Date of airing: October 3, 2011 (FOX)
Nielsen ratings information: 8.73 million viewers, 5.3/8 in Households, 3.1/8 with Adults 18-49
It was an expectedly disappointing episode from this time travel dinosaur family drama television show. What you learned from it was only one thing: TERRA NOVA didn’t want to be a series depicting storylines in a critical and morally complex way, it didn’t want to deal with the highs and very lows of a destroyed future and how humankind is saving themselves in the distant past, it didn’t want to get into climate change and whether or not humanity is still too dependent on elements from the future (which made their lives worse in the first place) to help make their lives in the past easier. Instead, it has become a family drama with (for its time) fancy visual effects, starring dinosaurs, featuring annoying teenagers, housing predictable storylines led by stereotypical characters, and shipping ridiculous plots.
When I think about how Malcolm got introduced as Elisabeth’s ex-boyfriend from ages ago, and how Jim suddenly found himself in a “competition” for the attention and affection of his own wife, I was already rolling my eyes. And then, Maddy suddenly had the opportunity to get a boyfriend of her own (because she is a teenager, and because it was all she could think about as a teenager while setting up in an entirely new world), proving that the writers weren’t interested in shipping around the genre tropes, they want to get right in on them. Especially after Josh developed an interest in a guitar, but he didn’t have the money to buy it, so he just continued to hang around Skye and flirt with her while making things difficult for him because of his girlfriend still living in the future. Why were you stacking this show with those PG-friendly storylines, instead of depicting how the future drove humankind into ruin in the first place, and then threatened to do the same exact mistake in the past? Why did the writers not believe that the audience was ready to see a story that could have brought humanity into the same problem they had when dealing with technology in the future? Because it is what I was expecting after I realized that the colony was being run by future technology.
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| The attack of the horny birds has commenced. |
I have another question: How long has Terra Nova been “active” as a settlement in this series universe? Since the Shannons were part of the tenth pilgrimage, I could imagine it was up and running for a couple of years, and it’s what Taylor said when he sort of explained what he found when building Terra Nova. It’s also imaginable that Terra Nova needed a while to be built, considering it is a huge circle of agriculture and has a big-ass long outer circle of living quarters. I can’t imagine that Terra Nova was built right after the arrival of the first pilgrimage. I was asking myself those questions because the horny dinosaur birds were never to be seen after the arrival of future humans. Malcolm explained that the birds were flying back to their breeding ground to mate once more, but a) that’s a pretty simple backstory to write into the script to give humanity some trouble in the form of sexed-up birds, and b) I can’t quite imagine that there was a reptile species that decided to migrate back to its breeding ground when they were ready to mate, instead of migrating like birds usually do.
I also couldn’t imagine that the dino birds have never been seen before. I guess none of them were left behind during the mating ritual way back when (like, dead or something), and none of them returned to their breeding place earlier, because ... faulty biology, or something? I get that new species are going to be discovered every day (which is a generic premise to fill a couple of episodes with), but it was very convenient that the birds were completely unbeknownst to humans before, even though their Burning Man tent was Terra Nova.
Other than that, the story was just there to fill the hour and to fill the episode and go to the next. The writers obviously didn’t think it was necessary to develop the plot or characters or show why TERRA NOVA should be considered “must-see TV” with that kind of production budget. This episode didn’t care to show why I should be interested in the characters, and why I was supposed to be hoping for their survival during the horny bird attack. By the way: No one died during the airborne assault? Three armed-to-the-teeth soldiers were shredded to pieces out in the open, but everyone inside the gates who got attacked by thousands of these beasts survived? I was at least hoping for one of the birds to get to Josh (or to Malcolm), so that he could have been a victim of the mating ritual. That would have been at least funny, and when I think about a dinosaur attack being funny, something must be wrong with the storytelling.
While we’re at it with Josh: The story of him wanting that guitar was very teen-soapy. It’s what anyone should be expecting from a show involving teenagers in love. They always try to impress each other. And the fact that TERRA NOVA wanted to be about that, at least with their teenage characters, made the show extremely uninteresting from the start. That was a reason this episode has been so disappointing for me, and it’s the simple fact that the writers tried to build in soft teenage soap opera that feels very alienating amid dinosaurs, survival, and science-fiction action.
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| Little children shouldn't play with dinosaurs. |
At least the action sequences of the show were interesting to look at here. The attack on Terra Nova might have looked a little too artificial with all the VFX birds flying around, but there was a sense of urgency and thrill with Elisabeth and Malcolm working on the pheromones while the birds were making noises outside and possibly attacking the colonists in their homes. And though I was disappointed, because no one was lifted into the sky in an attempt to get eaten (like that one awful JURASSIC WORLD death), the chaos was almost good enough to save the episode, or at least that part of the story.
Meanwhile, I noticed that a few seconds were spent creating more plot points for the series (while others, like the equations on the rocks, were forgotten): As expected, the Sixers have a spy in the Terra Nova compound, but that was already obvious in the pilot episode because Mira mentioned she had friends inside Terra Nova, making it unmistakable that the Sixers have friends inside the colony. In a way, the writers weren’t creating a story here, they were reusing a fact from the pilot, to refresh the viewers’ minds that, oh yeah, there is a spy in Terra Nova. That’s a story that will keep the characters and the viewers busy for a little bit. This science-fiction dinosaur show now has a spy thriller embedded within it.
