Some unordered thoughts...
• If you start counting the numbing drums, distant horns and single desultory piano keys (a reality show staple nowadays), you'll get distracted enough that you won't hear anything else; it sounds like it was scored by John Carpenter. (Actually, John Carpenter would do better.)
• It specifically decries greed, war and ignorance but it is a product of them.[1]
• New dinosaur: "Carno" or "Carnosaurus," which looks for all the world like an allosaurus, but if you call it something else, you can make something new out of it.
• Soldiers with enough padding they could be playing football.
• Guns with enough motion tails and lights they should be in a video game.
• It substitutes emotional posturing for human interaction. [2] The posturing seems to provide a substrate for every person and event; long stares, tensed muscles - "there's gonna be a shootout" moments - where someone needs to back down before someone else gets hurt, and those awful strings or soft staccato piano notes that are only a viscous layer of crap you spread on the walls so when you throw the story against it, it sticks.Fiction has become a reflection of reality in which fewer and few people cooperate; they burst into conflict at every opportunity over minor things or plot elements that we don't care about.
• Josh is the handsome dummy with a temper. He worries about his father getting left behind before they arrive in Terra Nova then later criticizes his father for striking a police officer (which he'd done to protect his family) and serving time in jail. When Josh's sister explains some logistical time travel stuff regarding a probe (which solves some sci-fi continuity issues), Josh doesn't understand it and explains he was "having a life" while the rest of the world was interested in such nonsense.
• Now, I do understand the pieces - the producers need to explain your typical time line problems (the "grandfather paradox" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfather_paradox ) and good lookin' dumb ol' Josh is just dumb enough to make an excuse for his smart sister[3] to bore us with the details for a few seconds, so let's dispense with that. What I wonder about why the writers and producers didn't have enough trust in their audience to have a few main characters find the probe and analyze it and discuss it.• At one point two characters find strange writing on rocks, under a waterfall and beside a flowing stream. "Looks like it's been here for a while," says another good lookin' star (in a Twilight werewolf kind of way). Right. Flowing water carved the Grand Canyon but didn't erode this ancient writing. (Can you say "carnosaur"? Sure, I knew you could.) Look for the producers to create their own alphabet and language about previous inhabitants, and regardless of the time line issue, it will relate to our modern earth somehow.
• Episode 2, "Instinct" is a remake of The Birds without Tippi Hedron or Hitchcock or the suspense. I think I see where this is going; I suspect episodes will frequently put a familiar story in the Stone Age and let the dissonance and danger carry it along. How long can that go on? If you develop the characters, a few seasons perhaps, if they have enough money to continue inventing new aspects of prehistoric Earth.
I'm giving it a chance. When I was little, when TV was four networks and everyone talked about everything that was worth talking about, I lived inside TV and identified most closely shows like Planet of the Apes (the show and the movie), Kolchak: The Night Stalker (think X Files meets Jimmy Olsen meets Popeye Doyle), Johnny Quest (the first, original, and best, the one banned from Saturday morning TV because it was too violent). Which is all just to say that if I were a kid, I'd probably find less wrong and more right with Terra Nova.
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| Jimmy Olsen |
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| Karl Kolchak |
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| Popeye Doyle |
[1]
Call me jaded, but anything you watch on TV is a product of a social caste that has little understanding of you and me. There is more power and excess and money in that circle than you or I would ever see in a hundred lifetimes. It tries to connect with us, and it needs to in order to earn ratings, but few of the people behind the connection are like you and me, want to be like you and me, or even want to be in the same room with you or me. There are exceptions, I'm sure, and that keeps the illusion appealing.
[2]
Insightful emotion is difficult. The animated ones are easy - anger, fear, surprise, hate, etc. Anyone can script and shoot and perform an argument. We do it every day without cameras and without thinking. What's far more difficult is the unverbalized anger, fear, surprise, and hate, and the verbalized acquiescence, compromise, vulnerability, etc.
[3]
Naomi Scott, every dino-loving cell-texting Nintendo-playing pre-teen's dream.
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