This Week In TV – Dino Bores: Terra Nova is Flashy but Bland

There’s nothing inherently objectionable to big, dumb TV science-fiction, provided it’s competently assembled and fun to watch. Just this past summer, TNT’s alien-apocalypse drama Falling Skies remained reasonably entertaining for the duration of its 10-episode run, despite not blowing anyone’s mind or re-writing the rules of the genre.

FOX’s new Terra Nova certainly qualifies as dumb sci-fi.

FOX’s new Terra Nova certainly qualifies as dumb sci-fi. The show opens in the year 2149, when Earth has been ravaged by overpopulation and humanity is facing extinction. However, a crack in time has been discovered that allows for travel back 85 million years to when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Either by necessity or by lottery, groups of people have been selected to leave the 22^nd century behind and colonize the past, giving humanity a second chance at preserving our plant. Produced by Steven Spielberg, Terra Nova is certainly much flashier and more expensive-looking than Falling Skies, but it ends up being nowhere near as much fun. It begs the question: What’s the difference between the two? Or even better: What mistakes does Terra Nova make that Falling Skies somehow sidestepped? Let’s break it down …

Sometimes simpler is better. Ever since Lost, TV sci-fi and fantasy series have had a tendency to lean too heavily on elaborate mythologies and convoluted mysteries. That’s why Falling Skies’ straight-forward storytelling – aliens came, they kicked our ass, now the people still left need to fight back — was a breath of fresh air. Terra Nova could have done the same thing by just being about a group of pilgrims sent back in time to save the human race. Certainly enough drama could be mined from that scenario to fill up at least one season’s worth of episodes. But, no, Terra Nova’s writers and producers decided to also throw in a conspiratorial second colony with a top-secret agenda (they don’t call them “the others,” but you might as well), as well an additional mystery concerning a series of strange mathematical chalk drawings. It’s a lot to jam into the first three episodes, and as a result, Terra Nova seems somewhat schizophrenic. People forget that Lost started with a sharp focus on the characters, and it’s many puzzles sprung outward from there, growing over time. Conversely, Terra Nova is eager to say right up front, “There’s so much going on here that you don’t understand!” without first convincing us to give a damn about any of it.

Feature diverse characters and hire a fun cast to play them. Everyone on Terra Nova is kind of samey: Grim-faced, fish-out-water adventurers trying to make their way in a dangerous new world. The show’s primary focus is the Shannons, a family of five presented in the pilot as facing bunch of obstacles (Dad’s been in jail, the son resents him, the youngest daughter doesn’t remember him). But then strangely all of those obstacles were either dealt with (or outright dropped) by episode two, leaving Terra Nova with a boring center. Jason O’Mara plays Papa Shannon somewhat blandly, and I keep wishing his part had gone to an actor with a little more edge. (The Chicago Code’s Jason Clarke comes to mind.) Outside the Shannon family, Avatar’s Stephen Lang fares best, but he’s playing the sort of straight-ahead career military man you’d expect. Falling Skies got a lot of mileage out of setting Colin Cunningham’s wily, sharp-tongued Pope loose amongst the other more dire survivors. But in Terra Nova, the good guys aren’t diverse enough to bounce off each other in interesting ways. All the drama comes from mysterious external forces, which dulls the storytelling.

Showy special effects are nice, but if CGI dinosaurs are the whole point of your series, you could have a problem. Most of Falling Skies’ FX budget went toward establishing the alien menace and then showing why they’re such a troublesome enemy. The money may have been limited, but it was spent with focus. With Terra Nova, FOX burns cash every week on extended dinosaur-attack sequences that sometimes tie directly into the main plot (episode two’s silly dino-birds) and sometimes don’t (episode three’s carnosaur attack). It almost feels like the show is obligated to have its humans fend off a new breed of scary dino every week just because (a)FOX has themoney to do it and (b) it’s how they promote the show. But since dinosaurs are ultimately just big animals driven by instinct to protect their territory, there’s not a lot of long-term dramatic benefit to featuring them again and again. Maybe Spielberg and company planned to just use them as an entry point to get viewers hooked on a more well-rounded sci-fi series, but so far that series as yet to show itself. It might want to do so before it’s too late and FOX decides to spend its money somewhere else entirely.