Welcome to Terra Nova! It seems like we’ve been hearing about this show -- and the many, many struggles to bring it to our living rooms -- since forever. Now that it’s here, was it worth the wait? Umm… Kind of? Potentially. Terra Nova combines elements of Jurassic Park, Lost, Land of the Lost, and Julian May’s Saga of Pliocene Exile into a whole that so far is somewhat less than the sum of its parts. The problems are fixable, though, and there’s no reason it can’t improve. It’s early days yet, in other words, and this thing could go either direction.

We begin in the twenty-second century, where Earth is an overpopulated, badly polluted hellhole where the sun never shines, the air is brown, and everybody is absurdly good looking. -- What? It’s true. The evidence:

Jason O'Mara as Jim Shannon

Yum!

Shelley Conn as Elisabeth Shannon

OMG that bone structure.

Naomi Scott as Maddy Shannon

Cute!

Alana Monsour as Zoe Shannon

Adorable!

Landon Liboiron as Josh Shannon

Zoiks, it’s Logan Huffman! Hold me. -- Oh, wait. Yeah, we’ll be getting back to this guy in a couple of minutes.

Anyway, these are the Shannons of (apparently) Chicago; Mom’s a brilliant doctor, Dad’s a cop, kids are cute as shiny buttons. Unfortunately, Child #3, aka Zoe, is there illegally -- families are limited to two children apiece due to (reading between the lines) overpopulation and scarcity of resources. One dark day, the population police arrive at the Shannons’ door and find little Zoe cowering behind a wall vent. This is evidently a bad thing, because Dad goes ballistic and takes a swing at a population cop, landing himself in prison for his efforts.

… Okay, so right away, we know that Dad, aka Jim, is a) a bit of a hothead and b) a lot of an idiot. First, he and his wife, aka Elisabeth, chose to flout the law in having Zoe. However one feels about compulsory population control, it’s not like the law was in any way obscure -- signs reading “A Family is Four” hang all over town -- and they had to have known the risks of getting caught. (How they managed to conceal a pregnancy, a birth, and a baby for all that time is left unexplained, probably mercifully so.) Then, when they inevitably do get caught -- if he could just manage to NOT ASSAULT ANYONE, the family could conceivably get off with a fine and be allowed to go about their business. But NO. So I’m already shaking my head at these people.

But anyway. While Jim is a guest of the state in the Big House, Elisabeth learns that she’s been selected to go through the Time Portal to Terra Nova, Earth’s last best hope, 85 million years in the past. Kids #1 and 2 (aka Josh and Maddy) get to go along; Zoe and felon Jim aren’t invited, since we can’t reward bad behavior, after all. But Elisabeth’s Not Going Anywhere Without Her Family, so she breaks her husband out of the slammer with remarkable ease and he pummels his way through the Time Portal (after a quick stop to pick up Zoe in a giant backpack).

Can I just take a minute here to ask: if Earth is so bad (and it seems to be) and the Time Portal’s security so incompetent (and I don’t see how there can be any disagreement on this point), why aren’t people sneaking through all the damn time? Hell, why aren’t the guards saying “screw it” and jumping through themselves? In any event, Jim makes it through and -- true to form -- comes up swinging on the other side. An unimpressed Commander Taylor, leader of Terra Nova, assigns him to Agricultural Detail, where it becomes necessary for him to remove his shirt.

From this promising beginning, the show quickly and unfortunately devolves into a by- the-numbers family melodrama. “Did we do the right thing? Coming here?” mews Elisabeth helplessly, watching Josh castigate the long-suffering Jim for abandoning the family (to PRISON, Josh! To PRISON! It’s not like he was chilling on a yacht somewhere with Scarlett Johansson and Christina Hendricks or anything). “We’re going. To start again. As a family,” monotones Jim. (O’Mara is a very attractive man but that was one of the worst line readings I’ve ever heard.) Josh, for his part, blows off a mandatory orientation to sneak outside Terra Nova’s oddly ill-secured fence with his new friend Sky (Allison Miller, a standout here). -- By the by, the writers missed an opportunity by not showing the orientation -- it would have been the perfect opportunity for a massive exposition dump. Do the Terra Novans use money? Where do they get their clothing? Do they all speak English? Are there other (Asian, European) colonies like it? Etc. Meanwhile, Maddy makes friends with a young soldier who is so bland that even today I couldn’t pick him out of a police lineup if you held a gun to my head.

Then there’s a dinosaur attack, but by the time the dinosaurs started attacking I was mostly busy playing Angry Birds, with only the occasional glance up at the television. I did watch long enough to see that there are mysterious etchings on rocks, and the Commander’s long-lost son (the mysterious etcher, so it would seem) is running around out there beyond the fence, and I haven’t even mentioned the Sixers -- Terra Nova’s answer to Lost’s Others -- who are opposed to Taylor and always have been, although we don’t seem to know why.

Fortunately, the Terra Novans (and Sixers) are also hot:

Stephen J. Lang as Commander Taylor

ROWR!

Christine Adams as Mira

More bone structure! Also, I NEED her personal trainer’s contact info. Please.

So to summarize:

The Good: The show looks great -- this was an enormously expensive program to produce and it shows. The CGI looked fine to my untrained eye. The Terra Novans are interesting, and I want to hear more about why the Sixers are so rebellious. I liked Sky well enough. Everybody is beautiful, and Jason O’Mara even takes his shirt off.

The Bad: The dystopia was about 1000% more interesting than the utopia. The Shannons, while beautiful, are boring. Having reviewed V in its entirety, I’ve more than had my fill of angsty 17-year-old boys (seriously, was Huffman unavailable for this one? Pity, that); Josh needs to undergo a massive attitude adjustment and personality transplant before he’s remotely interesting, but unfortunately, it looks like his growing pains are going to be a major focus of the show. There are a lot of unanswered questions. (Just for starters, how did Taylor get his hands on Jim’s prison records? Jim couldn’t have been on the original list of “pilgrims” -- is two-way communication through the gate possible?)

So there’s promise here, but the show’s going to have to get very good very fast if it’s going to survive. Geek audiences have been spoiled by Lost, Game of Thrones, et al., and these days it’s going to take more than CGI dinosaurs and teh family dramzzz to hold our attention.

And it’s early days, but still not too early for a Checklist...

The Checklist

Taylor does something simultaneously badass and stupid:	Check (baits a dinosaur).
Shirtless!O’Mara:	Check.
Someone gets eaten by a dinosaur:	Check.

 
   -- Kate Nagy