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Terra Nova: Why The Hell Am I Watching This?


Hey! It's Fall again! That means it's time for new shows!

Terra Nova is Steven Spielberg's baby, pretty much the only thing I knew about it going in was that it had something to do with dinosaurs, and that I'd read a handful of articles about how many problems there were filming and producing the first couple of episodes.

Our story kicks off in the year 2149 where the planet Earth is a smog ridden, overpopulated hell-hole. Everyone breathes through masks when they're out in the open, if they're smart, and there are population control measures in place, everyone's limited to two children, with propaganda all over the place "A Family Means 4".

Our hero, a Hugh Jackman knockoff, is a police detective that for some unknown reason decided to have a third child. During a surprise inspection, they hide kidlet #3 in the air duct, but when the breeder police knock something heavy over, she squeals. At this point, Superdad goes apeshit, and starts kicking the crap out of his fellow cops.

Flash forward to two years later, Superdad's serving 8 years in solitary confinement, breathing unfiltered air, and his wife visits to tell him that they've been recruited for the Terra Nova project. Terra Nova is a colony that's been made on the other side of a crack in time, that lets out onto an alternate timeline Earth 85 million years in the past. I assume, that part of the goal is to start a new civilization on an unsullied Earth, while trying not to screw it up like they did with the current one.

Okay, so the wifey (she's a medial doctor, which is why she gets to take her family to a planet with a future) smuggles Superdad some kind of laser scalpel, so that he can break out of prison, and then into the Terra Nova staging facility. Just to let us know that it's not that easy, security manages to find their ass with both hands and a flashlight, and confront him right in front of the rift, he manages to shake them loose, however, and makes it to a new world, where he can reestablish the tradition of not following any of the goddamn rules, and overpopulating the planet.

Okay, I'm not going to belabor the point, Superdad really wants to be a cop in the new settlement, but sinister colony dictator (playing pretty much the same role he did in the movie Avatar) puts him on gardening, which he blows off to stalk a suspicious character.

So, he never follows the rules, doesn't learn from his mistakes, but apparently not following the rules makes you a really good cop, so they put him on security. Basically, no one in this show manages to evoke any kind of empathy from me, because they're either idiots, assholes, or completely bland.
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