By John J. Joex
Sci fi fans have eagerly awaited the Steven Spielberg produced Terra Nova since it was first announced as series over a year ago. But now that it’s here, high expectations have ceded to major disappointment for many. I’m one who personally finds the show vastly underwhelming, and after having seen its third episode I wonder if FOX has succeeded in giving us one of the absolute worst science fiction series of the past decade or more. And while the series has already been picked apart ruthlessly across many blogs, forums, and social networking sites, it’s worth taking a look at just what went wrong with the final product and determine if it has any hope for salvation.
I would have to say that the biggest failing of the show is that it has no clear vision, feeling like the product of a conglomeration of corporate executives instead of the inspiration of one or a few creators. Sure, Kelly Marcel is listed as the series creator, but if you check the IMDb.com entry on her you see that she has a pretty sparse resume with little in the way of genre cred. I’m guessing some executive somewhere liked the idea and took her initial treatment into a meeting of the suits where they injected plenty of formula into it to bolster the concept into something they thought palatable for Prime Time viewers. So instead of establishing some vision or tangible direction for the show, they just lumped cliché upon contrivance to create what can only be described as a corporate product with plenty of branding and merchandising potential (and I should note that this is a specialty of Spielberg of late).
Let’s just take a look at a few examples. The series is supposed to be about people escaping from a bleak future where the environment is breaking down to a world in the past where they can build a new life (throwing in some less than satisfying justifications for how this will not lead to paradoxes or butterfly effects). But they have to start series off with some contrived storyline where Jason O’Mara’s character gets thrown in jail for two years thus setting up his detachment from his family and providing the justification for the teen angst of his son. On top of that, they throw in formula television story threads like O’Mara’s wife’s ex-lover being at Terra Nova, and a group of defiant teens running afoul of the authorities, and O’Mara himself playing the head-strong rebellious cop doing things his way. And we have even had to cringe through the dreaded child-in-jeopardy ploy in the second episode.
But what they have failed to do is recognize the potential for good stories that lay at the heart of the show’s premise. There’s plenty of drama to be found in just exploring this new world and showing how the people there learn to live in such harsh conditions, cut off from any immediate aid. A good creative team could mine that right there for many seasons without stumbling on themselves (look at what Lost did on just a single, small island). There’s no need to throw in a bunch of stock television side-stories that we’ve already seen hundreds, if not thousands, of times before. And trust me, there’s also no reason to contrive a justification for teen angst. That’s just part of their nature.
But the producers of the series chose not to follow the more organic, creative path when approaching the stories for Terra Nova. And really, this show demonstrates much of what has been wrong with the movies Spielberg has directed over the last few decades. Great premises bogged down by tired, predicament-oriented scripts that often shoot for family appeal but that do so by stooping to such manipulative tricks as constantly putting children in harm’s way. We don’t have a series that wants to engage our mind in any way, we have a bag of tricks that wants to throw platitudes at as so fast along with cool looking CGI dinosaurs (unlike some others, I think the creatures are well done) that we don’t think about the fact that we’ve seen it all before, and likely done much better.
Usually, after only three episodes, even if I don’t particularly care for a series I can at least see some potential in it. But after cringing my way through the two hour pilot and two more episodes, I have little or no hope for this one. In my opinion, it would need a drastic course change to work into even a decent genre entry, and I don’t see the producers doing that. And at this point, I am done with this show. I like it less than last year’s No Ordinary Family (another one the tried to mix genre elements with family-friendly stories), or ABC’s V reboot, or NBC’s mess of a series The Event. In fact, I have to go all the way back to 2000’s Cleopatra 2525 to think of a worse example of genre television than Terra Nova. That may seem grossly unfair after only three episodes, and maybe the show will show some improvement and redeem itself. But at this point I see little chance of that happening with this once highly anticipated series.
