First Impressions: Terra Nova

(Airs on FOX, Monday nights at 8pm)

Terra Nova is the biggest piece of shit pilot I’ve ever seen. Take into effect the super-long, oft-delayed production schedule (remember, the pilot was originally announced to air in May), the $20 million price tag of the 2-hour pilot, and the absolute void of any acting talent on the announced cast, and we all knew it was coming…. but even I didn’t see this coming. This show is really, really awful.

Terra Nova is about a world at a crossroads: the world has polluted itself into a Wall-E esque existence, and humans are turning to an unexplained rip in the time/space continuum to go back 56 million years in time to “do it right” (although of course, there are darker ulterior motives to all of it). With this as the historical context, we meet the Shannon family, who face some legal problems after knowingly breaking the 2-child law now in effect on Earth in the 22^nd century (apparently, China’s influence continues to grow). After an unexplained 15 minutes of arrests, jail breakouts, and weak exposition into the sci-fi mythology behind the show, we finally get to the point and enter the past, where the show only continues to get worse.

First off, there is a glaring void on conflict between the main members of the family. Of course, the son is rebellious and the little daughter is cute and innocent, but there is NOTHING driving the show emotionally. Every piece of dialogue and emotional conflict is pulled from every single typical plot line you’ve seen multiple times for the past thirty years, and it turns the family into one-noted talking faces that an audience will never care anything about. It spreads out to the show’s secondary characters. Seriously, do I need another show with a father/son battle for power (between the so-called leader of Terra Nova, Commander Taylor, and his unseen-at-this-point son)? Throw in some love stories (which anyone with half a mind saw coming from miles away), some weak sci-fi shit, and an empty black void for a plot, and all we have is Michael Bay on TV – which would be a bit of a compliment to Terra Nova, because at least Bay can make wild action scenes.

Sure the special effects looked good, but that’s not going to keep me with a show for thirteen hours. And Terra Nova isn’t offering anything up besides cool-looking (if sometimes odd moving) dinosaurs: in fact, I’d argue the dinosaurs who don’t talk or have much of anything to do with the main plots of the show are more fun to watch then the humans, who are given absolutely no material with any presence of depth to work with. It might be the worst pilot script ever put to screen: it rips off everything from LOST (we all can see the time-traveling plot lines coming) to The Godfather (the blatantly obvious use of oranges), doing it all very badly. There is even a scene with people stuck in a busted car as dinosaurs attack it…. do they think nobody’s seen those Jurassic Park movies?

There will be a large audience for Terra Nova, thanks to the two years of hype, and the willingness of Americans to watch mind-numbing bullshit with pretty effects. It’s hard to even write a review for Terra Nova, being one of the worst two hours of television I’ve ever watch. There’s nothing good about Terra Nova: the writing stinks, the acting stinks, the special effects are boring, and the show already showed its hand as being a conspiracy-based sci-fi crap pile, so save yourself the time, and SKIP IT!