Date of airing: November 14, 2011 (FOX)
Nielsen ratings information: 7.01 million viewers, 4.1/6 in Households, 2.3/6 with Adults 18-49
I am getting used to the generic character stories and the 1990s science-fiction plots. Maybe it’s because I am already expecting not to get entertained by this show, knowing that I already disliked watching it in 2011, and that it will soon be all over anyway (only five episodes left), or maybe because I was starting to get to know the characters, and their absurd reasoning for their absurd actions are starting to make sense. Or maybe it’s just the episodic nature of the series – stories are concluded within the hour (with the exception of the serialized elements that all have to do with the Sixers, because it’s part of the show’s mythology) and I don’t have to get annoyed over unanswered questions and dumb plot twists. Sometimes there is an advantage to not putting up a highly serialized narrative – you get to forget an episode that was rather boring because you don’t need to remember what happened.
It’s not like this episode was forgettable and boring. Okay, it was, or else, TERRA NOVA would have been a success and in its twelfth season by now (ha, as if that is ever going to happen to science-fiction on broadcast television), but there was some fun to be had. As stereotypical as the story was, Maddy brought me some joy during this hour, as she turned from a timid young woman to an investigator who could make her old man blush by following her guts and putting down a killer who changed his face to escape the authorities in the future timeline. Oh yes, the Ken Horton story was nuts, but it fits quite well into a nutty show about time travel and dinosaurs and a teenager trying to sell drugs to an adversary group so he can get a free trip to the past for his girlfriend. And the way Maddy stumbled upon this fraud and realized that she was “admiring” a killer was a truly absurd plot, with a conveniently written climax, as the fake Horton had to wait to kill Maddy, because Jim needed to show up and be his daughter’s rescue. If there is one thing Maddy learned from this experience, it’s that she should step into the shoes of her father and become a homicide detective. She’s got the nose for that already.
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| A romantic greeting separated by 85 million years. |
I loved how Maddy talked to Zoe about her “investigation,” treating her little sister like a partner in solving a crime, only for Zoe to be fascinated by something else entirely. The vampire running gag was cute and had me chuckle once (“So they are both vampires?”), and it showcased that the writers knew what to do with the youngest cast member, even if Zoe will never be good for anything more than crawling through a duct to get to the other side of the door and free her trapped father. Plus, it helped to show that the Shannon siblings love each other. Here I was, thinking that Maddy wouldn’t like her little sister sometimes, because bigger siblings generally don’t like their younger siblings.
Because TERRA NOVA is still a proceduralized series, the writers may have focused on the individual storylines a bit too much though. There was no big A plot, as the Ken Horton arc and Josh’s dealings with the Sixers had equal amounts of screentime. That was actually something great about the episode, since the writers managed to put focus on each of the characters without the need to cut time from one story for the sake of the other that happened to have a connection to the greater storyline of the series. The writers didn’t sacrifice anything from Maddy’s story, although that may be the reason why it’s so absurd in hindsight, with the backstory of Horton’s research assistant doing all the killing and face replacements for the sake of living it up 85 million years in the past. It seems like the show has found a groove when it comes to the narrative. And now the only thing needed was a more interesting narrative.
Josh breaking into the infirmary for the Sixers was a bit of a dumb story, especially since it didn’t lead to a lot of dramatic things at the end. Josh could have lived through the consequences of his actions (by landing in the Terra Nova version of jail, for example), but all the writers did with the story was to establish that Taylor’s son Lucas could still be alive (we know that already), and he might have successfully created a way to communicate with 2149 without the help of the portal, which was apparently not possible to do before. As if Josh’s entire story was not just here to fill airtime, but to also serve as a plot device for a reveal that would bring forward the greater storyline. Josh didn’t break into the infirmary to work on getting his girlfriend through the portal, he did that so the characters can move a step closer to Lucas and whatever his evil plans are. There is no reason for Josh to smell jail time after that, although I do hope that his actions will have some form of consequences in the next episode. He is old enough to suffer them, especially after he has been something of a dick when it comes to his father being around the family again.
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| It was not Eve who ate the apple. |
Meanwhile, Taylor took a trip into the wild and reminded us all that Curran was kicked out of the colony and has to survive on his own out here. I was hoping for Curran to return at some stage, and it looks like he is ready to get involved in a storyline now, with Taylor hiring him to be a spy among the Sixers, since the Sixers have their own spy in Terra Nova. I think that’s fair, and the writers established a good-enough reason why Taylor would want to have a spy for himself now. Maybe we even get to see some scenes with Curran among the Sixers – seeing how the adversary group lives and exists might be a fine way to spend some minutes on, and you could certainly manipulate the audience into feeling sorry for the Sixers and their way of living. Maybe they are just the same as the people living underground in the 1993 movie DEMOLITION MAN. Maybe the Sixers and the colonists just need to find a way to band together and fight the real enemy. But who is the real enemy?
