Cast: Jason O’Mara, Christine Adams, Byron Brockmann, Shelly Conn, Stephan Lang, Simone Kessell, Landon Liborion, Allison Miller
Writers: Kelly Marcel, Craig Silverstein, Brannon Braga, David Fury
Director: Alex Graves
Network: Airs on Fox, Mondays @ 9pm
Original Telecast: September 26, 2011

Many of you probably never watched the BBC science fiction series OUTCASTS, if you had, you’d know the eerie similarities that it shares with the premise of TERRA NOVA, Fox’s new science fiction/action show.

In OUTCASTS, the world has gone so much to hell that they made the choice to abandon the planet in favor of a new habitable world where they set up a colony to begin a new life. Unfortunately, the planet is rough, there are numerous wild beasts and dangerous weather systems and there is a rouge element of the settlers that have branched off to live among themselves outside the walls of the colony. Of course, not everything is black and white and there are numerous secrets and lies being spewed about.

Now, slap dinosaurs into the mix and have the focus primarily on one family and you have TERRA NOVA.

Now, don’t get me wrong, this is not a bad thing. I loved OUTCASTS. I was saddened that the show didn’t get a second season because it was shaping up to be the new BATTLESTAR GALACTICA – one of my favorite shows of all time. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying TERRA NOVA is the new BSG. But it definitely has some potential to be something very interesting and in-depth if given the opportunity.

While the whole traveling through time thing opens up a whole can of worms. Why travel to a period of time that is completely wiped off the face of the Earth by some catastrophic event? If they go back in time and erase all of history, how’d they get all that fancy technology? How do they have the laser rifles and pistols and cars? And what about all those poor people stuck in the terrible future? Don’t they just fade from existence? Time paradoxs make my head hurt.

But I can live with it. I can accept that they are changing everything as a new chance on Earth, a Earth that mankind has destroyed.

I like the premise a lot in fact. A high-tech society that has to deal with the perils of Cretaceous period as well as the dangers of man with all the jealousy, greed and secrets that goes along with it. It has a deep JURASSIC PARK meets LOST feel. At least on the surface.

Some of the plotlines are pretty lazy, but given this was the pilot episode that is sometimes to be expected. The whole son hooking up with a wild chick that makes moonshine in the jungle with her other trouble making friends that get surrounded by a pack of nasty dinos is fairly cliché but again it is more of a launching point for the overall show. The same can be said for all of the family-oriented plotlines that just screamed as if they didn’t need to be on the show to make it important or interesting.

However, these are all storylines that can be adjusted or dropped or ended quickly. I’d like  to see more stories involving some of the other characters in the colony and the difficulties they face in the Cretaceous period and keeping things up and running while protecting the population from man-eating beasts and the unknown as well as mankind’s own general nature.

We’ll see what happens as there are some interesting characters in the show and that means there are some good possibilities of these things happening including Stephen Lang’s Nathanial Taylor, where Lang basically plays the same character he played in AVATAR.

Overall, I thought it was a good start to a promising new series and if they improve on some of these weaker plotlines and make things more complex and interesting, Fox may have a winner on their hands.

Meanwhile, here are the Top-10 things I learned watching the first episode of TERRA NOVA “Genesis”:

1. In the future, putting babies in the ventilation shaft is still considered a no-no.
2. The future looks eerily familiar to BLADE RUNNER.
3. Prison breaks are extremely easy in the future and security to enter the past is really lax.
4. Jungle car chases with a T-Rex is a normal occurrence.
5. You can make red moonshine from a foul tasting fruit/nut combination.
6. You can survive a dinosaur attack if you are cute and needed to move along the plotline.
7. Writing on rocks is the new way to piss off your parents.
8. CGI dinosaurs look pretty good if they are slowly moving but if they are fast, quickly turn into something terrible from the SyFy Channel.
9. Your mortal enemy can just drive up to the front door of your colony and offer some goods that you need and you gladly trade with them.
10. No one gives a rat’s ass that they just traveled to an era that was literally wiped off the face of the planet by an extinction event, despite the fact they were sent there to SAVE the human population.

AGREE? DISAGREE? LET US KNOW WHAT YOU THINK – COMMENT BELOW!

Click onb Link: TV Review – TERRA NOVA – Season 1 – “Instinct”

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Article: TV Review – TERRA NOVA – Season 1 premiere

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