Cast: Jason O’Mara, Christine Adams, Byron Brockmann, Shelly Conn, Stephan Lang, Simone Kessell, Landon Liborion, Allison Miller
Director: Jon Cassar
Writers: Terry Matalas, Travis Fickett
Network: Airs on Fox, Mondays @ 8pm
Original Telecast: Nov. 7, 201

“Nightfall” was a vast improvement over the episodes we have seen so far on TERRA NOVA.

Instead of some lame disease, or a runaway, or murder because of a gambling debt of all things, we got a genuine conflict between the Sixers and the colony as well as a definite look at how deadly the land they live in can be. Something that we have been dying to see since day one of this show.

While we didn’t get a lot of information about what the box contained or its value to Taylor’s (Stephan Lang) son and his relationship with Mira (Christine Adams) – or the reason as to what job she was sent to do on Terra Nova, it set up a situation where the show could go in a positive direction. We could finally be crawling out of the hole that the show dug itself in and the continued focus of the Shannon family and their romantic interludes and into more of the overall mythos of the series.

Now, I’ve watched all the episodes of this show so far and it has been almost pulling teeth to get to this point, I just hope that they do not lose focus and we can continue down this path. There is so much that we don’t know about the characters and why they are there. Why Taylor spent so long in the jungle by himself, why his son hates him, what the Sixers were sent to do, what the real reason behind Terra Nova is, is it our past or an alternate Earth’s past? All of these and many more are what the show should be focusing on.

While the whole blackout over Terra Nova was a bit humorous – a meteor firing an EMP device over the colony and leaving it vulnerable to the attack of the Sixers and their poor torture ginormous dinosaur – the aspect that they are relying so much on their technology and the consequences of doing so was interesting to see. Now, I doubt they will follow up on this fact but it might be an interesting path to go down, preparing for a powerless future. But I guess when you have a magical semiconductor chip making machine that isn’t that much of a worry.

Here’s to hoping that they will not backtrack next week as we focus more on what was established in this episode and less on gambling debts and lame mystery diseases.

Things that I thought were interesting or hilarious in “Nightfall”:

• Young adults still binge drink on Terra Nova.
• In order to have more than two kids in the future, you gotta go to a rundown farmhouse.
• Meteors have built-in EMP devices.
• Stinky mud makes a great alternative to dinosaur dung, who knew?
• Why was Zoe Shannon (Alana Mansour) so afraid of that tight space? She was put in an air conditioning unit in the opening episode with no problems. You’d think she’d feel right at home.
• I’ve said it a few times already but no one cares anymore about statutory rape in the future (past?)

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