SF-Fandom Weighs In On Spielberg’s “Terra Nova”
We have watched the 2-hour premier of “Terra Nova” on Fox and our forum members have weighed in with first impressions and opinions. You can check out everything shared so far in this Terra Nova discussion.
But here’s the short version: Eh.
The storyline is a bit tired (Dad fights with son, Mom tries to fit in to new job, Stephen Lang is a tough-as-nails commander trying to keep everyone alive, etc.).
The premise of the show — that humanity is so desperate to survive after having polluted the Earth until it’s nearly uninhabitable that it attempts time travel to start over — is interesting but it has been done before, even on cheap TV movies (at least, time travel to the age of the dinosaurs has been).
Frankly, I’m not sure why anyone would want to go back 70-80 million years. Not only were there lots of big vicious dinosaurs hanging around, the clock was ticking on the world then, too. 65 million years ago a huge asteroid plunged into the Earth, wiping out something like 90% of the species on the planet.
If it were me, I would consider going back about 50 million years. The planet will have recovered from the disaster by then and there wouldn’t be that many huge vicious critters running around trying to eat us. Of course our ancestors would be little furry things scurrying along through the jungle and we would have to be extra careful about what we ate.
On the other hand, it came out in the show that scientists didn’t so much discover the secret of time travel as find a rift in time — and they’re not sure whether the rift cuts back into our timeline (where we are all DOOMED!) or opens a door into an alternate timeline.
Alternate timelines are rather trite. I’d rather find out that the colonists of Terra Nova have found their way back into OUR timeline and they need to figure out how to get off the Earth without falling into the old Temporal Paradox Trap. If that turns out to be the case, then the time rift’s going back before the end of the dinosaurs is conveniently safe. Most of the species alive in the past will be wiped out anyway. Chance of a paradox is pretty slim in that scenario.
The show needs to get as far away from “classic science fiction setup” as soon as possible because, frankly, we’ve all seen that story before. The sooner they start developing the inevitable story arcs and allowing the highly convoluted dramatic plots to take over the writing, the sooner people will get emotionally invested in the show.
If we really need to follow a family drama in a new world, then they should have followed the Swiss Family Robinson model instead.