| Season 1 | Episode 1 & 2 | Aired on 09.26.2011
Meet the Shannons! In a dystopian future on a burned-out earth where people need "rebreathers" just to breathe the polluted air, they've defied the billboards that proclaim "Overpopulation equals extinction!" and "A family is four!" Treasure equals an orange that is almost freakishly colorful amidst the drab backdrop. Zoe is the moppet who the Shannons aren't allowed to have, and when the population police come calling, the Shannons stick her in an air vent and hope for the best. But babies cry, they always do, and when Dad goes berserk and attacks the police, he winds up in prison.
Two years later, and presumably many labored-breathing sodomizations later, Elizabeth (a doctor) visits her husband in a prison so ridiculous that she's able to slip him a laser that can cut through anything, which he'll need in order to break out, rescue Zoe, and join his wife and Maddie and Josh as they've been selected for the Tenth Pilgrimage, a one-way trip through a "time fracture" back 86 million years ago. Zoe can't come, because that would be rewarding the family for "bad behavior," which raises the question of why they're allowed to leave this polluted world in the first place.
We barely see any of the escape or rescue (John is able to break in to "Hope Plaza" by strapping himself to the underside of an armored vehicle. I guess in the 22nd century, they've forgotten all about mirrors on sticks). An accomplice has a backpack waiting for him, and John manages to rejoin his family (Josh bids a strangely non-tearful goodbye forever with his girlfriend) as they trudge toward the Stargate or time fracture or whatever the hell, but he gets pulled out of line and questioned about being seen leaving a restricted area. The family is reluctant to go through the time rift without him, but Elizabeth tells her daughter, "He'll find a way! He always does!" Well, except for the time he punched police and wound up in jail for the two years and only broke out after you brought him a laser slicer.
Turns out "punching police" is his plan here too, and he punches his way through the authorities and into the time rift and 86 million years into the past, full of fresh air and trees. The weapon he's got doesn't sit well with the authorities on the other side, and they decide to STAB HIS BACKPACK, because of course that's what you would do, and you're nuts if you think this show is killing a kid this early. The family manages to prevent the backpack-stabbing, and when it's opened we find, to no one's surprise, Zoe.
| Season 1 | Episode 1 & 2 | Aired on 09.26.2011
So, the pilgrims make their way to the colony, with only one roaring allosaur somewhere in the distance to spoil the party, where they're greeted by Nathaniel Taylor, played by the mean army guy from Avatar, who welcomes everybody to the Cretaceous period by reminding them how humanity messed up 2149: greed, war and ignorance. "We blew it. We destroyed our home. But we have been entrusted with a second chance. A chance to start over, a chance to get it right." He tells them. I have to say, I'm not sure using a giant dinosaur skull for a desk is the best way to demonstrate your intention to not wreck the planet this time.
Anyway, he gives Jim grief for stepping out of his six-year prison term and stowing away with an extra kid, and Jim -- despite being in danger of getting thrown in jail again -- tells him it's none of his damn business why he and his wife risked their careers to have a third kid (so there's some kind of story there we'll find out at some point) and then sticks Jim -- who wants a badge and a gun so he can be a cop again -- on agricultural duty. "Beats making license plates," Jim tells his wife afterwards. Come on, do prisoners actually still do that? Especially when there are no cars?
The Shannons get shown to their quarters, which are like some kind of futuristic IKEA home, not painted but with sheets pinned up decoratively on the ceilings, just in case they want to film a video from the '80s. Jim starts trying to rebuild his relationship with Zoe, who barely remembers him, and Josh, who's pissed that his hotheaded dad punched a cop and landed in jail, leaving them to fend for themselves for the last two years. Look, even in the year 2149, I'm pretty sure a family with a doctor who was first in her class in Northwestern does all right fending for themselves. Anyway, much like with Taylor, Jim wants a fresh start with his family too.
Maybe everyone can start by keeping a better eye on the five-year-old? Zoe wanders off outside, where she winds up feeding foliage to a family of brachiosaurs that have gathered outside the colony fence, and the family comes out and gawks and is a little too comfortable with giant dinosaurs almost eating their kid. They stand there and beam like they're watching fireflies in the backyard on a warm summer evening.
It's going to take everyone a little time to adjust, but Jim and Elizabeth eventually come to the consensus that leaving behind the cracked and failing world for this new one was the right thing to do.
| Season 1 | Episode 1 & 2 | Aired on 09.26.2011
The morning sees the family drinking a blue liquid to help prepare their stomachs for the fresh food and dinosaur meat they'll be eating, and then it's off to work for the parents and off to orientation for the kids (really, shouldn't the adults go to orientation too?). Maddie spies a statue of some sort of probe and because her brother doesn't care about history, it gives her a chance to explain that the probe was sent through the time fracture but its beacon was never detected back in 2149, which somehow proved the probe was in a whole new time stream. Sure, and not that somehow it stopped working after 86 million years. It's a ridiculous explanation that just serves to announce this show isn't going to subscribe to the butterfly effect theory, which is a whole lot of time-travel-fiction nonsense anyway, and then Josh blows off orientation to go to the prehistoric farmer's market.
Over at agricultural duty, Jim is given the task of weeding, which he thinks will be easy, but of course it turns out to mean 10-inch roots entwined with the colony's fencing, and he has to hack them off with a machete. But it gives him an excuse to take his shirt off and climb to the top (after falling off when a huge-ass millipede runs over his hand) and get all "I'm the king of the world!" with his arms in the air, while Taylor checks him out with fancy binoculars and for some reason doesn't order a sniper to take him down for that embarrassing display.
Meanwhile, at the Flintstone farmer's market, Josh meets cutie girlfriend-replacement Skye, and acts like a complete dick to her, but this is one of those instances where a girl finds jackassery adorable, and Skye susses out that Josh left someone behind. It's true, but one look at Skye's ass, and Josh seems to forget about ol' what's-her-name, who is probably choking to death right now.
Elizabeth is making the rounds, and you can see why she was recruited: being first in the class in Northwestern makes her the identical candidate to calmly pull giant leeches off people's backs.
So Jim runs into Josh playing hooky with Skye (and is Jim playing hooky from work? Probably just lunch break) and Josh doesn't take too kindly to his cop-punching dad lecturing him on following the rules. "You can't just come back after all this time and start telling me what to do," he says, and stomps off.
While Elizabeth and Jim discuss what to do about Josh (she wants Jim to cut him some slack, saying Josh really missed his dad), as well as the perplexing question of why someone would steal anything in a colony where everyone is provided for, their wayward son is discovering that Skye lives not with bogus bring-down parents but with other 16-year-olds who work hard and play hard.
| Season 1 | Episode 1 & 2 | Aired on 09.26.2011
Playing hard involves going OTG -- outside the gates -- and Josh is hesitant but as always for teenage boys, if there's a chance he's going to get to touch boobs by being cool, he's in. Like an utter schlub, though, he can't help staring at Skye as she strips down to a bikini and takes a deep plunge into a lake under a waterfall, and then he goes in fully clothed. This is also where she shows him a bunch of incomprehensible symbols that look like equations scratched into the rocks. They haven't told Taylor about it, because this area is off-limits. Skye figures it's because Taylor doesn't want anyone to know about it, but maybe it's also because he'd rather people not get eaten by dinosaurs?
Later, in the infirmary, Elizabeth is treating the unconscious man who was shot for stealing. Despite not knowing what the story is, she upbraids the security guard for it, and he tells her he was siphoning power off the grid, and is a Sixer. Before the guard can explain what that means, the guy leaps up and holds a laser scalpel to her throat, and makes his escape with the guard's gun.
Meanwhile, Jim's getting some sort of instructions about sticking a device in the base of a plant, some sort of procedural explanation that got chopped up for me because it happened right at the end of one DVR recording for the first hour and at the beginning of the . Jim's cop instincts kick in when he sees this guy acting suspiciously, and then he spots the gun the guy got from the security guard, and he chases the guy down and helps prevent Taylor from being assassinated.
Jim demands to know what's going on, so he and Taylor go for a drive and a hike, and then we check in with Zoe and Maddie, who are leaving school and then meeting the guy who shall be Maddie's love interest, and she embarrasses herself by geeking out and displaying too much brachiosaurus knowledge for anyone who is older than eight and not actually named Ross Geller.
On Orientation Hike, Taylor tells Jim about the Sixers, so named because they all came over on the Sixth Pilgrimage but then started getting all squirrelly and hid weapons and left the colony when Taylor figured out something was up. They had some sort of agenda but Taylor doesn't know what or who sent them, and he doesn't know who he can trust back in Hope Plaza to find out what's going on. And hey, speaking of the Sixers, here are a couple of armored vehicles now, coming in "hot" to the camp.
Terra Nova's got to get some work crews inside, so it's up to Taylor and Jim to hold off the tanks as best they can, which means almost getting themselves run over. But it turns out the Sixers have their own problem -- they're being chased by a "carnataurus"? Is that right? Taylor won't let even Sixers die in the mouth of a dinosaur, so he orders everyone into the camp while he gets out of his jeep and stands there like a jackass to distract the carnataurus, which charges him. Maybe the dinosaur wants his mom's skull back, Taylor.
| Season 1 | Episode 1 & 2 | Aired on 09.26.2011
It's a good thing for him Jim doubles back with the jeep, and they get inside to safety while Terra Nova security fire sonic weapons at the creature. Having dealt with that, it's now time for a standoff with the Sixers inside, who are there to make a trade: meteoric iron for their man (the guy who just tried to kill Taylor), medical supplies and ammo. Taylor agrees to the trade (except for the ammo part). And Jim is so special that the Sixers' leader, a woman named "Mira"? "Mirra"? is all, "You're new. Welcome to paradise."
Having witnessed the confrontation with the Sixers, Elizabeth is not too pleased that Jim's going to be a cop again, and she stomps off -- because women on television and in movies are always mad at their cop husbands for being cops -- to the clinic to help pull together some medical supplies. Meanwhile, outside the gates, the kids are drinking moonshine from their own still, so there's hope that the kids of the future past will act just as stupid as today's teenagers.
Over at the clinic, Taylor asks Elizabeth about why they chose to come here, when they could have had it fairly sweet back in the future, with one of those fancy houses in a dome. She says she didn't want that for her kids: "I think they deserve the chance to be part of something real, something new, something that has a future." Taylor knows what that's about; he had a son who came in on the Second Pilgrimage. But his son went missing a few years ago. "I haven't given up on him," he says. Elizabeth asks him to be careful on her husband, because she's the one who stays up late worrying. I guess, if there are any actual security problems, she expects Taylor to keep Jim on the bench?
Outside the gates, Skye and Josh are slicing more fruit using some sort of spiny skin or appendage or whatever to a dinosaur that "mostly hunts at night," which naturally means it's coming for them very soon, and when they get back to their transport, they find it's been stripped of power cells by the Sixers who just left Terra Nova. Fortunately, the Sixers' own transport is still there, but it's now occupied by a badly wounded Sixer who only lets them hide from the menacing slasher when he recognizes Skye and/or would like to sleep with her. Josh acts like a big baby the entire time and freezes up every time something freaks him out, which is every time something happens.
And back at Terra Nova, the kids sneaking out has been spotted on the extra-special holograph security cameras that people check only after several HOURS, apparently, and Elizabeth blames this on Jim, who is going to run on out to get his son back before dark. Taylor's security chief, Guzman, has a daughter with the group as well, and Elizabeth persuades her way into the rescue excursion by pointing out they'll need a medic. Instead of saying, "How about we don't take BOTH parents in a family," Taylor just brings everyone along.
| Season 1 | Episode 1 & 2 | Aired on 09.26.2011
The rescue party makes radio contact with the kids, who are fending off the gathering crowd of slashers with their rifles, but Tasha (Guzman's daughter) gets freaked out and insists on making a run for it back to camp. When no one else agrees, she grabs a gun and heads out into the dark woods on her own, and gets attacked by a slasher. The rescue party finds her, so Elizabeth tends to Tasha while the rescue party uses her info to pinpoint where the rest of the kids are -- not that there's not enough time for Jim and Elizabeth to decide that Josh is exactly like his old man: a rule-breaking ass-hound.
Back in Terra Nova, Maddie's love interest shows up at the door to make sure they're OK, and Maddie pretends Zoe is scared so he'll stick around and look all hunky for her.
Meanwhile, the kids -- as we learn that Skye's parents died of some sort of fever -- have decided to take one of the power cells and sprint back to their own vehicle with it. That choice becomes a little less under their control when a slasher rips open the Sixer vehicle and starts chewing on (the ironically named) Hunter. The kids gamely try to fight off the slashers, but they're moments away from being dinosaur chow when the rescue convoy shows up to send the slashers scattering. Hey, how long does Jim have to be on security detail before he gets a helmet and a vest and the other badass equipment that everyone else gets? At any rate, he's firing these rifles like he had marksmanship classes on them. Security gathers up the kids -- Max has been injured -- while they go to find the Sixer left behind, only to discover that Mira has managed to spirit him away in all the confusion. Really? All the slashers and the Terra Nova crew there? Mira's some kind of Cretaceous ninja.
Back at Terra Nova, the Shannons have a family hug, while Skye goes to see Taylor to apologize, because he's been so good to her since her parents died. Well, now she knows why the area is off limits, he says, and she's somewhat taken aback, but his reason is just that it's slasher territory. Then he faux-casually asks if they went to the falls, and she's smart enough to say no. He looks at her, eyes flint, and tells her that they're treacherous waters.
But right now the Sixers are there, looking at the equations, as well as the footprints that indicate the kids were there. Taylor won't like that, because he's trying to keep it under wraps, we learn, as well as the fact that it's Taylor's son who's leaving the rock scrawlings: "Every time he gets closer to an answer, he puts it here for Taylor to see," says Mira. "To remind him the real reason of Terra Nova's existence: control the past, control the future. These are the key to everything."
| Season 1 | Episode 1 & 2 | Aired on 09.26.2011
And as nighttime falls, the Shannons go out and have a good look at the moon, which for once isn't obscured by pollution and -- by virtue of it being 86 million years ago -- is much closer to the earth. Also, the stars are in slightly different spots, which Maddie is quick to point out. "We'll leave the math up to you, sweetie," says Jim -- and then they all stand in silence instead of foolishly trying to apply any kind of scientific reasoning to this show.
Daniel is a writer with a wife and daughter in Newfoundland, where Terra Nova is a national park with the Splash N' Putt, which has a really tall waterslide! Follow him on Twitter (@DanMacEachern) or email him at danieljdaniel@gmail.com.
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