Terra Nova - "Within"

Season 1, Episode 11

You might be wondering why, after reviewing the pilot and then giving up, and then dropping in on the fifth episode and being similarly disappointed, I would consider dropping in on Terra Nova for a third time. The answer is simple: I don’t have anything else tonight. But really, I’ve been watching the show as it’s been airing, because even as the show a disappointment, it also held potential…okay, it’s really just because I’m a masochist. But embracing mythology helps to boost a show’s quality more often than not, so I will be covering tonight’s episode as well as next week’s 2-hour finale in order to discuss where I think the show went wrong and whether it lived up to any of the potential we saw back in the pilot.

So strap in and put on your snark helmets, boys and girls, because things are about to get….middling.

If you ask me, the biggest disappointment with Terra Nova was that there was probably only about 5 hours of so of worthwhile material within the first season, and I’m taking the still-to-be-aired finale into that assessment. I’ve said before that I feel as if TN has been mass-marketed to death, and there’s nothing that the masses like more than procedural format. It allows people to watch TV shows without having to worry about catching every episode. It requires less thinking from the viewers, which it great because hey, most viewers prefer a passive viewing experience to one that requires you to think.

Yes, you’re right. That’s a very cynical way to look at the television industry, but it’s also one that I’ve found to be true among my family and friends. And even if it wasn’t, does it really matter? Network executives certainly believe it’s true, and it’s their cynical interpretation (which, in the only time we will agree on anything ever, lines up exactly with mine) that gives us shows like TN, shows in which the least objectionable is what happens, in which plot is kept to  a bare minimum, and tropes and clichés are preferred over nuanced storytelling.

It didn’t have to be this way. A show about people sent to live in the time of the dinosaurs, with a benign dictator for a leader, at war with a rebellious sect of defectors, and a mysterious shadowy organization that seeks to control this new civilization for its own nefarious purposes? It would be nigh impossible to fuck that up, and yet somehow the has.

That ‘somehow’ of course is that the show relies on stories that had nothing to do with this premise. No, the only real way to describe the show is a combination between and family drama and a procedural. The problem is, none of those elements are particularly good. The family is a set of over-used tropes – a rocky marriage, a sullen teenager, a genius middle child, and an adorable moppet – and even those are rarely deployed, thus zapping the ‘drama’ portion out of this show. The procedural stories, meanwhile, just felt like half-baked leftovers from the Star Trek: Enterprise writer’s room. These were the bases for the show’s early episodes, and while nothing there was horrendously bad, it was completely uninspired and boring, and sometimes that an even worse fate for a show.

And with these two elements eating up some much of the show’s running time, the serialized elements – those that actually could have been interesting – became underserved, to the point that they felt as middling as everything else on the show. Let’s take the “Terra Nova spy” plot, for instance. While this could have been a story that built to a surprising twist and revealed the paranoia of the society along the way, instead we had to settle for show going with the most illogical choice – Skye. From a logistical standpoint, I guess it makes sense – Skye was the least used character up to that point, and being in the main cast meant that they had to give Allison Miller something to do – but that’s also what makes it so nonsensical stupid. There was no build to the reveal; it just sort of happened, and without any context, it wasn’t able to invoked the reaction that I’m sure the writers were hoping for.

In fact, lack of build is what sinks just about everything one of the serialized elements. While we’ve been told since the pilot that Taylor and his son Lucas have been on the outs for years, it was something that we we’re just supposed to take as fact, and without knowing why Lucas has felt the need to rebel against his father in such an extreme fashion. And now that we’ve found out that it’s because Lucas blame Taylor for his mother’s death, that just makes him seem incredibly pissy and petulant, considering that he’s attempting a coup as retaliation.

Similarly, why is there a shadowy organization that wants to take over Terra Nova, and do they have plan in case of the inevitable backlash from the legitimate government when their crony Taylor is overthrown? The show has given some general reasoning behind this – greed – much like Skye becoming a spy because the Sixers can fix her mother, it’s an overly easy answer supplies in order to move the story forward. At least Boylan, who was a traitor but not The Spy, is smarmy and immoral enough that his doing business with the Sixers makes sense. Sure, it’s another simple explanation, but it’s one that fits the character and doesn’t feel shoehorned in.

And it’s to that end that I don’t particularly care about the supposed invasion that we’ll see next week. The stakes haven’t been properly raised, I have no idea who the major players are, and there’s no telling what the invasion will mean for anybody. It’s an even that’s happening because the show feels like it should, not because it’s evolved organically out of the story.

And then there was Maddy’s plot, which is the perfect embodiment of everything that’s wrong with the “family” side of the show’s equation. These plots are kept purposely small-scale, so they register as nothing more that cute filler, and even that cute aspect is up for debate. Again, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this – filler plots can be useful way to give cast members screen time when they can’t be worked into the A-plot, and they can be used to tell us something new about the characters – but the show fails at this as well. The show just lets these stories coast on out supposed goodwill, and there meant to be entirely disposable.

And a blown core? Really? There’s absolutely no tension in that, and much like everything before it, it just sort of ends without any real resolution, but just Maddy giving the wheel to Boylan, and him trying to get back into Jim’s good graces. Yeah, because at this point in time, that’s something the show needs to be exploring.

Next Week: The two-hour finale. The bad people invade, and I just shake my head.

Quotes and Other Thoughts:

And say, whatever happened to Josh’s girlfriend? I mean, it’s not that I care, but it’s yet another example of the show dropping the ball on supposedly important plot points.

I’m pretty sure I heard Taylor say “fraking” at one point. Stop taking other shows down with you, Terra Nova.

Lucas describes his relationship with his father as “a Shakespearian relationship that borders on Greek tragedy.” It looks like somebody didn’t pass English class.