The Dinosaur Box
Primeval. Dinotopia. Terra Nova. Primal. Did you know how many dinosaur TV dramas there are? Or that some of them are actually good? Switch on The Dinosaur Box with hosts Thomas Gomersall and Darby Knight as we sink our teeth into every paleo drama you've ever watched, and some you probably haven't too. Featuring detailed and (we hope) humourous breakdowns of characters, themes, production histories and of course, creatures, this is the podcast for anyone who loves dinosaurs, storytelling or any combination of the two.
The Dinosaur Box
Terra Nova: What went wrong? (2/2)
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Hope you liked the Terra Nova pilot, because it only goes downhill from here. Join Tom and Woody for Round 2 of our Terra Nova two-parter, as we dissect how a show that should have been on par with the creativity, fun and creature action of Primeval instead ended up with barely any dinosaur screentime, a plot no one asked for about spies and colony intrigue or something, and a teen romance — not even the same one from the pilot — that couldn't be more wooden and unbelievable if the writers manufactured it that way (oh wait, they did). But hey, with any luck, we at least hopefully got a half decent podcast episode out of it 10+ years later.
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Hello and welcome to the Dinosaur Box, the podcast where we dig up and study dinosaur TV shows to see what makes them thrive or go extinct. I'm your host, Thomas Gomasle. Joining me once again is my good friend and guest host, Woody Lowy. Hi everyone. And we are back with part two of our two-part Terra Nova review, the finale, you might say. So previously on this podcast, we covered the pilot episode of Terra Nova, or really I should say episodes, since the pilot is technically two episodes merged into one. And we were generally of the opinion that it was pretty good, weren't we, Woody?
SPEAKER_05Yes, definitely. I think uh we thought it showed a lot of promise and a lot of potential for what the rest of the series um could have been.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but sadly, as we also mentioned in the last episode, that was pretty much where the good times began and ended for this show, which ultimately went on to run for only one season and is widely considered today as one of the biggest letdowns in TV history. And I would say the show that marked the end of the last golden age of paleo media, because after this, there really were almost no good paleo media projects for quite a few years. You could maybe make the case that there were some decent-ish documentaries like Planet Dinosaur, but there were certainly no good paleo dramas from this point on until Primal came along in 2019.
SPEAKER_05And probably nothing live action, right? I know Netflix has done some animated stuff, but nothing live action to my knowledge.
SPEAKER_00Oh, I see you've been uh I see you've been checking out Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous.
SPEAKER_05I've watched a little bit of it here and there.
SPEAKER_00Oh, finally, finally. I've all this time I've been trying to persuade you.
SPEAKER_05Yes, yes. Well, I I haven't watched too much of it, it's been only an episode or two, so no spoilers.
SPEAKER_00Well, you know what, you've made better progress than Alex Crowley in that respect. So um, but anyway, uh having now finally seen the first and only season of Terra Nova in full, what are your thoughts on it?
SPEAKER_05Oh, I mean, from a creative standpoint, just very confusing uh genre-wise. And I I think for those who were expecting what they sort of set up as the premise from the pilot, I think a bit of a letdown.
SPEAKER_00I will say this, it's not as bad and boring as I remember it being, but I can't in all honesty say it's worth watching. I don't know if you know this, but there was actually a South Park episode that aired around the time Terra Nova debuted, which turned out to be sadly prescient about its quality. I forget the title, but it's the episode where Stan is depressed and sees everything as literal shit. He watches a trailer for Terra Nova on TV, and the Trey Parker narrator is like Jurassic Park and Lost, all in the same TV show. Dinosaur, Lost Human.
SPEAKER_05That's how you know the forecast isn't a great one. South Park is roasting you.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and the show is barely out of the gate at this point. I think they'd only shown the pilot and maybe the second episode. So yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of morbidly fascinating seeing just how many terrible choices this show makes. Because, like, they had a premise that was so imaginative and was so ripe for story ideas, humans building a society among dinosaurs, and instead they just made like the worst possible decisions they could have made with regards to story and characters and world building. It's a classic example of how having a great premise really doesn't matter if you don't know how to execute it well.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, 100% agree. 100% agree.
SPEAKER_00So before we get into exactly what went wrong with Terra Nova, we should probably talk about the reasons why it went wrong. And the sad thing here is that this was a show that nobody on the production team could really make work because nobody cared enough to make it work. We mentioned in the pilot episode that the showrunner Fox ultimately picked Brannan Brago was effectively press-ganged into doing it. He never wanted to work on the show to begin with and would later call it, quote, the only truly awful experience of my career. Jeez, oh, that is I did not know that. That is uh really, really harsh. I told you we had more zingers last episode. Right. Um, so he had no real creative vision for the show, nor any real interest in developing one. And on top of that, he was also having to deal with a lot of different factions who all had their own ideas about where they wanted it to go. The studio wanted to take it one way, Steven Spielberg, who was the executive producer, wanted to take it another. There was a lot of disagreement between everyone, and Bragg couldn't bring it all together into one cohesive vision because he didn't really give a shit about it himself. And in fact, years later on a podcast, he admitted that he really was just half-assing it and going through the motions as a showrunner and spent pretty much the whole production process being really bitter and miserable about being forced into this.
SPEAKER_05Oi, I mean, you had told me that there was more drama, shall we say, about the whole production aspect, but I didn't realize how severe it was.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, he threw some real shade on this podcast. My favorite salty comment of his was if you're one of the 12 people who have seen this show, you'll see why it doesn't quite work.
SPEAKER_03Okay, not a fan, I see.
SPEAKER_00And he wasn't the only one and not give it his all on Terra Nova. Steven Spielberg himself admitted that he also wasn't very heavily invested in the show as an executive producer. And I suspect the same is probably true to an extent of the other parties involved.
SPEAKER_05Very likely. I mean, and it's kind of it still is so surreal to hear you say that Steven Spielberg was on a production team for this, because you just I mean, you would never have known that the man so iconically famous for the genre, you know. You wouldn't think after having watched the show that he had anything to do with production whatsoever.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I think that's also the reason why the show has no distinct identity as a result, because there were all these different factions trying to pull it one way or the other. As my usual co-host Darby once said, it's a triumph of vision over focus.
SPEAKER_05Yes, yeah, yeah. Very, very absolutely Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I mean, to be fair, Braggett did start to get invested in the show towards the very end and tried his best to make it work and wanted it to succeed, but by then it was really too little, too late, which to his credit, he took full responsibility for on that podcast I mentioned. He was like, Look, this was my fault. I didn't put my all into it, I'm completely to blame for how it turned out.
SPEAKER_05That's quite impressive for him to hold so much accountability on himself.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, well, ultimately the fault here really lies with Fox. I mean, why wouldn't you pick a showrunner who actually cared about making this show? There had to have been someone out there who would have wanted the job.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, definitely.
SPEAKER_00The other reason why the show failed has to do with budget, or rather, lack thereof, because whereas the pilot episode had a budget of $20 million, every episode thereafter only had 4 million to work with, presumably as a way to cut costs. And that unsurprisingly caused some really serious problems for the show going forward, particularly where its creatures were concerned, as we will discuss later on.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I think you know, when you put so much money up front for the pilot episode, it really sets a precedent that the rest of the show is going to be at least to some sort of similar degree, right? The difference shouldn't be so large. And I think uh when you have a smaller budget, it means the time is usually shorter for, for example, visual effects teams. And so I think it really puts a lot more pressure on people to produce the same quality of product.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I agree. A lot of the show does feel really rushed, particularly in the effects department. Not to mention that set probably drained money like a hole in the earth. Yeah. You know, I think the show probably would have really benefited if it had come on HBO, because they at least would have been able to afford the big budget and could have given it the production values it deserved. Because this came out the same year as Game of Thrones. So clearly HBO was already capable of footing the bill for record-breaking TV budgets at the time.
SPEAKER_05I think HBO would have done a good job in terms of the amount of money they were willing to spend. It does make me think though, because they were really going in this direction of gritty, gory, action-packed. Like Game of Thrones kind of brought rise to a whole lot of series that are quite violent. And I mean Terra Nova has its action, but it's really not that kind of show, right? It's really maybe not the direction HBO had hoped to go in at that time.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I guess Terra Nova was aiming to be more of a family-friendly show because you have got these dynamics with the teen characters, a five-year-old girl, the sort of general family drama. So I guess maybe it wouldn't have quite fit tonally with HBO's crop at the time.
SPEAKER_05I mean, I I don't think Fox would have wanted to produce, you know, a teenager being ripped in half by a dinosaur. I don't think that was their MO at the time.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and also probably insufficient titty count for HBO.
SPEAKER_05Definitely.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Anyway, now that we know how we got here, let's take a look at what we got. Let's be fair and start with the stuff that is good about this show, because to its credit, it's not like there's nothing to talk about here.
SPEAKER_05I mean, for starters, I actually found the acting all right. I mean, I really bought into Jim and Elizabeth's relationship. Yeah, theirs is consistently one of the best in the show, I'd say. Yeah, I think between Jim and Elizabeth, you know, a lot of the couples we see on TV, it feels like it was made for TV. Because sometimes in these TV shows where they cast actors just for the sake of matching a description they were looking for, the relationship can come off very wooden, right? But you really believe that they were married and that they were working together as a team.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you really got the feeling that they'd known each other for a really long time and they knew each other's little ins and outs. Shelley Kahn, who plays Elizabeth in particular, is really good. I don't know if it's because she's British and therefore I'm biased, but she does bring a real sense of gravitas to her performance, I feel.
SPEAKER_05What did you think of their relationship with the kids?
SPEAKER_00Oh, I thought that was really good. They do believably act like real parents to them. They comfort them when they're sad, they give them advice when they need it, like Jim giving Maddy relationship tips after he gets used to her creepy boyfriend. More on that later. They reprimand them where they deserve it. There's this one scene when Elizabeth scolds Zoe for giving her Sash. Zoe's like, I want Daddy to read me a bedtime story. You don't do the voices, and Elizabeth's like, bad luck, kid, you're stuck with me. Um I think again, I think Shelly Conn of the two probably. I mean, Jason O'Marrha and Shelly Conn both work really well with the kids. The dynamic is really good, but I feel like Shelly Conn especially works great with the kids, especially Alana Mansor who plays Zoe.
SPEAKER_05And I think it's important when working with kids for the relationship to feel organic. I mean, they must have had some real rapport.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, actually, uh Jason O'Mara, who played Jim, he released these little video diaries on YouTube, and you do see him following the younger actors like Naomi Scott, who plays Maddy, or Alana Mansor around, and they are very comfortable with him. They do joke with him a lot, they have very casual conversations. So you can tell they were very acquainted with each other on set, and they were very au fay with each other.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00I'd say the main adult characters are pretty sadly written. Jim, Elizabeth could make a case for Mira, the leader of the Sixers, and especially also Commander Taylor. The same is sadly not two of the younger characters, but we'll get to them later.
SPEAKER_05I actually thought Stephen Lang as a character was quite refreshing. I mean, you sort of know what sort of character Stephen Lang will be playing whenever you see him on the on the screen, right? You know it's going to be a very tough guy's sort of macho character. But I felt like I think I touched a little bit on this in the pilot episode, but I didn't feel like he was your stereotypical one-dimensional guy who didn't listen to advice, who was super strong-headed. Uh this guy had nuance, and I think that for the most part, his interaction with the protagonists feels believable, which I think is the main crux of developing most character relationships.
SPEAKER_00It's definitely some of the best writing in the show. All the stuff with Taylor and Jim. You really get the sense of their characters becoming really good friends. You see them start to exchange secrets, let each other into their lives a bit more, and you see that trust really start to build between them. As you say, I liked how he did have that degree of nuance. He definitely had that very tough exterior that you expect from Stephen Lang. And I think you can definitely see him channeling Quark from Avatar in quite a few of his scenes. But there is this real tenderness to him as well, I think. You do see him be very gentle and very um, oh, okay, maybe gentle's not quite the right. You do see him be um, you do see him be very patient and be very willing to listen to other points of view and take the informed approach, which is very much the flip side of his character and avatar. I think it just goes to show that Stephen Lang has much more of a repertoire as an actor than you would probably think.
SPEAKER_05Well, I think that's probably quite I don't want to say typical, but I'm guessing that a lot of the guys who play these tough guy characters probably have a bit more range, but they're, you know, maybe they enjoy playing those types of characters, maybe their typecast is those characters. I don't know. But I'm guessing that some of them have more range than what we probably see on screen.
SPEAKER_00I find he's also surprisingly funny, too. Some of the best subtle comedy in the show, I think, comes from the banter that Taylor and Jim have between each other.
SPEAKER_02They tried to put a bullet in your head the other day. Not the first time, won't be the last. Yeah, which is why I'd appreciate it if you hang back a step. Shucks, you might make me blush. Yeah, the delivery is very good.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, Stephen Lang is widely considered by many as one of the very few redeeming features of Terra Nova as a whole. Fair enough. There's also the second episode, which is technically the third, and honestly, I'd say is the only other episode worth watching besides the pilot. So in this episode, a swarm of these small pterosaurs that have hitherto never before been seen in Terra Nova show up and start attacking the colony a la Hitchcock, the birds, which this episode was actually written as a homage to. And it turns out that the colony was built on their breeding ground, and the reason they've never been seen before is because they only breed once every nine years. So they're coming back here to reproduce and taking issue with the colonists having built condos on their nesting sites.
SPEAKER_05I have to imagine for you it was exciting to see them bring more creatures into this episode.
SPEAKER_00Oh, yeah, definitely. Because we had the pilot episode, which while it was fairly dinosaur light, it still had enough in it to keep me excited. And then in the next episode, we had so much more creature screen time. So it felt like they were very much staying in that same sort of lane or even getting better in this episode.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I mean, when all those creatures show up on screen, you're thinking to yourself, Oh, this is great. I like the direction in which they're taking this because now we're getting to see them interact with the creatures. How are they going to develop the dynamic of coexisting in a completely different environment?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, this is exactly what I wanted from the show going forward. What are the challenges faced by building a human society in a prehistoric world?
SPEAKER_05So correct me if I'm wrong. Are pterosaurs supposed to be Cretaceous?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, they lived all through the Mesozoic, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous. Although, interestingly, these pterosaurs belong to a group called Rampharincids, which is a group that mostly went extinct in the Jurassic. Although, actually, I was thinking about this when I was watching it. Terra Nova actually does have quite a few Jurassic taxa in it. You've got the brachiosaurs, there's a species called a Galasaur they mentioned, which, if you pay attention to the graphic, is said to be a member of the Campsagnophids. And there were parts of the world in the actual Cretaceous that acted as refugia for Jurassic species, like parts of China. So it is kind of an interesting, albeit I'm sure, entirely accidental, reflection of real life.
SPEAKER_05And I mean, look, I think for the most part, yeah, maybe they used a species at least that physically resembles one of the Jurassic period. I I guess most people wouldn't pick up on that. What do you want to say about the pterosaurs themselves? I found it interesting that they gave them some sort of life history. And I found the migration thing an interesting premise, although there were some details given that part of my background is to do with wildlife, I just found a little bit odd. I mean, breeding once every nine years? Does that sound a little far-fetched to you?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. I mean, I will buy that they have a very localized breeding ground because we do see that sort of thing in nature. I don't buy they breed every nine years, they're not cicadas. I mean, like, are there any are there any uh do you know if there's any vertebrates with similar breeding cycles?
SPEAKER_05Not even in large mammals, surely, because I I like animals have to breed to ensure the mortality rates don't catch up to them, right? So, I mean, breeding once every nine years, they'd either have to be like a true apex predator and live for just a very long time.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, they definitely don't pick the first box because they don't even eat the I mean they do kill humans, but they don't eat them, so they're not apex predators, and they're only like the size of a crow. So I think we can rule out the idea of them having particularly long lifespans based on what we see in real animals that size.
SPEAKER_05Probably.
SPEAKER_00I had my own theories before this episode aired about the biology of these things, and I kind of wish the show had gone with this because I think it might have been a potentially interesting twist, and that was that these were a eusocial species of pterosaur based on the fact that they swarm a lot and the fact they don't eat their human victims. It reminded me a lot of wasps or bees. So I thought that maybe the reason why they'd never been recorded in Terra Nova before is because they were kind of like army ants and they'd moved from one new hunting ground to another, and they just hadn't happened to come across Terra Nova at the time that humans had colonized it.
SPEAKER_05I think it definitely makes sense. The pterosaurs are a smaller creature in their world. So your social behavior would really aid in ensuring their survival.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I also just really like the idea of a pterosaur queen as well.
SPEAKER_05Do you imagine that behaving as a queen bee would?
SPEAKER_00Oh, yeah, totally. I had this idea that maybe they'd find some cave in the middle of the jungle and she'd be sequestered there in the back, laying eggs all the time, while the workers would bring her bugs and small lizards and whatnot. And then while she's laying eggs, they'd be then picking them up and putting them in little nests made of mud and spit like swallows. So, I mean, I had this whole biology planned out for them in my head before this episode aired. I quite like that. Yeah, and it's not really a thing you've ever seen in paleo media before. They've never really tried to do you social dinosaurs or you social prehistoric reptiles. So I think this could have been a way to really make the show that much more unique.
SPEAKER_05I agree.
SPEAKER_00This is also incidentally the only creature-centric episode in the show, which speaking of okay. Let's get into what is probably the most infamous problem with this show. Terra Nova is a dinosaur show with almost no dinosaurs in it. You know, kind of like kind of like The Walking Dead if it started out not having zombies.
SPEAKER_05Right, right, right. Did you did you feel like there were any early signs that you may have missed your first watch through?
SPEAKER_00You know what? Um, not on the first watch through, but I did mention in the last episode that the advertising was very dinosaur-light. In hindsight, that was a red flag for what was to come, but I absolutely did not recognize it at the time. If I thought about it at all, I probably thought they were just holding the dinosaurs back to keep the audience in suspense.
SPEAKER_05You would think.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, like it just never occurred to me that a show set in the Cretaceous would have hardly any dinosaurs in it. It was just so counterintuitive.
SPEAKER_05What do you reckon the cumulative runtime was of actual dinosaurs on screen?
SPEAKER_00I don't know, but I think I think it's probably I think on average each episode probably has about two minutes of dinosaur screen time, if that.
SPEAKER_05If anything, they sort of use them for the sound design more than anything else.
SPEAKER_00Yes, you hear dinosaur sound effects more than you actually see dinosaurs on screen.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_00Unfortunately, this is also a problem shared by Terra Nova's spiritual successor, Labrea. Someone did a super cut of all the creature scenes in Labra on YouTube. It comes to less than 15 minutes of a three-season show. I feel like they just don't realize what people want. Thing is though, it's not just that you don't see dinosaurs much in the episodes themselves, it's that they don't seem to be present much in the environment at all. When the characters go outside, they encounter one at most, or most of the time they don't even see that many.
SPEAKER_05You would think in an environment like that, you'd see them all over the place.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it doesn't make sense biologically because this is meant to be a pristine world where hunting and habitat loss haven't decimated animal populations like they have in our world. You think of those 19th-century accounts of bison herds in America that were so huge they'd stopped trains in their tracks for two days. That's what you should be seeing in Terra Nova. There should be hundreds or thousands of dinosaurs around the colony.
SPEAKER_05Could it be a CGI budget issue?
SPEAKER_00I would say so, probably. And then this is, I mean, I don't want to be too unfair to the show here because you could argue they were working on a much lower budget, and the fact they were also filming in a really expensive country, Australia. But even so, I feel like for a show like this, if you do have to make cuts, the last thing you should be skimping on is the dinosaurs.
SPEAKER_05Okay, so talk to me then what you thought about the dinosaurs you did see on screen.
SPEAKER_00Well, first of all, the CGI was pretty rubbish in most of them, you know, budget cuts, casualty. But for another thing, I didn't think they were really designed very well. Well, do you elaborate on that? Okay, well, I mean, the thing that is probably the best example of this is the speculative dinosaurs. So I didn't mention this in the last episode, but I'm kind of on the fence when it comes to speculative dinosaurs at the best of times. I think because they're inherently imaginary, there's a danger there of getting so caught up in how much free range you have with them that you end up creating something that is totally implausible, but you feel like you can get away with it because it's technically fiction. I mean, primeval, for instance. A speculative arboreal dinosaur in its fourth series, which is basically a raptor's head on a monkey's body, and it is one of the worst creatures in that show, in my opinion. But at the same time, I think it is possible to do speculative dinosaurs well, i.e., the V-Rex and Peter Jackson's King Kong. The problem with Terranova is it doesn't even really try. Apart from the slashers in the very first episode, the designs are really generic in this show. I mean, for instance, the two other feathered dinosaurs that we see, the Nycoraptor and the Oversaur, which I just want to say is not related to an Overraptor. It doesn't look anything like them. They could have done so much with the feather designs of those. You think about the diversity you see in modern birds. They could have gone with a cockatoo crest, golden pheasant colors, maybe like a turkey neck wattle if you want to be really out there. But instead, they're these dull brown or green dinosaurs with no sort of appreciable feather ornamentation.
SPEAKER_05That is definitely a bit of a letdown, especially with more and more new research coming out. I mean, I I know this was shot, you know, more than a decade ago now, but at the same time, people were beginning to discover findings about what dinosaurs more likely would have looked like. And I think that if you're going to take the creative liberty to invent speculative dinosaurs, anyways, you might as well get a little more creative with feathers of ornamentation, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, credit to the slasher, even though you don't really see it, they at least went for an interesting pattern: black, blue, yellow, red, like I mentioned in the last episode. But from there on, the closer we get to any sort of speculative adorments or anything like that is the ankylosaur where they added a few extra spikes to it. Why invent speculative dinosaurs if you're not going to make them special in any way?
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I mean, there was the whole thing with the empiriosaur, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, uh yeah, the dinosaur a dinosaur the sticks is used to attack the colony. It's a spinosaurus, it's just a spinosaurus with a few extra spikes on long itself. So why not call it a spinosaurus?
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I I don't know. I I that part always puzzles me. It's like taking a dinosaur off of stock images and just plastering a new name onto it, right? It doesn't make any sense.
SPEAKER_00Well, I mean, even the names I thought were just really random and not thought through, like Nycoraptor, Oversaur. Dinosaur names are supposed to mean something, you know, Velociraptor, speedy thief, triceratops, three-horn face. Nycoraptor is just Nyco thief. It has no meaning to it. It just feels like they just put words into a dinosaur name generator for this.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I agree. They just wanted something that sounded cool. Um but but so other than uh say the names and the looks that we've been talking about, I I'm curious to hear from you what you thought about some of the plot lines surrounding the dinosaurs. I I know there aren't many.
SPEAKER_00Well, there's the pterosaur plot, which is fun. There's an episode where a guy uses a Nycoraptor to off someone who he owed money to, which I think had potential. Um, but the thing that's most frustrating is that there are moments and ideas in this show which, with just a little bit more tweaking, could have made for some really great dinosaur action scenes or storylines. Like the empyrosol you mentioned. So, to give this some context, in the episode it appears in, a meteorite explodes in the atmosphere and takes out the colony's power. So the Sixers take advantage of this to drive an empyosaur up to the gate as a distraction for Jim and Taylor while they sneak in to steal something from the colony.
SPEAKER_05And I think that could have been a great premise for kind of not maybe not an MO, I don't mean by means of domestication, but I think that the Sixers utilizing dinosaurs to give them an advantage against the colony would have been a great running thing throughout the series.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I was thinking that too. Like, how cool would it have been if that Imperosaur was the Sixers battle dinosaur, which they raised from a hatchling? Like you say, it could have made for a really great recurring dinosaur character. Imagine how much more fun all the scenes where they ambushed Terra Novan convoys would have been if they had a battle dinosaur.
SPEAKER_05Right, exactly. And and I think, especially because, you know, it's plausible that if they raise the dinosaur from when it hatches, there's imprinting. I don't know if that's what dinosaurs had.
SPEAKER_00No, they probably did imprint. That's definitely plausible.
SPEAKER_05So in this scene, right, basically they drive it away, they set this fire, and I think it makes sense that the animal goes away. But the whole action scene to me, I I don't know if it lulled me into a false sense of security about what they were going to continue to do moving forwards, because it was a pretty decent scene, but yeah, it's a great setup. It was. I just but every time I I picture it in my head, there's just something missing, and I don't know if it's the fact that I felt like the Imperosaur was sort of a Spinosaurus, just with a different name, and they were trying to pass it off as a speculative dinosaur, or or maybe because it just didn't really show up for very long. I'm not really sure, but something has always just felt a little bit missing. Missing in what sense? Um see that's a good question because it's hard to put my finger on it. I just feel like it's not a in some ways. I wish that we would have seen a dinosaur more.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, definitely, totally. I mean, this whole thing had all the makers of a great action scene, and it's all over very quickly with no conflict. Like you say, they start a fire, it roars them a couple of times, and then it's driven away. The main action in this episode is them chasing the Sixers over the rooftops after they've driven the dinosaur away. When it should have been them fighting the Imperiosaur, and then afterwards they realize too late that it was a diversion, and they show the Sixers getting away from the colony with the stolen item. I mean, you know you're doing badly when Jurassic Park 3 has a better climactic action scene than you, with the same dinosaur, no less. There's also the, in my opinion, far worse waste of a dinosaur-centered plot line, which is the baby ankylosaur.
SPEAKER_05Oh, yes. The one that was hatched from an abandoned egg and raised by the Shannons.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so basically, what happens is in the same episode with the Nycoraptor murder mystery, they find an abandoned ankylosaur egg, which they take back to the colony to study, and then it hatches and is adopted by Zoe as a pet. Now, when I first read about them having a baby ankylosaur before this episode aired, I had this idea where Zoe would find this egg that had been abandoned by its mother in the wild, take it back, egg would hatch, dinosaur would imprint on her, and hijinks would ensue. There, that is your story. It practically writes itself with a premise like that.
SPEAKER_05Absolutely. Because then, I mean, it would also be great sort of dinosaur comedic relief in certain scenes as well.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, there's so much you can do with this. Like in the opening of the following episode when Josh can't find his shoes, you could have the baby ankylosaur chewing on them like a puppy.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, there was a lot of potential for very cute stuff to happen.
SPEAKER_00Or if it had imprinted on Dowie, think of all the complications that would arise from having a dinosaur that thinks it's a human.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, especially one that would grow to be so large.
SPEAKER_00But instead, the thing hatches. At the end of an episode that has almost nothing to do with it, by the way. They don't even mention it for three whole episodes. And then the Shannons dump it back in the wild because apparently these dumbass writers couldn't think of what to do with it. I mean, how unimaginative do you have to be to not find story potential and keeping a baby dinosaur?
SPEAKER_05The thing is, there are certain ingredients you need for a TV series to keep people hooked, right? Like action scenes are good, but you also need endearing things that keep the audience drawn into certain characters. So a baby dinosaur hatching in the colony is a perfect opportunity for the writers to create a cute creature that creates this dilemma of what are we gonna do with it? Like how do we raise it? There's a moral dilemma of just releasing an animal that's imprinted on a person, doesn't really know how to fend for itself because it's not gonna learn from its mother, right? There are all these dilemmas that you're gonna have to go through. And plus, it could just be a very cute companion for whichever kid the writers decided it'll imprint on. Um, and uh, for me, I was just disappointed we got none of that. It was pretty much a throwaway.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, even if your excuse is, well, we had to cut back on CGI, you have an animatronic dinosaur for the egg hatching scene. So why not use that more since you've gone to the trouble of making it? You know, you could have Zoe carry it around with her or just have it sit on her bed next to her sometimes. It wouldn't cost you anything extra, and it would be such a simple way of boosting your dinosaur screen time.
SPEAKER_05Exactly. Like I said, they went through all that effort just for a throwaway, essentially.
SPEAKER_00Also, I want to come back to what you were saying about the moral dilemma of them releasing the baby ankylosaurus into the wild. Isn't that really unethical in its own right, given that he's only like what, a month old by the time they do that?
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I mean, especially when you consider most birds and reptiles and take a little bit of time before they really get their legs under them properly. I mean, right?
SPEAKER_00And he can walk. He can walk, but my my beef with that is that he's too small to defend himself. And the other thing is, baby ankylosaurs are thought to have been like baby crocodiles, and that their armor only hardened as they got older. So, right now he's got no way to defend himself, and they're just dumping him out there in the wild. I mean, I watched that scene, and like the Shannons are the only family he knows, and he's calling after them in distress as they walk away. He's like, Yeah, yeah. I was like, I can't watch this. This is cruel.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, uh, there was no bribe or reason because there was no discussion over if they should have done that either, right? It was pretty much, yeah, this is what we're gonna do.
SPEAKER_00Oh, no, no, they said they said, Oh, we have to release him because otherwise he'll lose his ability to socialize with his own kind. He should already have lost it by now. He should have imprinted on a human being. He shouldn't believe he's an ankylosaurus at this point.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I mean, the only fix would have been to drop him off in a herd of ankylosauruses that accepted him.
SPEAKER_00No, the only way I think the only way you'd be able to do this is put the thing down like cold yellow, but they weren't ever gonna do that, thankfully. No, no, obviously not. They had some mercy at least.
SPEAKER_06Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Of course, they contrive a happy ending by having a seemingly unrelated adult ankylosaurus show up out of nowhere and adopt the baby, which I'm pretty sure never happens with real animals.
SPEAKER_02Very, very rarely.
SPEAKER_00I gotta say this: the baby ankylosaur in Terra Nova walked, so that Bumpy and Jurassic World Camp Cretaceous could run and be a way better version of this. Bumpy is literally the baby ankylosaurus in Terra Nova done right.
SPEAKER_05Fair enough. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Oh, Bumpy, give it a name that's precious. Going back to the dinosaurs hardly ever being in the show, I think there was a way they could have made this work if the dinosaurs were at least memorable in the scenes they were in. Like if you think about the dragons in Game of Thrones, they didn't appear very much in the early seasons of that show either. But when they did appear, they would always do something memorable, like Drogon burning a slaver in season three, or even him, Viserion, and Rhaegar fighting over a lamb in the opening of season four. But in Terra Nova, the dinosaurs are just background most of the time. And even when they do get more to do, they're written out of the episodes almost as quickly as they're introduced.
SPEAKER_05They were part of a very lush world that was just heavily underutilized.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, no, totally. The Cretaceous setting is an afterthought in this show. Half the episodes of just Jim and Taylor investigating various mysteries going on inside the colony. Most of the characters never go outside except for them. And even when they go out, it's in service of whatever mystery they're trying to solve in that episode, or this ongoing storyline of them trying to find a spy in the colony who's secretly feeding info to the sexes. It's basically a crime drama that just happens to be set in the Cretaceous, which, to borrow a quote from the nostalgia critic, is like a Holocaust movie that just happens to have fragles in it.
SPEAKER_05I think if it was supposed to be a crime drama, I can't say that all the plot lines were subpar.
SPEAKER_00No, I mean, these are not badly written storylines per se, they do make sense and they're compelling-ish, I guess. But the problem is this isn't what we signed up for. We didn't want cop drama and colony intrigue. We wanted to see more dinosaurs and more of this incredible world, and we're not.
SPEAKER_03Exactly.
SPEAKER_00When I said that I want to see more of the little details about colony function, I didn't mean I wanted that to be the main setting of the show. This should be the base where you begin and end each episode, but the rest of the time, you should be out in the jungle seeing these creatures, learning more about how this whole ecosystem operates. Like, what happened to the whole thing of Sky guiding Josh to the world of Terra Nova, like all the promo materials that she was gonna do?
SPEAKER_05For me, you know, they fixated so much on this whole Sixer spy plot line, and I just felt like they spent very little time building or using the world that they built, and also really getting us to care about some of the characters that probably should have mattered a lot more in terms of how much the audience became attached to them.
SPEAKER_00So remember that really sweet relationship we talked about in the pilot between Josh and Skye, the one they spent literally half of a 90 or so minute two battle focusing on, the one you probably thought was going to be the main romantic plot going forward. Well, it turns out the writers were just fucking with you there because it is almost completely kicked to the cub for the rest of the show.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, this was a big disappointment, and just frankly, a very strange creative decision.
SPEAKER_00This is probably what frustrated me almost as much, if not more, than the lack of dinosaurs.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. I mean, for starters, you know, okay, so there was Kara, right? Josh's initial girlfriend. She doesn't get to come through the portal with him, and there was the whole thing with him promising her that he'll find a way to get her over. But the issue is they spend so little time developing that relationship. You forget about her very quickly, especially because his rapport with Sky is very good. The on-screen chemistry was very good.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and the show very cruelly tricks you into thinking that they're gonna carry that on. Like he protects her during the terrorist attack and then invites her around to the Shannon house to make sure she's safe. And then there's the episode after that with the turman and the hammock together. There is this gentle lighting, this schmultz-guitar soundtrack. They're doing these big dreamy doe eyes. It is such 2010 teen romance ambiance. And then they kiss for the first time, which okay, this is three episodes in, but you know, it's still a sweet moment. And you can tell from his eyes and his body language he's really into her. And then he tells he's still into his old flame, and I'm like, dig move, man, not cool.
SPEAKER_05And that whole dialogue of him saying that it just felt forced, you know.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, they set this up like Josh and Skye are gonna be a thing in this show, and then they completely drop it in favor of this bullshit storyline of Josh trying to get Kara to Terra Nova that no one cares about.
SPEAKER_05Because they spent exactly zero minutes telling us why we should care about it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so how this plays out is Josh finds out the Sixers can communicate with the future and might be able to help him get Kara to Terra Nova. So he gets the job at this CD bar where the owner trades in secrets with the Sixers on the side. It's basically the iceberg lounge of Terra Nova. And then uh Mira eventually bribes him into stealing medical supplies from the infirmary, the same one his own mother works at, by the way, in exchange for getting Kara to Terra Nova.
SPEAKER_05So, but okay, hang on. Because there's this whole thing, right? With after he finds out that the Sixers can communicate with the future, doesn't Mira show him some sort of proof that she knows where Kara is or something like that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. There's a moment when he's having doubts and he says, Look, I want some reassurances, and she shows him a hologram of Kara in the future.
SPEAKER_05You know, I don't know. Part of me just finds it a little bit implausible as well that a boy of his age would have so much conviction about this whole relationship. It's just a bit uh I don't know. I mean, it's not implausible. I suppose it's possible. It's just I mean, people have less conviction over a relationship when they depart from high school and go to university, right?
SPEAKER_00Well, it's slightly different when you go back to a parallel universe 85 million years in the past. But yeah, I mean, I get that it's honorable of Josh to try and keep his promise to Kara, but it's not interesting as an audience member.
SPEAKER_05No. And and they never establish why exactly Josh would have such interminable feelings.
SPEAKER_00Um, they kind of do in a way, because there's the episode, I don't remember which one it was, but there's the episode where he's talking to Sky about how bad the situation is in 2149. He says, I had three friends who killed themselves because nobody has any hope anymore. So you see why he wants to get Cara out of there. But I just think, you know, wouldn't it have been a way more interesting dilemma for him to try to get Kara to Terra Nova, but then realize he's actually falling in love with Sky?
SPEAKER_05That would be a problem.
SPEAKER_00It would be a problem, but that's what would make it interesting. It would help build on a relationship that was actually established in the pilot and the audiences might actually care about, versus beating us over the head with just trying to reunite with this girl we don't know and don't care about.
SPEAKER_05Oh, okay. And the worst part was is that it was kind of at the expense of his character development. Between the pilot and then the end, I don't really feel like there was much growth in his character.
SPEAKER_00No, he doesn't grow, except I guess he learns to be nicer to his dad. He doesn't learn to appreciate this world he was so against coming to. He doesn't develop any new interests or hobbies because he's so absorbed in trying to get Kara to Terranova. Honestly, in that scene we mentioned where Mira shows Josh a hologram of Kara in the future. I so wanted it to be a fake or for another boy to come into the picture just so we could end this whole nonsense subplot.
SPEAKER_03I understand that feeling.
SPEAKER_00I also liked where Josh decides to go ahead with stealing the meds from the infirmary, and Sky is the voice of reason trying to talk him out of it. And in the end, she just puts her foot down and decides to no longer help him with this. I was like, you know what? Good on you, girlfriend. You deserve better than this Sky.
SPEAKER_05You know, I I actually I found Skye, like the actress, did a pretty good job.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I love the look on her face when he's trying to justify this. She knows this is bullshit and she knows he knows it too. She's just as fed up of hearing him whine about this as the audience is.
SPEAKER_05The only thing is, and this has nothing to do with her acting, but it was just that scene where after they kiss and he says he wants to get Kara to Terra Nova, her response was so calm.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, she should be way more hurt to find out that the guy that she's obviously in love with doesn't really want her back. She's like, Oh, you probably hate me for that. And then she's like, No, Josh, I don't hate you. And I'm like, You should.
SPEAKER_05Right, right. There's no real uh established reason why she would want to help him.
SPEAKER_00The thing is though, Kara isn't even expecting this of Josh. She makes it very clear in the pilot when they're saying goodbye that she's accepted that she's not gonna see him again, and she wishes him a good life, even after he's at, oh, I'm gonna find a way to get you there.
SPEAKER_04It's a one-way trip, Josh. There's no way back.
SPEAKER_00As far as she's concerned, he doesn't owe her anything, and he's not even doing what she'd want by not living his new life in Terra Nova to the full.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I mean, listen, the the whole relationship with him and Cara was just sort of they really wanted to force that, and I really have no idea why.
SPEAKER_00You know what I would have loved to see? I would have loved to see him find some sort of healing in nature. There's so much scientific literature these days pointing to the link between exposure to nature and psychological healing. And here we have a character who has literally never experienced nature before in his life. He's come from this really awful, apocalyptic, dystopian future. He's had a lot of personal trauma, what with his dad being arrested and thrown in jail for two years. And then for him to come to Terra Nova and find some sort of peace there. I mean, I just think what really interesting and also just really touching idea that would have been to explore. You see this broken kid gradually learning to find joy in life again by being surrounded by this thing that he's never had the ability to experience before.
SPEAKER_05Well, maybe that would have been a touch too uh introspective for the show. Yeah, possibly. I I wanted to ask you about the other teenage romance in this show.
SPEAKER_00Oh god, yeah. Maddie and Mark Reynolds, the two characters who had about a minute and a half of screen time in the pilot at a stretch.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. There's so much to talk about.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so okay, well, so okay, so little intro to Reynolds, since we didn't talk about him in the last episode. He is a soldier who Maddy first meets when he brings her and her family to their new house in Terra Nova. Again, when she and Zoe are on orientation, and again when he comes to check on them while Josh is being rescued from the slashers. And if you think that's nowhere near enough time for him to develop any sort of personality, I'm sorry to tell you that neither is the rest of the show.
SPEAKER_05His acting was so bizarre. I mean, they really try to go for this trope of the guy who was raised by a disciplinarian father or something along those lines, right? I don't necessarily mean this is exactly what happened to him, but that's the trope, it's the archetype, where you know he kind of is a gentlemanly person in the kind of antiquated way, which can make it kind of funny for a teenage girl in 2010s who doesn't really speak to people her age who would say 2149, technically. Okay, well, yes, but you know, they're using language of 2010s, I suppose, right? So um and it's just the issue is the way they wrote his dialogue did not make him feel clumsy with a contemporary, it didn't make him feel comedically antiquated. He just gave me really creepy vibes.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I cringe listening to the scenes where he was asking Maddie on a date. Like, I want to declare my intentions for you, Maddie Shannon, to court you.
SPEAKER_05That is such a weird turn of phrase.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, no normal person talks this way, even with military training. Even Maddie seems creeped out by it at times.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, if they wanted him to be, you know, comically antiquated. I don't know. There were just better ways to do it.
SPEAKER_00It doesn't help that Dean Guyer puts no emotion into his performance at all. It is literally like watching a sex doll in a uniform with him.
SPEAKER_05There was no chemistry between him and Aomi Scott.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, they're just going through the motions here. I feel like he didn't know how to act with his face either. I don't remember him ever having more than two expressions in this whole show maximum.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. I mean, I don't know what the direction was for how he played his character, but I can tell you it didn't really come off right.
SPEAKER_00I do love Jim's reaction when Reynolds says to him, I've begun the initial stages of courting Maddy. He says, You are aware I carry a gun, have a quick temper, and tend to hold grudges, right?
SPEAKER_03I remember this line. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I mean, you kind of wonder why would Maddie be into this?
SPEAKER_05Well, there I have no good answer for you because there is no real reason.
SPEAKER_00I guess it's because she was unpopular at school. So maybe this is like a Meg Griffin situation where she just throws herself at any boy who takes an interest in her.
SPEAKER_05Maybe. But you know, again, it's it's not very well set up, so it's just not very believable.
SPEAKER_00Oh, but then it gets so much worse when Reynolds, who I must point out here is not much older than 16, eventually says he wants to marry Maddie, who is also only 16, which just yuck.
SPEAKER_05Yuck, but also just very, very strange. I mean, there really isn't a precedent for why he would want to do that. Presumably in 2149, that's not the norm, because they try to play off the culture as very similar to our current day culture. So I mean, it just is very bizarre.
SPEAKER_00There was an interview with the showrunners where they said they wanted this to reflect how young people in real frontier towns and history got married.
SPEAKER_01But to keep these colonies going, people got married really young. And the fact that Maddie is being courted already is one of those things we're gonna talk about and explore a little more in other episodes because we need to keep this colony moving.
SPEAKER_05Right, but I don't feel like that's culturally that analogous. I mean, I understand it's a colony and it is kind of like a frontier town, but I don't know, culturally, they seem kind of far apart. These people come from the future, they have much more advanced technology and things like that. It's the the cultural norms just wouldn't be the same.
SPEAKER_00Also, the reason why people got married young in historical frontier towns is because you were probably going to be dead before you were 35. But in Terra no, it's not the case. Yeah, they have a functional healthcare system. It doesn't seem like dinosaurs are claiming too many casualties. Yeah, diseases are a bit of an issue, but they don't seem to kill that many people per year, so there's no rush to do this.
SPEAKER_05And plus, how old is the colony supposed to be? What, a decade?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, thereabouts.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I mean, how many cultural shifts could there have been?
SPEAKER_00Also, Reynolds has known Maddy for just under a year by this point, isn't it? A little too soon to make a decision about marrying her.
SPEAKER_05Definitely. Josh and Sky's relationship would have been a much better focus point.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, seriously, what idiot thought this was the relationship people wanted to see grow? I mean, it may be a byproduct of the whole show having to be written at once, but even so, they set up a completely different relationship in the pilot between Josh and Sky. So ignoring that in favor of this is just poor planning and payoff.
SPEAKER_05Well, it's preposterous, is what it is.
SPEAKER_00If they were gonna do this, then this should have been saved for a later season. The first one should have been about building up Josh and Sky's relationship and maybe hint at something at Maddy and Reynolds here and there on the side. And then if you got renewed, then you could focus on those two.
SPEAKER_05I agree.
SPEAKER_00But yeah, this show puts way too much focus on the wrong things and nowhere near enough on what should be the core elements of it.
SPEAKER_05So I think I really focused on this plot of trying to find a Sixer spy, and um obviously this somehow includes Taylor's son, Lucas. Obviously. He's in league with the Sixers, blah blah blah. But they just get so fixated on this. And I remember watching the pilot and thinking, I really hope this is not the direction they're gonna go in. Because they kind of brought this in with like those equations or or symbols, and then they mention someone closely connected to Taylor, and then I was like, oh, okay.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I remember when they finally reintroduced Taylor's son about halfway through the series. I remember watching that and thinking, Woody, here's that convoluted plot you were worried about. It's arrived.
SPEAKER_05Right. So for context for listeners, Lucas is in league with corporate villains from the future who want to strip mine Terra Nova. And at some point they also sent the Sixers to try to take Taylor out. And um essentially Taylor found out about this and he had to banish Lucas from the colony, and apparently Lucas has just been living in the jungle this entire time. And so, in order to help the corporate villains, he's trying to enable the portal to go both ways. Because right now they can go to the Cretaceous, but they can't go back to their future world. And for those who aren't aware, actually, the markings on the waterfall rocks that we see, their sort of calculations or things he uses to taunt Taylor about it. But it took them ages to bring this back. Like, this is a very convoluted plot line. Like it's a full crime drama story arc, and it took them ages to bring this back. I mean, it felt a little bit like they'd forgotten that that was supposed to be a thing.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I don't think they even mentioned Lucas between the pilot and that episode.
SPEAKER_05But also just his relationship with Taylor, like it's such a cookie-cutter way to give a strong male protagonist drama.
SPEAKER_00Glad you brought that up because I wanted to ask the question is Lucas a good villain?
SPEAKER_05Overall, no. Like I just said, he's very overly generic, he's just a relative of an overly macho leader who essentially goes against said relative to destroy the piece. I feel like it's a very K-drama-ish sort of thing to do. Um and I mean, look, there's some attempt at creating a sympathetic backstory, right? Like he hates Taylor because Taylor had to sacrifice Lucas's mother in Somalia. Okay. Alright, like I get it. But then the thing is, does that justify him being willing to wipe out an entire ecosystem and the whole of humanity's last chance for survival just out of spite for his father? That's it it doesn't make him a particularly strong villain.
SPEAKER_00I do feel like he's acted a lot better as a villain than he has written. Ashley Zuckerman, who plays him, puts on this really creepy, deranged smile from time to time. He also talks in these very hush tones that make him sound really unsettling.
SPEAKER_02About your forgiveness. You should be forgiven for mine.
SPEAKER_00There's also his creepy relationship with Skye and his weird fetishization of the fact that she's Taylor's adopted daughter, which technically makes her his stepsister. Although he uh leaves the step out of it when he's addressing her as such, which gives it this even creepier, cosy, incestuous vibe.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I don't know. Like, I don't know why they decided to do this. Was it to convince us that he's very screwed up in the head? Because we're convinced of that already.
SPEAKER_00It does add an extra layer of creepiness when he's sexually harassing her. The weird thing is people made YouTube videos shipping them as a couple.
SPEAKER_04Okay, I mean to each their own. I don't I don't know that I I don't know. I don't know about that one, folks.
SPEAKER_00Speaking of Skye, turns out she was the Sixer spy all along, which if I was being generous, I'd say was the reason why they shunted her off to the side this whole season, so you wouldn't ever suspect her. But in reality, it was probably just another result of bad writing, like everything else in this show.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, so again, for context, Sky's motivation was that the Sixers were keeping her mother, her sick mother captive, and basically keeping her alive only on the condition that Sky gives them information about the colony. But this whole like this whole subplot just felt like a weed popped out of the ground. There's no anticipation for I mean, you could have maybe, but there's no anticipation for the plot itself. Like, why why is it there?
SPEAKER_00It feels like it was just set up to create conflict in the adopted father relationship she had with Taylor.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, exactly. It was definitely a situation that was very shoehorned in. For me, it also contradicts some of her character traits, right? Like, I don't understand how that was supposed to be compatible with her friendliness with Josh. Like, if she's if she's supposed to be on the Sixer side, why would she? I guess she could have a genuine friendship with him, but I don't know. It just seems the thing is when you start to shoehorn in subplot lines like that, it's very easy for the continuity of characters and personalities to suddenly not be so fluid.
SPEAKER_00I don't think it's necessarily mutually exclusive that she could have a genuine friendship with Josh and still be a spy for the Sixers because the Intel work has nothing to do with her relationship with Josh. I don't think it clashes as much with that part of her character as you say it does. The problem I find with this is that it's not impactful because we never spent any time seeing Sky and Taylor's relationship.
SPEAKER_05Right, that's true. They don't speak to each other.
SPEAKER_00No, they have one conversation at the end of the pilot and then it scrolls forward to like, what is it, episode 11, 12, I forget, and then they're having a chat then. And this is about the point when they reveal Sky's the spy.
SPEAKER_05And then there's no impact whatsoever in terms of Taylor's disappointment or sadness, because it's like, well, what sort of relationship did you two have again?
SPEAKER_00I think Stephen Lang's acting does help to sell it a lot because you can see he is visibly crushed by the realization. It's just the story does not do anything to back it up. Correct. Also, the Sixers are nomads, so how have they been keeping Sky's mother alive for three years while constantly moving camp in this disease and mosquito-infested jungle?
SPEAKER_05Right, and they're constantly having to steal medication from the colony.
SPEAKER_00And they live in tree houses, which, in the words of Ian Malcolm, puts them at very convenient biting heights. You only need a big theropod dinosaur to wander into camp and sniff out a sick, bed-ridden woman behind this flimsy canvas, and the whole basis of their relationship with Skye is gone.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_00So anyway, Lucas eventually succeeds in making the portal go both ways, goes back to the future, and he and this evil military group hijacked the 11th pilgrimage to come to Terra Nova, sending through a suicide bomber to kill Taylor's troops stationed on the other side, which also takes out Josh's girlfriend we don't care about. So that whole stupid subplot has no payoff to it.
SPEAKER_05There's no payoff. We spent all of this time waiting for some sort of resolution because we were convinced this was a very important thing to him, and then this is the end result.
SPEAKER_04If I just left everything alone, she'd still be alive.
SPEAKER_00Think of it this way, Josh. At least her last breaths were fresh air.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. So then what happens is this evil military group take over the colony, which sends Taylor and his troops into the jungle, and eventually the Shannons join them and they engage in guerrilla warfare against Lucas, the Sixers, and their allies. Thing is, for me, the occupation again is just sort of that genre confusion issue. I mean, we went from a crime drama to what, a World War II movie in a different setting?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, like Empire the Sun or Chandler's List or something like that.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's just so strange. It's like what what do you want to be? You have to decide. You can't be everything. And I just felt like also the occupation didn't have a lot of impact because the show doesn't make us care enough about any of the characters, right? So the occupation of the colony, you're like, do I how much do I feel sympathy for those characters currently? Who are any of these people? How much time have we spent with them?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it doesn't help that the acting doesn't really jibe with the mood either. There's the scene when Jim wakes up from a coma to find the colony occupied, he goes home to his family, and Maddie and Zoe are just sitting at the kitchen table looking bored, like there isn't a hostile group that's just taken over their home.
SPEAKER_05So eventually they decide to destroy the portal because they're like, hey, we need to stop anyone else coming in to try to destroy Terra Nova. There are issues with this decision, though, because don't they rely on the portal for medicine and a lot of their tech? And I just feel like all that was sort of glossed over very quickly.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, Taylor's like, we'll find a way to survive. And like, that's it. There's no consideration as to what's going to happen when they run out of stuff. It's all swept under the rug. As is the ethical problem of abandoning millions of people to their fate with no hope of escape. Like that was the whole thing of Terra Novos, like it's humanity's last great hope. And you're condemning all these people to just choke to death in this apocalyptic future. There's no consideration as to the wide implications here.
SPEAKER_05So basically they go on, and at some point, they ambush one of Lucas's trucks. The truck is shipping a container of meteoric iron to the portal, and they swap said container with an identical one containing Jim and a drug juvenile Carnotaurus.
SPEAKER_00Because the show's finally remembered it's supposed to have dinosaurs in it.
SPEAKER_05Right, finally. It's almost like the writers were like, hey, here's your dinosaur. We remembered, right? Here's one at the very end. Yeah. And the dinosaur is let loose on the bad guys in the future. And whilst it's doing this, gym sets of detonators to destroy the portal.
SPEAKER_00I wanted to like that action scene, but I was so out of it by that point. Like I did not I didn't have the energy in me or the emotional investment to care about a dinosaur. I mean, that is a pretty serious indictment of a paleo drama if you are so tapped out that you can't even get excited at a dinosaur.
SPEAKER_05Well, yeah, and and even I recall when we're discussing talking points, we both were drawing blanks on how we felt about this climax. Because I think when you're watching the show, you're just so clocked out by the time you get to this point.
SPEAKER_00It does actually remind me of another bad paleodrama, Primeval New World, which I will not make you watch. Maybe that's a good thing. Yeah, I saved my worst cruelties for myself and Derby.
SPEAKER_03Fair enough.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so the ending of that show hits a lot of the same beats as the ending of Terra Nova. There are these time portals or anomalies as they're called in the primeval universe. There's this evil militarized group who wants to control them, who the protagonists have to stop. There's a horned theropod that gets tranquilized and taken back through the portal to the present, except there it's an Albertosaurus, not a Carnotaurus. It breaks free, kills a bunch of bad guys, and then everyone runs to the portal in the blaze of fire at the end.
SPEAKER_05Wow. Okay. Yeah, I can see, I can see the comparisons you're drawing. How do you feel like that finale stacks up with this one?
SPEAKER_00Oh, they're both pretty awful. But you know, I will say this Terra Nova is bad, but even after everything I've said, I wouldn't necessarily call it unwatchable. The same cannot be said for primeval new worlds.
SPEAKER_05Right, oh okay, that gives you a pretty clear idea. And I was gonna say earlier though, I was thinking like one of my issues with this whole finale, or or throughout, I guess, the whole Terra Nova series, is that you never really feel that connected to their environment.
SPEAKER_00No, you never care about the ecosystem, you're never allowed to build any sort of emotional connection to it.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I look, the whole thing with caring about the ecosystem is if you're a well-adjusted person, you don't want to see an entire ecosystem destroyed. But for a story, a good story, that's not enough. There has to be an emotional anchor, which makes it compelling for you to feel stress, for you to feel anxiety about the whole thing.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, Avatar nails this because you see the beauty of the ecosystem and you see it be destroyed when they tear down Home Tree. But Terra Nova doesn't put in the work for that. And it's because of that whole thing of just constantly being pulled in all different directions. Oh, is it a teen drama? Is it a crime drama? Is it an environmental story? It's just because it's got no identity, it's got no focus as to what we should be caring about. So, what is there to say in the end about Terra Nova?
SPEAKER_05For me, it was a world with a lot of potential for creativity and imagination. There was a lot of room for creating a world that was very grounded, that would spark other people's imaginations, but ultimately it all falls flat and it ends up being just a really fancy, expensive set for a crime show.
SPEAKER_00The thing I always say to people is the worst thing about Terra Nova isn't that it's bad. The worst thing is that it could have been really good. I mean, there were so many little threads of good ideas floating around this show, any one of which would have made it way more compelling if they'd actually developed them properly. It's so frustrating because you just think you just put a bit more time into them, a bit more thought, a bit more creativity with your limitations, and you could have done so much more with this. You could have given us more of the type of show you promised us to begin with.
SPEAKER_05Is there the discrepancy between what it could have been versus what it ended up being?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it introduces good ideas, but then it either does nothing with them or it cuts their lifespans too short. And here's the thing: even if Terra Nova had gotten enough ratings for a second season, the execution of the first is so fatally flawed. I can't see how a serviceable second season could have come from this. Like, why would you feel in the thing for Josh and Skye now being able to pursue a relationship when hardly any time was spent on them in this season? I mean, I assume that's where they were going since they killed off Kara.
SPEAKER_05I think for season two, it would have been very difficult for them to create a compelling storyline with the character relationship still intact. Because they they made it so convoluted, they drove relationships in directions no one wanted. I don't know how you reel that all back in.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's unsalvageable.
SPEAKER_05Exactly.
SPEAKER_00So uh yeah, I guess we just wrap this up with talking a little bit about the legacy of the show. There was a motion web comic developed for audiences to write their own ending to the show. They had a link to the website on the inside of the DVD box, which is no longer active. I found it pretty underwhelming. It only allowed you to use Taylor, Jim, Lieutenant Washington, and Lucas as characters, and definitely didn't have enough dinosaurs. Of course. Yeah. Of course. The show also had a terrible song written for it. It was called Another Sun. It was sung by Michelle Brunch, and it is honestly a perfect musical metaphor for Terra Nova in that it starts off nice enough. But then very rapidly just tended to a nonsensical cacophony.
SPEAKER_05Like, why would they choose a song of that genre? It was more like I could have seen it from a walking dead scene where a bunch of people were getting mauled. I mean, I know the lyrics aren't necessarily well, the lyrics aren't in that direction, but it's just the instrument the change is not the change not in that direction at all.
SPEAKER_00I think it's kind of meant to be it's meant to be more like sort of peppy upbeat sort of thing. But yeah, I don't get I don't see a way with it.
SPEAKER_05I think it's I think it's a music thing. It's just the choice of chords and everything. It was very almost bittersweet. It was strange. I just I didn't I didn't like the musical choices they made in that song.
SPEAKER_00Well, um, since we mentioned season two earlier, the writers did drop a few hints as to where they would have gone with this. Apparently, Taylor would have undergone a mental breakdown and Jim would have assumed control of the colony in his stead. There was also apparently going to be a subplot where they would have had a super intelligent species of dinosaur threaten the colony.
SPEAKER_05Oh, not this. Jurassic World tried this.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I was really looking forward to seeing what your reaction to that was gonna be.
SPEAKER_03Oh, I didn't know that that's where they were going with that. Not this again.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I feel like this would have taken the show to a whole new level of bonkers.
SPEAKER_05I don't know why studios do this. You don't need this. Animals aren't necessarily stupid. Maybe they don't process information in exactly the same way humans do. But have you seen Crocodiles Hunt? They will wait and watch animals at watering holes and remember which watering holes the animals go to. You don't need the super intelligent dinosaur.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I I I I don't know. Like, you know what? I watched the whole finale with a sense of numbness. I didn't care what was gonna happen at all. I felt nothing.
SPEAKER_03I felt very similarly.
SPEAKER_00I mean, like I say, it's such a shame because this show has so much potential. It should have been a show on par with the fun and creativity of primeval. And I don't know, man. Like, I just how do you fuck up a premise this good this badly?
SPEAKER_05Well, they wanted to do a cop show. That's how, right? This should have been a show where kids were buying Happy Meal toys from McDonald's of and it ended up being CSI Cretaceous period. Oh Jesus, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Uh yeah, I don't know. I mean, I'm worn out, it's late where we are, so I think we're just gonna wrap this up. So um, yeah, uh, thanks for doing this, Woody. Thank you for suffering through this for me.
SPEAKER_05Oh, it's my pleasure. It's always it's always fun to talk about a series, especially as two people who enjoy writing ourselves.
SPEAKER_00Didn't you say that this show made you want to write better Cretaceous Fiction? Yeah, when I have more time on my hands, maybe.
SPEAKER_05But I definitely definitely did give me the spark because it was like, oh, really? This is where they went with that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, well, if I can persuade you to come back on this podcast another time, I will try and find a better show for you to talk about.
unknownGood.
SPEAKER_03You know, I mean, I'm always happy to talk about subpar things once in a while, but it's also fun to talk about good things.
SPEAKER_00Although I may also have to twist your arm to talk about the original script for the Terra Nova pilots, which I mentioned I found and downloaded, just to compare and contrast it to the final version. Because I think that could be some interesting stuff to talk about there.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, yeah. That sounds interesting.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Well, anyway, uh that's all we have to say, listeners. Thank you for listening to this. Hope you enjoyed yourself, and we will see you on our next dig. Take care.
SPEAKER_05Bye. Thanks for listening, everyone.