any imaginable difficulties during production including weather, the troubles of getting the cast together, and finally the promotion of the show, and the talk of the producers that TERRA NOVA will be a spectacular show and all, you should come to expect that it will end up to become a disappointing viewing experience. Maybe people were expecting sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll from a family dinosaur action drama that cost around $15 million to produce for the first two hours, especially if the viewers have to wait for a couple of years for the premiere, but it’s probably their own fault if they were expecting the greatest television drama ever after listening to the producers talk constantly about the show (myself included, because I listened to them and I was expecting the Grand Canyon).
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| Celebrating a job well done. |
The pilot was still underwhelming, even twelve years after people started to forget all about the show (maybe its appearance on Disney+ on the international market could change that). Too generic to be a good show, too stereotypical to be suspenseful, and too predictable to be surprising. TERRA NOVA might have had one of the rather worse pilots of recent time, but nothing beats 2009’s THREE RIVERS (which may be on the very bottom of my list of TV Pilots From Best To Worst), and looking at it as an 86-minute TV movie, it kind of worked on its own. But the generic style of the future and past, captured with the help of all the greenscreens you could have built, opened up questions of how the producers were seeing the show and how the writers thought they could do anything to enrich their work when having to listen to more than a dozen executive bosses above their paygrade. Is TERRA NOVA about remembering how the genre was in the 1990s? Does TERRA NOVA want to be a critical show about the situation Earth was finding herself in (global warming, overpopulation, dusty air), or is it just a simple family drama set in a world of time travel and dinosaurs? What would the show have looked like when it was taking the stories seriously? Why does it all have to be about the Shannon family which is riddled with the most generic characters network television had to offer?
TERRA NOVA delivered some answers to these questions, in addition to the many reasons why you should never expect anything from a network show in the future. Especially when they are going to be hyped by the people involved in it. Maybe TERRA NOVA was the beginning of the end of the Upfronts season excitement. That’s when my interest in the broadcast network season dwindled, after having been hugely disappointed by the crop that premiered in the Fall of 2011, and the quick and painful cancellations of LONE STAR, MY GENERATION, PAN AM, and even THE PLAYBOY CLUB during that time. All shows I liked back then, but were killed because of the old-timey broadcast network TV business.
I can’t even remember the script I was reading for the pilot, but I have to say I rather take the first draft of the script than this version of the pilot, knowing that there was a different and darker story in the premise. I accepted that the producers stretched it out to two hours, making it more of a television event (as well as bringing back the two-hour pilot approach for a hot second). I respected that the writers changed their whole approach to the story because of it. But they also changed the tone of the show. Instead of a dark action thriller with dinosaurs, it became a drama surrounding a family I didn’t care for, in a setting that looked coded on a computer screen, with characters boring my mind out of my brain, with twists that couldn’t surprise you anymore in this day and age of television, with actors that seemed asleep at the wheel during their performances.
The perfect example is Stephen Lang: His Commander Taylor was a replica of his character in AVATAR, with the bonus of comic book character behaviorism. Which made me question if the writers wrote around his character that way, because Lang was so awesome in AVATAR, and if the producers cast him because there was no one else in their minds to play the character. AVATAR fans, fresh in the minds of the audience (the movie wasn’t even two years old at this point), still had the evil Colonel Quaritch in front of their eyes, which helps to get his character in the pilot here. And I just hate how writers depend on the coolness of previous productions, not creating anything unique. Some maybe call that lazy writing. But then again, I don’t know when Colonel Taylor was written that way when I barely can remember anything about the pilot script.
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| Will the boy follow the attractive girl down the computer-generated cliff? |
The biggest problem of the pilot was in its first act. 17 minutes were spent building a prologue, the creation of the Shannon family and their conflicts, and the development of a future that looked as screwed as the world looked like in front of the eyes of today’s and tomorrow’s teenagers. Generally, I had nothing against that prologue, but when you say that Jim is breaking out of a maximum-security facility, and then breaking into a maximum-security facility, then please show the maximum-security facility and don’t waste only two minutes with Jim and how he broke out (not seen in the pilot, because apparently, the depiction of a hot laser was all the maximum-security facility needed to be broken out of) and broke in again (maximum-security facility my ass). This was just something that annoyed me deeply throughout the beginning, especially when you think about how you were introduced to the status of the world for 17 minutes, just to be told to forget all about it as soon as the Shannon family stepped through the portal into the distant past.
The beginning of a wonderful friendship between Jim and Colonel Taylor was another issue I had with the pilot. I would have expected that there would be a bigger beef between the two, since Jim literally broke out of prison and into the past, but Taylor needed to destroy that conflict, because he didn’t give a damn about it, and for some reason, he needed another security guy with a badge and a gun. Why build up such a conflict during the prologue, to make Jim the guy who risks his own life and that of his family to be the hero of his own story when the writers quickly trashed it in the second act? Not that I was expecting jail time in Terra Nova for the entire Shannon family, but maybe Jim should have tried to woo Taylor for more than just 20 minutes to become a new member of his security detail. The Shannons defied all kinds of laws throughout the prologue and did not get punished when the second act began – wonderful for the characters, pretty bad for the political side of the show, if TERRA NOVA even has a political side. There wasn’t even any kind of conflict left at the end of the pilot, because Jim was working for Taylor, Elizabeth had a great job, and the kids have either friends or are liked by other people. So much for suffering the consequences.
And finally, there wasn’t much of a story, which I kind of blame on the fact that the original premise needed to be bloated into a two-hour event. While the first half took the time to introduce Terra Nova and the characters, the second half forgot all about it and decided to do a JURASSIC PARK imitation, which I guess was good enough for network television, but when you throw characters you don’t care about in peril, what good were these 20 minutes of dino action thriller for? What story was in this two-parter after all? Well, let’s count on a few of our fingers: Josh’s disdain for his father (also, he is proof why people hate children and teenage characters outside WB and CW teenage soap opera dramas); Taylor’s past with Terra Nova and what secrets he was keeping; the Sixers and how they prove to be trouble for Taylor and Terra Nova, becoming the human antagonists of the show; and Terra Nova itself and how it might be not such a paradise as Mira teased. Normally you would have had more for a two-hour pilot. That begs the question if TERRA NOVA wanted to be a show-show, and not a tell-show. Bring the visuals, no matter how expensive they are and how long it takes to produce them, and keep the story to a bare minimum.
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| Flesh-hungry reptiles are near, so they have to be mowed down by automatic rifles. |
At least the action was great and made me swiftly go through these 86 minutes. When the kids were outside, attacked, and about to get eaten by some hungry dinosaurs whose scientific name I have already forgotten, there was a bit of thrill, thanks to the fact that some of the characters did get to feel the slashers or teeth and almost died. I was thankful for Max to have survived, because he was kind of the only minority character on-screen during the story, and thank the heavens that the writers stopped themselves from using the “Black Dude Dies First” trope, although I absolutely did not care about who was going to die and who was going to survive in this situation. I was wishing for Josh and Skye to get eaten because the guy was annoying and the girl was probably just eye-candy for the audience, but since they are regular characters, my wish of witnessing a gruesome death for these two teenagers wasn’t fulfilled (but how kick-ass would it have been if the writers had decided to kill off some of the major characters in the pilot?). All in all, the action worked, as well as some of the special effects, though you couldn’t say there were top-notch. It was interesting to notice that the greenscreen background looked more silly at times than the movements of the CG dinosaurs (the scene of Jim and Taylor spying on two Sixer vehicles at the top of a hill is a prominent example of a very obvious greenscreen effect).
Also, the backstories seemed to be interesting: The equations on the rocks, the Sixers, Taylor most likely keeping secrets, and with evil people outside the gates, chances are there could be evil people inside the gates already (the idea that the Sixers have an informant in Terra Nova was already teased upon in the pilot, begging the question if the show was picking up on that with the next episode). There was also the fact that TERRA NOVA made kind of sense in the time travel genre by immediately creating an alternate timeline and the writers not having to care about paradoxes. Even if you make it yourself easy by not having to wonder about time travel paradoxes, the simple notion that there are no paradoxes could open up storytelling possibilities.
