Am I the only one tiring of Sky Atlantic’s Steven Spielberg produced dinosaur adventure Terra Nova?
It’s admittedly still early days but the show is scarily short on ambition and has a growing list of issues I’m struggling to get past:
Other than consistent series branding, why is the camp called Terra Nova? It’s a fairly ambitious name for a pretty small camp…
In the opening episode a huge crowd were queueing to be transported back in time, but the camp appears to house fewer people than travelled back alongside the Shannon family. If this is the tenth pilgrimage, where are all others?
Why are the camp’s population, most of whom seem to be from civilian roles in their own time, so happy to be placed under the control of the military? Have they given up on representative democracy?
How are the settlers planning to deal with the fact that any buildings they construct have to be capable of withstanding the impact of an angry T-Rex?
Their existing wooden-looking huts may be fine for a settlement protected by a barrier, but eventually continued migrations and population growth means they’re going to need to expand beyond the fence.
Where are the rocket launchers, helicopters and tanks? Surely the pilgrims realised assault weapons alone would not be enough to protect them?
What’s with the ‘armoured’ jeeps which look and sound like milk floats with some plastic bits stapled to them?
The ‘breakaway group’ thing has been done to death. The Six-ers make even Voyager’s pointless Maquis look interesting.
An episode centres around established settlers who are apparently too dim not to know that running outside the protective wooden fence into a jungle of man-eating Dinosaurs isn’t a good idea. Other people then get put in harm’s way to retrieve them. Does a new civilization really need such selfish and stupid brats hampering its growth?
So far it’s all been pretty underwhelming, predictable and decidedly average.
If the production team’s intention was to create something very different to Spielberg’s Jurassic Park they’ve succeeded, but perhaps not in the way they intended.
While JP had a huge cultural impact, I’ll be shocked if Terra Nova doesn’t go the way of it’s reptilian cast members…
