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Originally posted by Samprimary:
Based on the descriptions provided, take heart, it could just be those general startup difficulties.

Yet that gives the show a timeframe; if they have enough time to get into the 'swing of things,' and it's still not good, then don't expect it to get any better. Ever. It probably won't.

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"I don't know if I can go in without dad!"
"Gah! I hate you for leaving us two years dad, I'm nothing like you!"

Oh I see, you subscribe to the school of family first, but simultaneously imprisoned by the me first mentality of adolescence.

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"You can have your man, you can have the meds, but no ammo, no way."
"Can't blame a girl for trying."

Well, yes I can. What school of bargaining did you go to? "Could I get a few more fries with my combo meal, maybe a sweet and sour sauce packet, and an extra burger for free?"

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Also the discussion by the sixes about the markings on the falls. Why are they even talking about them, they clearly established that both of them know why they are there and who is writing them? Do people generally talk about things they both know about extensively? It drives me nuts when the writers want to inform the audience about things, but try to accomplish that by forcing dialogue.

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Oh no, a giant meat eating dinosaur is heading for our camp, here you take the wheel, and I'll assume you know what the hell I want you to do. Oh no, it wouldn't work if we shouted and yelled and fired our guns from within the vehicle, I need to get out, draw it's attention, and then you just read my mind and swoop in at the last moment, but don't drive away until I give you permission, and *then* we can drive into the camp.

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"Don't leave! Zoe is scared. Right Zoe?"
*Zoe smiles adorably clearly not scared*
*Stupid hunk guy is oblivious to how bad the lie was said*

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Here honey, here's a gas mask, with a cutting laser hidden inside, I didn't have to tell you in any secret way to look for it, and counter-intuitively the prison security doesn't check these things for that sort of contraband. BTW just laugh when the leader of Terra Nova praises the integrity of that very prison's security protocols.

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How in the heck do the folks at Terra Nova communicate with the people on the other side? It's a one way portal and communication is not possible? How would they know the people they are sending through the portal are not all dying instantly on the other side because in this parallel dimension there is too little oxygen?

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edit: And supposedly we let our teenagers live together because they mature and grow up faster in this environment. But during this episode you will see no indicator that they are in fact more mature than their teenage earth counterparts. (This was a lost opportunity, it would extremely cool to have teenagers who are a bit more mature than they normally would be because of the circumstances they live in)

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Oh hey honey, we haven't seen each other in two years, and we clearly love each other, but since little Zoe fell asleep on your bed, and she's gotten used to it, even though this is an entirely new bed, you better go sleep on the couch. There's no way we could move Zoe to her new bed, and have sex like two lovers who haven't seen each other in two years.

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Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by Lyrhawn:
Blackblade -

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Considering she bribed her way in, and from the subsequent huge piles of cash she gave him to bribe the OTHER guy, I think we can assume that generally it is a pretty tough prison unless you're loaded...however, that does raise the question of where she got the money. They made a point later of saying that their family COULD have chosen a life of luxury but specifically did not. Does she simply have rich and powerful friends? Did she borrow it like Steve Buscemi in Armageddon? That's a plot hole. The fact that everyone was accepting bribes in a dystopian future? Not a plot hole at all.

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They come right out and say they can get messages back, and I find it impossible to believe that they can't. First of all, how can they bury messages in the ground when they've already established they are in a different time stream? Unless that too is a lie (which wouldn't surprise me). Otherwise, why would the government be spending gazillions of dollars, sending their best and brightest through a hole into oblivion in somewhat small numbers without any proof at all that the people going through weren't just being vaporized? If the people being sent through were all poor I'd get it, it'd be a way to get rid of extra people while pretending they were going to a better place. But they actively recruit scientists and doctors, and spent a ton of resources. They have to be in contact. Also, how else would Taylor have gotten his prison record? Just happened to have it already?

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I really wouldn't be surprised if the "it's a different time stream!" thing was faked, but it would seem like the consequences would be pretty dire if they messed that one up.

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I'd have to rewatch to be sure, but I didn't see the same things you did re: Zoe. Granted I was doing some other things, but I immediately thought she was being held elsewhere. I mean, if they're just going to leave thirds with their parents, why have a thuggish group of police to take them away in the first place? Just have a social worker make a note and add it to the tax bill.

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Originally posted by Jeff C.:
I don't see this show lasting more than a season or two and here's why....

1. Money. The show is very expensive considering they have to use so much CG. In order to make it profitable, they'll have to get in some viewers, and quickly. They're less likely to stick around for long if they can't get a large amount of viewers.

2. It's Fox. Seriously, Fox is notorious for killing shows off before they've had a chance to blossom or develop. Remember Firefly? And that show had GREAT acting and writing.

3. The writing. It's terrible. I won't go into it here because it's already been said, but yes, it's awful.

4. Teenagers. Seriously, the one major flaw in this show is that it has such annoying characters, and half of them are kids. Nobody likes kids in shows. Nobody. There was a reason Lost only had 1 of them (and he only lasted for a few seasons). This show has like twelve of them, three of which are in the family.

5. It focuses on a family. Unlike Lost or pretty much any other successful show out there, this one has a main character who is married, which completely negates the possibility of a love interest. Oh, sure, you can say he's got his wife, but who cares about married love? I'm not trying to be mean about it, just realistic. The general audience wants to have the question of "will they/won't they?" rattling around somewhere, but this show doesn't have it. Oh wait, I forgot, the annoying unrelatable teenage son has a love interest (sort of). But since he is such a horrible character, I seriously doubt anyone will care.


On the other hand, it has that dude from Avatar, and he's pretty awesome. It also has a weird mystery involving some rocks and advanced physics, so that's cool. There's also the likable main character who looks like a carbon copy of Jack from Lost (scruffy lack of shaving and all). Oh, and yes, dinosaurs. But are these things enough? I'm not so sure.

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Ugh. I'm sad that Stephen Lang is referred to as "that guy from Avatar." Come on! He's totally "that guy from Gettysburg!" I was actually quite tickled when he said "Damnation!" in the first episode. Lang will always be General Pickett to me.

And Jason O'Mara isn't a Jack clone. You must never have seen Life on Mars.

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As for burying messages, yeah, I guess so, but, on the other hand, wouldn't they have like millions of messages available to them? If they're burying messages, then yes, it would effectively be instantaneous, but it would also mean that they have access to EVERY message that would ever be sent. I can't imagine they wouldn't just go read them all, and then bring them up again whenever a new question or what not goes out or comes in to make that message relevant. Taylor, on the other hand, said he hadn't told anyone in command "yet." Either he's lying to keep up the deception, or he's telling the truth and communication is far more immediate.

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Originally posted by Lyrhawn:
Ugh. I'm sad that Stephen Lang is referred to as "that guy from Avatar." Come on! He's totally "that guy from Gettysburg!" I was actually quite tickled when he said "Damnation!" in the first episode. Lang will always be General Pickett to me.
[/QB]

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Posts: 135 | Registered: Apr 2006  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by Lyrhawn:
Now Sam Elliott, I have trouble deciding if my "memory" role for him is as General Buford or Virgil Earp.

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Originally posted by Lyrhawn:
An asteroid is going to wipe out whatever they build in about 10 million years anyway, so what does it matter?

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Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005  |  IP: Logged | 

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Originally posted by Samprimary:

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Originally posted by Lyrhawn:
An asteroid is going to wipe out whatever they build in about 10 million years anyway, so what does it matter?

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I think 10 million years of development is sufficient enough to set up the sorts of things necessary to deflect an asteroid 0.0001% off its known trajectory.

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First, a news article:
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/09/26/7973577-terra-nova-gives-dino-fans-something-new-to-chew-on

Synopsis (superbrief): Colonists from a dystopian mid-22nd Century populated
entirely by early 21st century suburban Americans
facing environmental catastrophes flee via a rift in time to the early
Santonian (85 Ma), where they have to deal with dinosaurs,
intra-colony rivalries, and Steven Speilberg.

My Facebook observations are a) kids love the show and b) those who have been
around the block more often find it tedious, poorly
placed, and a poor execution of some halfway decent ideas.

Now, my thoughts:
Plot/setting: "Political refugees and misfits escape via stable oneway timerift
to a parallel past" is a combination of science
fiction tropes that work fine for plot reasons. Parallel past allows for people
to actually act and do things without consequences
for the future (Utley's Silurian short story cycle and Stirling's Nantucket
series both used this premise). The "political refugees
and misfits escape via stable oneway time rift" is the same background of May's
Saga of Pliocene Exile, and plenty of good stories
(Steele's Coyote colony books) [and, of course, reality!!] have been written
about misfits and other refugees as pioneers.

The idea of using the Santonian is a good one: it is largely a "twilight zone"
in terms of our paleontological knowledge, which
gives greater freedom to the writers. It stands between the pretty well known
communities of the Cenomanian and the extraordinarily
well known faunas of the Campano-Maastrichtian. If the writers were clever (ah,
if only...) they could draw upon both time slices to
create late survivors of the Cenomanian faunas and early precursors of the
latest K. But more about what they actually did below...

I am not quite certain if they established WHERE on the Earth the colony is (I
missed it if they said). This is an issue, because by
the Santonian you are getting regionalization of faunas to some degree, and
that is going to effect your taxon choice. Or at least,
it SHOULD affect your taxon choice.

The mountainous setting has multiple uses: From the point of view of the
audience, it is pretty. From the point of view of
characters in the story, it makes sense: running fresh water, and the potential
for hydroelectic power. From the point of view of
the writers, the fact that montane faunas basically don't wind up as fossils
gives them additional leeway in creating taxa.

The critters:
* Brachiosaurus. Umm, Brachiosaurus. Apparently a very late surviving
population... And they obviously went back in time prior to
the 2000s to find these ones, because they hadn't heard about the repositioning
of the fleshy nostrils! (My suspicion: they modded
the CGI models from Jurassic Park, and didn't correct this issue). Nice aspect:
they make reference to the fact (in our world,
possibility) that they occasionally chomped on small animals, too: hat tip to
Greg Paul. On the other hand, they referred to
"incisors" on these guys...

* Carnotaurus. A very early population of these... (Redated, Carnotaurus is one
of the youngest of the abelisaurids. But it was once
considered Aptian/Albian. Maybe this is a population in transit due to the
redating...) Utterly failed to get the forearms right on
them (again!): so far Dinosaur Revolution and Planet Dinosaur's models are the
only correct abelisaurid arms in CG. While we do not
have Carnotaurus' metatarsi, they gave it feet that are probably far too long
and slender based on other abelisaurids.

They could have said "brachiosaur" and "abelisaur" and it would have been fine:
we might get both of these 85 Ma. Specifying the
genus name (okay, I know that etymologically that phrase is inaccurate!) sets
them up to be wrong. If I were a consultant on this
(which I'm not), I would encourage them not to use particular known genera.

Also, this is where knowledge of where on Earth they are is important. If North
America or mainland Asia, the presence of an
abelisaurid is just contradictory to our current information on dinosaurian
biogeography! Any other continent, not so bad.

* Acceraptor. An invented dinosaur, nicknamed "the slasher". Inventing new
dinosaurs isn't a bad idea, so long as the invention is
reasonable, given that new species are named at a rate of about 1/week or more.
This thing, though: it looks something like a
toothed oviraptorosaur (or an oviraptorosaur-crested dromaeosaur) with Jurassic
Park "bunny hands" syndrome and a slashing tail
weapon. If it were me, I'd have suggested some sort of megaraptoran
neovenatorid. (And jeez, if you want a pack hunting predator,
you are smack dab in the middle of Eudromaeosauria's stratigraphic range!)

* Giant centipedes. Yes, you read me right: giant freaking scolopendrid
centipedes. Maybe 2 m long. What is next: giant man-eating
plants with mobile tentacles?!? Shades of bad "lost world" movies of yore...

The colony:
Fleeing to the mid-Cretaceous to escape high CO2 levels, is like trying to get
out of the cold by heading back to the Last Glacial
Maximum! It is NOT going to be like a "breath of fresh air". They do make
reference to people and crops suffering from hyperoxic
conditions, but it is not certain if this is because they are using the model
where mid-Jurassic through Cretaceous atmosphere have
higher-than-present pO2 concentrations (still a matter of debate in
paleoclimatology), or if it is supposed to be the reaction of
people from the craptactular atmosphere of the mid-22nd Century breathing clean
air for once. Sadly, I expect the latter. Just a
reminder: the atmosphere of the past is no more the same as the present
atmosphere anymore than the geography of the past is like
the present.

That said, at least it would lack all the industrial pollutants, so there are
plenty of reasons to want to go back.

However, food may be an issue: most grains use the C4 metabolic pathway, and
these plants do poorly in higher CO2 conditions. They
will probably have to mostly live off the land.

SPECULATIONS (you are warned): There are mysterious writing (equations) left on
rocks that the colony leader has forbidden people to
see. Given these, and some other comments, I suspect that the secret mission of
the colony is actually to set up a reverse time rift
to ship back natural resources to their home timeline. Or maybe not, we'll see.


Thomas R. Holtz, Jr.
Email: tholtz@umd.edu Phone: 301-405-4084
Office: Centreville 1216
Senior Lecturer, Vertebrate Paleontology
Dept. of Geology, University of Maryland

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So thanks for letting the trolls win yet again...

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