Worst Shows On Television: Terra Nova
The first thing one notices when watching Terra Nova is that it immediately doesn’t live up to the awesome concept it’s based on:
The earth is so thoroughly ecologically destroyed the only hope for humanity is to travel back in time and start over again before humanity even exists.
The show suffers from a similar problem that V faced; the events are so extraordinary but the response from characters is so underwhelming that the audience can’t possibly bother to care. When one travels back in time and is confronted with dinosaurs you’d expect some amazement as well as some trepidation when exploring a world inhabited by people-eating dinosaurs. But immediately everything is familiar and not the least bit scary.
Underneath this lackluster wonder at their new world, there is the opportunity for a real interesting plot. The show has touched very briefly on the fact that some people who have made this pilgrimage, Sixers (from the sixth pilgrimage), have some hidden agenda. Instead of taking a worthwhile page out of Red Mars or any other sci-fi drama about colonization, the Sixers are playing it close to the chest. Perhaps it will fall victim to the same problems as The Event, not allowing the audience to expect more from the show, in fact Flash Forward suffered from the same problem; the biggest event of the show occurs at the very end of the failed season.
The show suffers from maddening issues of consistency and idiocy. Por ejemplo:
- Teenagers who grow moonshine outside the safety of their compound
- A Birds influenced episodes with pterodactyls that are whisked away from the colony off screen.
- In the future there are population quotas and yet the main character, a cop, has a third child and gets put in jail and escapes off screen.
- Despite having scientists that are best in their fields, when there is an EMP, only the bartender can fix the computer chips.
There is certainly more holes in the plot than can be listed but the four above have stuck out. The plots frequently feel like failed Star Trek episodes, probably because of Brannon Braga helmed the end of the Star Trek TV franchise. I still watch it because I am curious about the overall plot but I certainly don’t have hope that this is a good story.
