Even concrete dinos in front of a creationist museum
are upset with the bad science in Terra Nova
I love dinosaurs. I love science fiction. I particularly love stories about time travel.
Tell me that there's going to be a science fiction show on television that's centered on traveling back to the Cretaceous, where there's guaranteed to be a dino-appearance in every episode, and you'd think that I'd be cheering. Promise me that the production values will be high, the actors both generally good and likable, and the network committed to a major investment in the series, and it could bring on a fair imitation of the Snoopy dance.
And yet, a few episodes into Terra Nova, I'm really, really, really wishing that the series had never been made. Because it's so bloody awful, no one is likely to try anything like it again in my lifetime.
Everything in the past happened all at once, in the same place. Hey look, it's a Brachiosaurus, and a Tyrannosaurus, and a Dilophosaurus, and a Spinosaurus, and a Carnotaurus, and an kinda-sorta raptor with a tail borrowed from the Queen Alien. It's just like Jurassic Park! Except that in the context of that film's backstory, it made some sense to have a mishmash of dinosaurs tromping around Isla Sorna.
For Terra Nova, which is supposedly set somewhere in the Late Cretaceous, it makes no sense at all. Not only are many of these animals from places as diverse as Africa, Asia and South America, they're also spread out over 200 million years. Some of the dinosaurs featured on the show are more distant in time from the era Terra Nova is supposed to be portraying than that time is from us. It shouldn't be surprising then, that the woods are also populated with giant insects from 200 million years earlier still.
It also shouldn't be surprising that there's already been an episode that featured a meteor exploding over the compound, though the odds of such events were just as microscopically small in the Cretaceous as they are today. Yes, there were at least a couple of world-thumping collisions in the period—about twenty million years after the time where the show is set. It's not exactly a looming threat.
Science is what we say it is. That meteor episode perfectly illustrates Terra Nova's attitude toward science in general. Not only does a meteor blow up over the compound (causing everyone to shout "sonic wave!" because apparently the term "shock wave" is too plebeian) it also causes an electromagnetic pulse that destroys the electronics of the settlers. How can a meteor create an EMP? Um, it's made of metal. Sorry, that's all the hand waving this nonsense point is going to get. What follows is an episode in which most of the tension is focused around getting a crusty bartender, the only person in a science-focused outpost who understands computers, to recreate the master computer chip that can be used to make other chips. Which he does. Using hand tools he also uses to create watches. Oh, and he gets it done just as the Bad Guys lure a Spinosaurus halfway around the world and through twenty million years in time to attack the compound.
The episode also features a central computer that was obviously designed from a casual viewing of the old version of Rollerball, but then that's not surprising. The writers of the show often seem to slip in clumsy references to other shows, when they're not outright lifting plot lines from deservedly obscure episodes of dusty old series. It's as if they're saying to themselves "sure, people would notice if we redid this famous episode of Star Trek, but if we lift our plot from this miserable outing of Space 1999, no one will notice. High five!"
This is a show written and produced by people who have contempt for both science and for science fiction. It's below B-grade movie work, pasted together with the assurance that CGI dinosaurs, impressive sets and cute children will distract us long enough to notice that the plot was nonexistent.
It wouldn't be so bad if, as with a dozen such experiments, the networks wouldn't take this show as a sign that science fiction doesn't interest television audiences. Good fiction in any genre will find an audience. This just isn't good fiction.
It's a shame. Because the basic idea is so intriguing. The Cretaceous is a world as alien to us as anything ever visited in a Hollywood starship. There really were events, conditions and animals there that would make for jaw-dropping visuals and challenging situations against which to play out the human drama of a settlement in trouble. There's room there to tell great stories.
Too bad no one at Fox seems to be interested.
Worst of all isn't the way they treat the dinos, it's the way they treat the people. The plots they are forced to wade are often nonsensical and lean on ideas so ridiculous it makes you long for the old Trek "fake radiation of the week" plot line. when you have both bad fiction and bad science, the result is ugly.
Please, networks, when this fails don't blame sci fi or sci fi fans.
