To all of you like-minded souls who are searching for an intelligent, layered, engaging sci-fi show for grown-ups to replace the late and lamented Lost and Battlestar Galactica: fraternal greetings across the miles, and I regret to say that our search continues. Terra Nova isn’t going to be it. We can sit around and piss and moan about What Might Have Been, but at the end of the day we need to engage with the world as it is, and what Terra Nova is, is TV that’s Fun For The Whole Family!!!

The good news is, if you accept it on those terms… it isn’t too bad. Kind of cheesy, but acceptable.

In “Instinct,” the fledgling colony is swarmed by some sort of half-bird, half-reptile creature the likes of which no one has ever seen or heard of before. (My six-year-old furrowed his brow, pursed his lips, shook his head, and very seriously mused: “I don’t think that’s a velociraptor.” Maybe you had to be there…) It turns out that they’re returning to their ancestral spawning grounds, and all Elisabeth and her ex-boyfriend (about whom more anon) need to do is synthesize some Musk de Flying Fatal Bird-Thing, and Jim and Commander Taylor are able to lead the swarm to safer climes (safer for the colonists, anyway; no word yet on how the introduction of the birdies to the new location will influence the local ecosystem, but hey, all flows, nothing abides, right?)

Once I decided to turn off my brain and meet the show on its own terms, I enjoyed myself immensely. See dive-bombing death-birds cockblock poor Jim! See Tyler Evans 2.0 (sorry, I mean Josh) get sentenced to “latrine duty” for last week’s hijinx by a heavily-mascara’d badass lady soldier! See Josh and Maddy being so busy saving their grown-up love interests that they accidentally leave their five-year-old sister to fend for herself against the Swarm of Doom! See Jason O’Mara remove his shirt before the opening credits even roll! Like I said, I enjoyed myself… even if Maddy’s man -- we’ll call him Private Bland for now -- remains so eminently forgettable that I still couldn’t pick him out of a lineup. Here, I’ll pin up his picture to help me remember:

Dean Geyer as Private Bland

One thing did piss me off, and that was Jim’s attitude toward Malcolm, the aforementioned ex. What’s with the ’tude, dude? By recruiting Elisabeth, Malcolm single-handedly saved your family -- your family, jackass, not to mention (indirectly) you yourself – from slow death in the dire and dreadful future. You should be thanking him profusely and plying him with expensive gifts, not whipping your dick out and demanding a tape measure. (Plus, check out Jim’s automatic assumption that Elisabeth wasn’t recruited for her mad medical skillz, but rather because Malcolm had carried a torch for 20 years and really, really wanted to hit that. If I were Elisabeth, I would be amused and offended at once. Of course, because this is Family T.V., Jim will surely turn out to be correct in his offensive assumption, but it would be nice to see Elisabeth rip him a new one. And I say that as someone who basically likes Jim, for the most part.)

Jim’s dick-swinging notwithstanding, this was a mildly amusing, entertaining-enough episode, and I enjoyed it well enough. But I can already see that I’m going to have to automatically turn my brain off before watching this show in the future.

The Checklist

Taylor does something simultaneously badass and stupid:	Check (“All right, you miserable…”)
Shirtless!O’Mara:	Check.
Someone gets eaten by a dinosaur:	Well, they don’t exactly get eaten…do you think “Pecked to Death by a Dino-Bird” would count here?

 
   -- Kate Nagy