Terra Nova - "Occupation"/"Resistance"

Season 1, Episode 12 & 13

If FOX were the sort of network that cared about critical reception or creative quality of its shows, tonight’s finale would be something of a benchmark for the show. Of course the network doesn’t care about these sorts of things, but critics do, and with the show’s fate still up in the air in regards to renewal (apparently it all depends on foreign markers, who tend to eat up this kind of empty blockbuster-type fare, regardless of things like story or characters), for us the finale will serve as retroactive proof for the series renewal/cancellation/reasoning for either of those options. But looking over the two-hour finale, I find that even as there were a number of strong moments here, it (unsurprisingly) was still dragged down by all the episodes that preceded it.

Now, last week I posited that perhaps the biggest problem with Terra Nova is that it stretched maybe give hours of story across thirteen, which led to a lot of plotess and/or pointless hours which amounted to nothing more than filler, and not even entertaining filler at that. I made the conclusion that this led to a lot of underdeveloped plot threads going into the end game, and that zapped a lot of tension out of the proceedings, but I missed the other vital flaw in this plan as well. Even without building up to the events of tonight’s finale, we had to have these events anyways, because an invasion by the antagonistic shadowy group that wants to take over Terra Nova was more or less setup in the pilot, and for the show not to follow through with that within their first season would be even worse than anything present in the show’s worst episode. And thus we got two hours that were propelled forward by a need to finish up the story, as opposed to the needs of an organically developed storyline (or any sort of developed storyline, for that matter). 

For most of the two hours “perfunctory” was the name of the game. So okay, someone came through with a bomb vest (perhaps voluntarily, perhaps not) and blows away the army waiting there to quash any sort of ambush. That’s a good start. (Here, and for the rest of the review, “good” is going to be a relative term. Just go with it.) However, the show quickly stopped that positive action in its track by knocking Jim Shannon, the audience identification figure, out cold for three days, and resuming after the invasion is over and done. The “off-screen” action is trick is one that the show has done enough times before (we get it, you have a limited budget), but I think this was the time when the move hurt the most. Without seeing the actually loss of power, we lose of the essential aspect of the traditional invasion/resistance story formula. It’s hard to feel for these characters without seeing the hell they had to go through to in order to get to that point. (And on that note: How did the invasion force get fascist-looking flags so quickly?)

What then follows is a lot of tried tropes of the standard resistance storyline, none of which help matters. We learn that the civilians of Terra Nova are now hostages, complete with a ban on weapons and a curfew. We see a bunch of character we don’t really know plotting a revolution. One of those characters is working for the enemy, but is also sabotaging the work from the inside. The handicapped member of civilization stages a diversion so that someone else can sneak off. This wasn’t so much a plot as it was the show marking off items on a checklist.

The villains side of the equation wasn’t that much better. We are introduced to some sort of middle man between Lucas as the conspirators back in 2149 (Weaver was his name, though it’s not like it matters now), who’s douchey and super eeeeeeevil. (He shoots a harmless brachiosaurs!). In the second hour he breaks this characterization by going from cold douche to flop-sweating, helpless douche.  We find out that the conspirators want to strip mine the past for its resources (okay, we already knew that) and that they’re willing to blow up the land to do it. And Lucas? Well, he just keeps getting weirder, proclaiming Skye to be his “sister”, apparently just so he can act all incestuous towards her. He also apparently changes his mind like three times as to exactly why he hates his father. Did you get that these were bad guys yet?

Yet I would be remiss if I didn’t say that there weren’t some part of the episode that I actually like, but I think it’s important to note the divide between the things I thought worked and those that didn’t. Things like Josh beating up Lucas and Jim coming to his rescue, Elisabeth tricking Weaver into getting Jim out of the brig, and Skye double-crossing Lucas were all fairly enjoyable moments on their own terms. Part of this enjoyment stems from the fact that these are characters that I’m familiar with (though I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I know anything about them), and that automatically makes me (slightly) more interested in their individual moments of triumph over those of the faceless, undefined mass that is the Terra Nova population. But more importantly, these moments gave these characters something that they so often lack: agency.

Or to put it another way: Two characters died in the finale, though I doubt anyone particularly cares. The first death, Kara’s, barely registers because A) this was only her third appearance on the show, all of which have been under a minute in length and B) there’s no particular reason for her to be there (or on the show at all, really) and thus her death doesn’t mean anything. Hell, even Josh doesn’t seem to be burdened by that weight for too terribly long. Wash’s death was equally inconsequential in that we didn’t really know her, even if she have more and longer appearances on the show, but it’s perhaps more aggravating in the sense that the show tried to make it mean more than it did, especially by having that moppet Zoe make a treacle-filled speech about her.  (Although on an interesting note, her death does seem to continue that new sci-fi trend of killing off characters named “Wash”.) These characters death don’t work on the dramatic level because we never had a chance to connect with them, and so any chance to wring some sort of response from them just feels cheap. (Of course, these deaths also don’t make sense on the narrative level, but that’s just Terra Nova being Terra Nova.)

But if the finale failed on the character level, it’s action level was far more enjoyable. And here is where I would like to stop and recognize the show’s best effort to date, “Nightfall”. You probably don’t remember it – and with a show this blandly clichéd, I can’t say I blame you – so here’s a short description: Terra Nova goes dark after being hit by a SOOOOOONNNNNNNNIIIIIICCCCC WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAVVVVVVVEEEE, and the Sixers attack the colony with a MOTHERFUCKIN’ DINOSAUR. Yeah, I bet you remember that last part, because it was so ridiculously stupid that I doubt anyone could ever forget it. But it was also fun, it the pulpy tradition of 1950s B-movies. No one would argue that it makes for particularly good television, but at least it was entertaining. I don’t know where all money goes, but for the big budget that the show supposedly has, it rarely uses it to give us the most entertaining hour possible (see Jim’s three-day coma as discussed above).

But tonight we got another ridiculous, stupid, and ridiculously stupid scene as Jim somehow manages to travel back through the time fracture and bring a dinosaur to 2149 and unleashes it on some of those shadowy conspirators. It was a scene that was unintentionally hilarious, and while me laughing at the show probably doesn’t bode well for them, I’ll admit that Taylor running back to the portal while he was being chased by the dino and with the place blowing up around him resulted in perhaps the most rapt attention I had ever given the show. (It’s also a much better answer to the question of “How do you kill a man with a dinosaur?”) If the show was more self-serious about itself, I doubt this moment would have worked, but because this show is so bland it allows the show to take on the characteristics of whatever moment is on the screen, and I could pretend that the show was being intentionally cheesy. And while the other action pieces weren’t nearly this cheesy, they likewise held my attention because, well, at least something was happening on the show.

And so here, with the few good moments outweighing a lot of the bad, I have to ask myself: Does Terra Nova deserve to come back for a second season? My gut reaction is of course “no” given that the show delivered up boring and/or outright bad episodes more often than not, and given that the same producers would stay on for the hypothetical second season, I doubt this would improve. But upon looking at the final minutes of the finale, I would have to say…that my answer is still “no”.

Somewhere in the last half-hour, the show began to tease us with the idea of the citizens of Terra Nova living without that semi-regular contact with the future, and I began to get hopeful. Watching a group of people fight against the elements, on their own, in order to build up a society has those shades of Deadwood that I mentioned previously, and would certainly raise the show’s stakes significantly. But much like how the show showed Lucas getting shot only to let him get away, the show isn’t that comfortable upsetting the status quo, as we learn that there’s (possibly) another time fracture out in the badlands, one that may or may not also being connected to the 18^th century. (Seriously, what the fuck was with that ship’s bow?) If Terra Nova gets renewed, it will be because enough people were happy with the formula to stick around (or, like me, their television masochists), and they would probably hate to see the show change at all, and this is just the out the show needs, however nonsensical it may be.

Quotes and Other Thoughts:

Apparently in the future there’s a Russo-Chinese alliance. I don’t particularly care, apart from the fact that this seems vaguely lifted from the future American-Chinese alliance used on Firefly, and the show already got in one of those with a character death.

Okay, I no this is being nitpicky, but the fact that part of the resistance were actually depicted in the "Occupation" hour bugged me, if only because it helped to highlight the fact that we saw so little of the titular occupation. You know?

“You are a highly suggestible hypochondriac, Mr. Weaver. I suggest you see a doctor about that.”

“A thousand people is all we’d have to restart civilization.” “One thousand. That’s a good, round number.” Taylor, ever the optimist.