By far the most ambitious TV show of the new season, Terra Nova came with both dinosaur-sized budget and expectations. While every other spiritual successor to Lost has fallen well short, the networks have turned back to mostly generic, episodic police procedurals as the safe bet. But producer Steven Spielberg returns to the Jurassic era (okay, the Cretaceous) with a sci-fi, time-traveling series for Fox. It clearly aims to become event television.
At least they have one cop on the show, Jason O’Mara, the Irishman who played Det. Sam Tyler, on the American version, ironically, of Life On Mars. He’s a cop once again, Chicago narcotics officer Jim Shannon, who’s arrested for breaking population control laws, hiding a third child (and assaulting the officers who tried to take her away). Things are bad in 2149—can’t-see-the-sky-or-breathe-the-air bad. But Jim’s wife Elizabeth is a noted doctor who’s recruited by the Terra Nova project, a pioneering group, settling the late-Cretaceous-era Earth through a fissure in space/time. The adventure begins with a rather unbelievable jail-break, followed by an equally unbelievable time-port break-in, but the result is a reunited family in a prehistoric settlement.
Of course nothing is as it seems in Terra Nova, and we’re quickly introduced to “The Others” or rather, “The Sixers”—the sixth wave of settlers turned out to be saboteurs with a hidden agenda. They left Terra Nova to create their own settlement, and one is shot returning to steal power. Elizabeth becomes a hostage as she treats his wounds, and the leader of The Sixers, Mira (Christine Adams) arrives to negotiate his release.
The real stars of the pilot are the very believable dinosaurs, from gentle giants getting hand-fed by the youngest Shannon, Zooey, to T-Rex-ish meat-eaters and vicious Raptor-like “Slashers” proving that dinosaurs still rule this new earth.
But great CGI has never been more than a single ingredient in any good show and what will make or break Terra Nova are compelling characters and an intriguing plot. So far, we have a family unit that includes a strong dad, an accomplished mom, a rebellious son, a brainy older daughter and cute younger one. Both teenagers already have love interests, and son Josh has already been led astray by his—OTG (outside the gate) for some exotic moonshine, cliff diving and dinosaur shooting (self-defence). The only other adult character we come to know at all is Commander Nathaniel Taylor (Avatar’s Stephen Lang), the first man to come through the wormhole and the leader of Terra Nova.
As for intrigue, Taylor knows more than he’s letting on and has tried to keep secret the strange equations carved in the rocks where Josh and his new gang of youngsters went hiking. The Sixers have their own motives for standing against Taylor. And time may not work in the way that the pioneers were led to believe.
But unlike Lost which kept its audience hunting for clues and scratching their heads, Terra Nova curiously began handing out answers like Halloween candy towards the end of the pilot. The author of the mathematical scratches is Taylor’s missing son. The settlement is less about starting fresh in a new timeline and more a struggle for the power to re-write the past. Questions remain about which side is more just, but it’s already clear that the settlers are pawns in a bigger game. To fill that Lost-sized hole in our hearts, the writers are going to have trust that younger viewers are ready for at least a little bit of a challenge, but that may not be what they’re going for—some plot twists already seem obvious (I’m just waiting for the Shannon’s math-whiz daughter to crack the rock-carved code).
Judging by these first two hours, Terra Nova is going to be the equivalent of a popcorn flick for the small screen, full of visual wonder, thrilling action and the occasional surprise. If the networks are going to capitalize on their ever-more threatened advantage of reach, it’s going to take projects this grand. But for projects this grand to really capture our imagination, it’s going to have to populate its impressive new world with original characters and inventive stories.