Warning. This review contains several spoilers about the series “Terra Nova”!
On December 19 the first season of the show “Terra Nova” ended. FOX will decide only the next year about to renewal of the series, which aired in the U.S.A. on Monday night, along with “House, M.D.”, a show that we already know it will end with its current season. In January 2012 on Monday evening the series “Alcatraz” will air so there’s the clear impression that FOX executives want to see its audience and understand which show they should broadcast in the next season in place of “House, M.D.”.
Terra Nova is a colony created in the Cretaceous trahnks to the discovery of a space-time rift that allows the opening of a portal to the past to travel 85 million years back in time. The trip is one way only because the portal only works from the future to the past, though there are hints about the possibility of sending radio signals towards the future.
In 2149, the Shannon family joins a “pilgrimage”, a group of settlers who regularly travel in time when the portal is opened to become part of the community of Terra Nova.
In addition to dinosaurs and other predators of various kinds, among the dangers for the settlers there are the Sixers, a splinter group that threatens Terra Nova’s existence.
The “Terra Nova” cast consists of:
- Jason O’Mara as di James “Jim” Shannon
- Shelley Conn as Elisabeth Shannon
- Christine Adams as Mira
- Landon Liboiron as Josh Shannon
- Naomi Scott as Maddy Shannon
- Alana Mansour as Zoe Shannon
- Allison Miller as Skye Alexandria Tate
- Rod Hallett as Malcolm Wallace
- Stephen Lang (foto ©Gage Skidmore) as Nathaniel Taylor
Unfortunately, despite the fact that among “Terra Nova” executive producers there’s Steven Spielberg, this show has demonstrated from the start heavy deficiencies in terms of contents.
The pilot episode begins in 2149, showing a future world terribly polluted and overpopulated. Despite the desperate conditions, Jim and Elizabeth Shannon not only have the two children permitted by the law but they also have a third one, Zoe. The family must keep their little girl hidden but she’s found during a control because her parents haven’t been able to create a decent hiding place.
Jim Shannon beats one of the cops who found Zoe and is locked up in prison. After two years his wife Elizabeth is recruited for the upcoming pilgrimage to Terra Nova along with the two children she legally had. When the woman goes to the prison to communicate the news to her husband she’s able to give him the modern equivalent of a knife-file, thanks to which Jim manages to escape from a prison where security is obviously non-existent.
Having bribed the right people, Jim Shannon is able to retrieve Zoe, who’s hidden in a backpack, to evade the surveillance around the portal that’s obviously as bad as the prison’s, and travel to the past together with the whole family.
Arrived as a stowaway in Terra Nova, Jim Shannon is able to be assigned to the security service of the colony when he saves Commander Taylor from the attack of a Sixer who infiltrated the colony.
For mysterious reasons, the pilot had good reviews but because of the lack of contents, negative reviews about the following episodes arrived that emphasize the dullness of the characters and especially the dullness and lack of contents in the plots.
The show’s producers promised that in the last episodes of the season they’d provide explanations about the Sixers goals and the work of Lucas Taylor, the Commander’s son. Indeed, after several episodes that just left clues about the season plot within a lack of decent contents there was the finale in which the portal is modified to run in both directions. From the future a small army arrives to take over Terra Nova and plunder the Earth’s past, so the settlers must try to resist the invasion. Unfortunately, in the finale they used again a lot of cliches, starting with the confrontation between Taylor father and son.
“Terra Nova” has also been compared to the British show “Outcasts”, set on planet Carpathia where a group of settlers who fled from a dying Earth tries to build a better civilization. In this series the colonists face several threats, including a splinter group. “Outcasts” was canceled after the first season and ended with the arrival of an armed force which wanted to take over the colony.
“Terra Nova” has a much higher budget than “Outcasts” and there’s a big difference in its style: while the British series is a science fiction drama, Steven Spielberg’s show is basically a family comedy with some science fiction elements.
In fact, the series thrives on family relationships: the Shannon family is the protagonist, Commander Taylor has a relationship conflictual to say the least with his son, the leader of the Sixers Mira wants to save her daughter remained in the future, Skye spies for the Sixers to save her mother who contracted an illness for which Terra Nova has no remedy but curiously the Sixers have one.
The fact that “Terra Nova” is a family show can be seen in the season finale, when a plot in which the level of violence was potentially very high has been developed so as to show only its bare essentials.
The elements of the series not related to family matters look like just fillers but, starting with the dinosaurs, seem to appear almost at random, without any real planning but just putting a cliche after another so that the audience don’t have to make an effort to understand what’s happening.
Unfortunately, it seems that in recent years Steven Spielberg has been involved in productions of lower and lower quality from “Avatar”, a triumph of special effects to cover a story already seen a number of times, to “Falling Skies”, which has characters and plots even worse than “Terra Nova”! If the movie was successful from a commercial point of view, on TV the audience is decent but not outstanding.
We’re waiting to know the future of “Terra Nova” but if it’s renewed it will take much more than a few dinosaurs to make it more than mediocre.
Edit March 6, 2012. Fox officially canceled “Terra Nova” but left open the possibility to sell the show to another channel.
