Date of airing: November 7, 2011 (FOX)
Nielsen ratings information: 7.75 million viewers, 4.6/7 in Households, 2.6/7 with Adults 18-49
It is almost unbelievable. The writers finally got into the main arc of the series, or at least the season (who knows what they were planning past the first season at this stage), and they spent the entire episode preparing for the introduction of Lucas, telling the audience that this young man is going to be the villain of the storyline, as the son of Commander Taylor (himself looking like he could become the villain any day now). And then I was wondering what this whole episode was actually about and if it made sense in the narrative. A storage device that was only able to be opened by Lucas was in the hands of Terra Nova leadership, after it was found hidden in a lockbox under one of the houses which no one knew about before? If the storage device was so important, who hid it in the lockbox in the first place and why was the spy not able to just get it themselves? Why the detour through Leah two episodes ago when asking the spy to break into the house and get the storage device for Lucas could have been done a lot cheaper and probably quicker, too? Not to mention that the story of Taylor’s son has been very underplayed in the series so far, just so the twist of Lucas revealing himself as Taylor’s son can be as big of a shocker as possible. Only it didn’t work because why the heck would I care about Lucas when I don’t even know the character and Taylor barely (if ever?) talked about him?
I also don’t quite believe that getting the storage device for Lucas was *the* reason for Mira being here in the first place. Granted, that would mean there is a conspiracy afoot in which people from 2149 are collaborating with Lucas somehow, and Lucas was unable to do all the scheming work all by himself, so colonists were sent through time to immediately separate from Terra Nova and be the instigating force of violence and terror. But if this was really Mira’s only job, that means she is without a job now and can do whatever she wants. She probably wants to invade Terra Nova and keep the colony for herself, but that wouldn’t make sense either. So, would the execution of her job make Mira a free agent of sorts? Not to mention that Mira could have kept the storage device to blackmail Lucas with, but apparently, that was never even a thought in the writers’ room, to make her an independent character with her own agenda. It turns out she has always been a hired gun. How tiresome.
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| ♫ Somebody save me ... ♫ |
At least the writers went back to the equations that the characters found in the pilot movie. Does that mean Taylor knows the meaning of them, or Lucas wants to find out the meaning? Does that mean those were Lucas’s equations in the first place, and he remembered them enough to put them on rocks and freak out future visitors? Does it also mean that Taylor knows more about this place than anyone else and decided not to share? After all, he spent some months alone in the wild (after he stepped through the portal first), so I could imagine he found something that could have indicated that humanity was in this timeline before (meaning, the equations were already there). But for the backstory of the show to be that heavy, it should have been developed beforehand, and I don’t trust the writers to have done that when they just delivered an episode that extended the hunt for a storage device into a second episode when it could have easily been solved by the mysterious spy in-between scenes long ago.
The biggest eyeroll moment of the episode was the ESP. Okay, my science-fiction brain can accept that a meteor is causing the EMP and frying every chip in Terra Nova and its surroundings, but in hindsight, it seems a little stupid of the colonists to be this heavily dependent on technology, considering it was technology that was biting their butts in the future. It was technology that ruined mankind, and it turns out that using technology 85 million years into the past almost ruined them as well because no one knew how to do things manually, let alone have weapons that were not run by batteries and chips. Also, it’s pretty convenient that there was a chip-making device (kind of weird that it wasn’t called a 3D printer, making me wonder if 3D printers existed in the minds of people in 2011 when this episode was written and produced) with a chip that could be easily replaced or fixed, when all the other tech in Terra Nova needed the work of said chip-printing device. The convenience of the plot was really oozing out of the script here, making it an icky experience.
At least the aftermath of the meteor strike and the resulting EMP looked interesting. I liked Jim and Zoe getting stuck in the Eye (TERRA NOVA stealing the holodeck idea from the Star Trek franchise), and Jim trying to make it easy and safer for Zoe to take her fear while crawling a shaft to freedom. The anti-spider song was nice work by Jim to be more of a father in the series, which may have been a necessity, considering he was out surviving in hand-to-hand combat a couple of scenes later, reminding the audience that this is also an action show. Plus, I loved that Zoe was getting attention as a character here and was given something to do. Normally, a kid like Zoe would just stand around, look cute, smile, make the parental units and siblings laugh, and then the episode ends. But in a way, Zoe was something of a hero here.
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| Zoe gets her very own John McClane moment. |
I also liked Hunter’s (who is this guy? Coming from nowhere, getting a throwaway story, probably forgotten with the next episode) miserable day and the disgusting parasite inside him, which brought some needed attention to Skye and a way to tell the viewers that you should always be scared of tapeworms inside you. What a shame that Hunter didn’t die here, because his existence essentially creates a love triangle between him, Skye, and Josh. What happens when Josh’s girlfriend comes back in time and makes it a foursome? Okay, that would be fun.
More fun than Maddy’s little romance with her soldier boy toy Mark who happened to be a good guy in this episode, perfectly capable of protecting her when needed. He is definitely a character that would fill pages upon pages in fanfiction stories about Maddy and Mark (if I look through Tumblr, is that going to be the first thing I find?), but that doesn’t make him any more interesting. The fact that he is so nice makes him boring, because there is no conflict between him and any of the other characters. Maddy is stuck in a romance, Mark doesn’t get to do anything as a soldier, and I’m sitting here, yawning.
