Terra Nova 1x01&02 - Genesis Parts 1&2 (Grade/Discuss) SPOILERS

[Relayer1]

Six of one, I suppose. My reasoning is that it's easy to gloss over the faults in the various documentary CGI dinos becasue there is so rarely any real people in the same shot to visually compare to.

As for Primeval, admittedly I haven't watched any full episodes since the second season. Perhaps things have improved, but IMO those early episodes feel just like Terra Nova in terms of the effects work, and the clips I've seen since then never struck me as outstanding.

Mark

I can't actually remember any CGI this poor in Primeval. Can't remember any decent writing in Primeval either though...

 

[Relayer1]

Update - the Dino's looked a lot better in the 2nd hour of the pilot !

 

[Temis the Vorta]

I think that's too complicated for this show. They dispensed with time-loop possibilities with dialogue that told the audience in effect to stop thinking about time travel. To then rescind that instruction would be too confusing and frustrating for the audience. This show has to live or die based on the time where they are now.

Well, that doesn't leave a lot of possibilities for a decent mystery then ...

Why not? They've got a whole new timeline to play with. The past of this timeline could be different than our own, which means it's not impossible that dinosaurs could have evolved entirely differently, leading to a civilization of intelligent dinosaurs who the Sixers are trying to defend. Or, the mystery could be something to do with the future of this particular timeline, independent of our own.

If these writers can't figure out something fun to do with a whole new timeline, they need to find a new line of work. (However, given how dull this week's episode was, maybe I'm vastly overestimating their creative skills.)

 

[MacLeod]

Back when JP was made Spielberg et. al. spent a good deal of time and money and resources on making the CGI dinosaurs in that movie.

You'd think now, 20 years later, that fantastic CGI would be economically feasible to use on a TV series. Apparently not.

Such as the BBC's "Walking with Dinosaur's" which came out a few years after "Jurassic Park" with ecah 30min episode rumoured to have cost £1m

 

[John O.]

If anybody was intensely confused by this pilot and thought it had too much "mystery" shoved into it, you need to watch Lost, and you'll have pretty much the entire first season of Terra Nova worked ou

I remember two "mysteries" - the equations scribbled on the rocks near the waterfall and There's Something The Authority Isn't Telling Us. The first mystery was answered, or at least heavily implied, by the end of the second hour (it's Avatar guy son's work) and the second probably has something to do with the first.

There's definitely something the people behind this operation not telling and the Avatar guy's son figured it out and somehow shared it with the rebels. As to what exactly he figured out - there aren't many possibilities.

Something has been bothering me since the first scene where Commander Taylor told DadCop (now I'M calling him that, can't remember his name), about the Sixers - and that's - this implicit assumption that they the only reason a group of people all split off from the main colony is because they were all sent with some ulterior purpose from some Big Brother Figure presumably still back in 22nd century Earth.

Considering the discontinuity between 22C Earth and 85m yr ago Earth, I fail to see the real gain for some sort of superpowerful megalomaniacal "Dealer of Fates" human a la Charles Whitmore since the guy has no direct control over what's actually going on - unless he's actually there.

I think it's far more likely that The Sixers have figured something out that either A) Taylor knows and doesn't want anyone else to know or B) even Taylor doesn't know and they don't want to tell him. Why they don't want to tell him - perhaps they think, like he does, that he was sent by afore-mentioned megalomaniac.

So his brother has been scribbling math and trying to figure something out... what it could be... Well there's a few possibilities:

1) They weren't sent back to an alternate universe like you said (but I do not think an argument that humans 85m years in the past could have triggered economic apocalypse in the 22nd century holds water - in between the two time periods you have half a dozen or more MAJOR global climate transformations). These would be singularity events that would essentially cut off any long term causality connections between one ecosystem and another. Even nuclear winter would be sorted out within 85m years.

So they'd still have to figure out a reason why this is such a big deal, because like I said it can't be connected to an ecological collapse 85m yrs later.

2) They were not sent 85m years in the past, at all. They were sent A) to another planet, B) to the future, or C) to an alternate universe of their own present time.

3) They were not sent to 85m years in the future, they were sent to 64,999,998 years in the future or whatever computes out to be just before the massive extinction level event that wiped out our Dino friends. I.e. "shit we just went back in time to right before another ELE"

4) Something even more bizarre and existential i.e., Lost and the Numbers and the Valenzetti Equation.

Time Traxx screwed up in the first episode, with respect to alternate timeline versus time loop paradoxes, and they still lasted three years. :P

I think nthey're trying to set up a Lost-esque scenario wherein people can COME to the past with all their plot-generating problems, but getting off the island (sic) is basically impossible here. In essence, anyone coming to Terra Nova comes from a Really Bad Place, and they'll deal with them amongst various flesh-eating dinosaurs. They then either resolve their issues and fade away into the local scenery, or be eaten. Rinse and repeat.

As sci-fi setups go, it's not bad. Lots of the less successful sci-fi shows are very closed in their setup and it limits their longevity. For example, Flash Forward, The Event, Heroes, and other recent series start with a very big and traumatic event that propels the world into the story. Thing is, that event never happens again, and the audience is hard-pressed to remember or care why it was that important.

Here, the major event is quickly established as something that will happen again. Everyone got to Terra Nova with a time machine (or whatever), but they won't be the only ones. There WILL be more people coming eventually. Similar to Stargate SG-1, there is a huge plot point in the setup that will remain relevant to everyone for the duration of the show. I think this creates a comfortable place for an audience to visit, and stay interested for the long run. For the sake of the 10 year-old inside me that likes seeing dinosaurs, I hope it will.

Also, the CGI here is as good as stuff on the Discovery Channel. I checked out a dino documentary in the past week (not tought to find, really) and the effects are on par. What creates the difference here is context - it's tough to call a Discovery dinosaur poor quality because you don't have a real human standing next to it. In general, it's no better or worse than what we see in Primeval, and UNLIKE Primeval there seems to be a workable story here.

Mark

I would agree, it's a better-than-average setup with respect to depth and longevity from which plot can be drawn to keep the audience interested.

The world is so horrendously over-populated it seems to be fairly violently illegal to have more than two kids.

Yeah, the vigor with which the cops were tossing the apartment made it seem like an extra kid in a household is just as bad as having bomb-making materials today.

Indeed, it made me think of in other shows when the police storm homes to find evidence in a murder case or something. China's one child policy is certainly not quite that bad. What we see in this episode implied a much more violently enforced law.

Yet, the consequences seem to be not much more than a fine and the family going on living life as normal. -Dad was only jailed because he punched out the police.

I don't think it's accurate to say the dad's punishment was strictly for hitting a cop. I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure even when prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law it is pretty unusual for someone to go prison for 6+ years for punching a cop. I think his sentence is implied to have been pretty lengthy - 10-20. I think we are meant to presume that the hiding of the child was part of what he was imprisoned for.

In this particular vision of the future, however, people are being out-right told that over-population will lead to extinction.

Isn't extinction (of the poorer and less adaptable portions of the population) the antidote to overpopulation? And the society we were shown is not an Orwellian system because it's far too loosey-goosey for that. Otherwise they would have known about the pregnancy and forced the wife to abort the pregnancy, or at the very least, locked up both the parents when the third child was discovered.

Could easily have gone to another country to have the child when she found out she was pregnant - like abortion tourism in the UK - and then smuggled it back into the country. I say "easily" in a relative term since this family is obviously pretty wealthy and well connected.

 

[RJDiogenes]

1) They weren't sent back to an alternate universe like you said (but I do not think an argument that humans 85m years in the past could have triggered economic apocalypse in the 22nd century holds water - in between the two time periods you have half a dozen or more MAJOR global climate transformations). These would be singularity events that would essentially cut off any long term causality connections between one ecosystem and another. Even nuclear winter would be sorted out within 85m years.

So they'd still have to figure out a reason why this is such a big deal, because like I said it can't be connected to an ecological collapse 85m yrs later.

2) They were not sent 85m years in the past, at all. They were sent A) to another planet, B) to the future, or C) to an alternate universe of their own present time.

3) They were not sent to 85m years in the future, they were sent to 64,999,998 years in the future or whatever computes out to be just before the massive extinction level event that wiped out our Dino friends. I.e. "shit we just went back in time to right before another ELE"

4) Something even more bizarre and existential i.e., Lost and the Numbers and the Valenzetti Equation.

5) They're in Purgatory.

 

[spooky spice]

I was not impressed.

Wow the authorities really don't like you to have 3 kids - but they don't seem to punish you for it (unless being sent to Terra Nova is the punishment...?)

The teenage boy has a girlfriend who he has to leave behind, oh and he hates his dad. But never mind there's a scantily clad teenage girl in Terra Nova to catch his attention (why does that teenage girl look about 30 y/o?)

Why aren't any of the adults actively making sure the teenagers aren't trying to get under, or over, the fence? (Surely adults realise that teens will do something like that?)

You're supposed to go to an orientation thing to learn what You Need To Know About Living In Terra Nova, but none of the newbies bother to go...

A wormhole is discovered, they send a probe through and never recover it. How do they know where this wormhole goes?

Are humans actually capable of living 85million years ago? Would they be able to eat any of the vegetation?

I can't remember the names of any of the characters, that's never a good sign...

I got the impression the show was supposed to be aimed at sci-fi fans, then dumbed down for the non sci-fi fans to be able to understand, only they messed up and made it too stupid for the sci-fi fans to enjoy.

I'll watch the next few episodes and see what happens.

 

[Takeru]

Why not? They've got a whole new timeline to play with. The past of this timeline could be different than our own, which means it's not impossible that dinosaurs could have evolved entirely differently, leading to a civilization of intelligent dinosaurs who the Sixers are trying to defend. Or, the mystery could be something to do with the future of this particular timeline, independent of our own.

If these writers can't figure out something fun to do with a whole new timeline, they need to find a new line of work. (However, given how dull this week's episode was, maybe I'm vastly overestimating their creative skills.)

Even if it's not a new timeline and they're in our past, the writers could still do everything they want. What many people don't realize is that we don't know much about life on earth 85 million years ago. We found a few fossils, but there are countless species that we know nothing about. The writers can come up with every fantasy dinosaur they want, even intelligent ones.
Realistically the majoritiy of dinosaurs should be species we know nothing about, only 700 have been discovered and named (and that includes species that did not live 85 million years ago), that's nothing.

It's kinda annoying that pretty much every time characters travel into the past in movies or shows, they run into nothing but dinosaurs some smart kid knows just because he went to a fucking museum. Just once I want to see the resident genius just shrugging when he's asked if the dinosaur walking towards them is called.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Even if it's not a new timeline and they're in our past, the
writers could still do everything they want. What many people don't realize is that we don't know much about life on earth 85 million years ago

Might be a bit much to say there were dino-cities, but hey I'm up for it.

 

[jefferiestubes8]

I liked the look at the future for 20 minutes.
Loved the prison production design.

i was kind of bored by 1 hour and once we were in a rescue situation with the teenagers in the 'car' at night I had to just stop watching.
I don't want to get into watching this series.
I feel the '6ers' faction will just be like the two fighting groups on Jericho.
A repeat enemy other than the dinosaurs.
I just didn't feel like getting behind one or the other faction.

Our lead man was good acting.
I'm just not interested in this cast set on the island of Lost shot in Hawaii.