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time travel and dinosaurs, but it's not sci fi

The show is set in the year 2149 when all life on the planet Earth is being threatened with extinction. Scientists have opened a door allowing people to travel back to prehistoric times. The Shannon family (father Jim, his wife Elisabeth, and their three children Josh, Maddy and Zoe) join the tenth pilgrimage of settlers to Terra Nova, the first human colony on the other side of the temporal doorway. However, they did not realize that they placed it in the middle of a group of carnivores.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Nova_%28TV_series%29


They're not only time-travellers, those people are coming from the friggin future.

The premise sounds a bit like "Earth 2 meets Jurassic Park", actually.

The premise of the show blows my mind. They are headed to the past to avoid extinction. They're not going to develop a long lasting civilization in the age of the dinosaurs. The dinos themselves were wiped out by an extinction level event.
Maybe they don't realize how far back in time they actually went?
 
Someone should do a show about an uninhabited island which gets populated by future people so they could exploit the past's abundant resources and create ships to escape Earth. The plan is to sink the island once this is done, to avoid any paradoxes. Thus Atlantis is born. But then, one traveler realizes the error of their ways and leads an ancient Greek rebellion, or something. It would be a ship-based show!
 
The premise of the show blows my mind. They are headed to the past to avoid extinction. They're not going to develop a long lasting civilization in the age of the dinosaurs. The dinos themselves were wiped out by an extinction level event.

The 'age of the dinosaurs' lasted over a hundred million years. Even if they go to the late Cretaceous to take advantaged of the better known dinosaurs (T-Rex, etc.) they should have millions of years of wiggle room to play around in. They'd have to be pretty dumb to start their civilization a few years out from the K-T event. But building ahead of a disaster of that magnitude makes sense: what better way to make sure that what you leave behind won't contaminate the timestream than by building your civilization over Chicxulub, where you know a massive asteroid is going to pulverize all trace of your passage?

Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman
 
The rejection of Stargate Universe is something we pondered; it seemed the typical TV sci-fi fan wouldn't go near it and/or hated it after trying a couple episodes because it smelled "newjack". Despite the fact that SGU wasn't truly a copy of NuBSG - for one, it actually respected science, and was about real science fictional concepts - merely the visual style and the fact that the characters weren't Trek/Classic Stargate era boilerplate resulted in not just disinterest, but literal hatred.

I think you'll find the real reason why SGU failed was because it wasn't a good show. Bad shows get cancelled. One need not analyze things any further than that.
 
Hmm, the two examples of bad shows are 'reality' shows. Just a comment, it means something but shot if I know what. :)
 
The show is set in the year 2149 when all life on the planet Earth is being threatened with extinction. Scientists have opened a door allowing people to travel back to prehistoric times. The Shannon family (father Jim, his wife Elisabeth, and their three children Josh, Maddy and Zoe) join the tenth pilgrimage of settlers to Terra Nova, the first human colony on the other side of the temporal doorway. However, they did not realize that they placed it in the middle of a group of carnivores.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Nova_%28TV_series%29


They're not only time-travellers, those people are coming from the friggin future.

The premise sounds a bit like "Earth 2 meets Jurassic Park", actually.

The premise of the show blows my mind. They are headed to the past to avoid extinction. They're not going to develop a long lasting civilization in the age of the dinosaurs. The dinos themselves were wiped out by an extinction level event.

From what I've read they go back in time 20 million years before the dinosaurs were wiped out.
 
The premise of the show blows my mind. They are headed to the past to avoid extinction.


TOS "All Our Yesterday's"

That was about saving the people, not the civilization. What I get from Terra Nova is they are going to the past to colonize. All Our Yesterdays had people hiding in established human civilizations in the past.

Still, it would be quite optimistic for them to assume that their civilization is gonna survive a couple of million years in the first place. They need to get close to the extinction event first. And even if their civilization survives for million of years... after such a long time one could assume that they will have developed techniques to deal with an impending asteroid impact.

At least they know with absolute certainty when it is gonna happen and that the time-span before that event is relatively safe. They don't have that certainty in their own time. Who's to say that an asteroid won't hit Earth only 50,000 years from their original time?
 
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Ever want to kick an entire network in the balls? :klingon:

Doctor Who doesn't have much of an audience in America, well under 1 million viewers for the most recent episode that I could find figures for. That's not all that great even by cable standards, where the top shows get 6M viewers, but since production costs are already paid for, it's a different calculation.

Not sure thats a fair estimation though, as I suspect only a percentage of US fans actually wait for the show to turn up on cable.
 
Not sure thats a fair estimation though, as I suspect only a percentage of US fans actually wait for the show to turn up on cable.
In BBC America's defense, they get the episode the same day it airs in the UK now. If I got them on cable, I'd wait for them.

...but there's the rub: they aren't on basic cable in most areas, so not many people can watch it.
 
Ever want to kick an entire network in the balls? :klingon:

Doctor Who doesn't have much of an audience in America, well under 1 million viewers for the most recent episode that I could find figures for. That's not all that great even by cable standards, where the top shows get 6M viewers, but since production costs are already paid for, it's a different calculation.

Not sure thats a fair estimation though, as I suspect only a percentage of US fans actually wait for the show to turn up on cable.
And let's not forget, that latest episode was on Christmas. Might want to compare that number to everyone else's number on Christmas day, I doubt anyone aside from the sports shows had very good numbers. A truer indication would be to look at the ratings for Matt Smith's whole first season
 
Not sure thats a fair estimation though, as I suspect only a percentage of US fans actually wait for the show to turn up on cable.
In BBC America's defense, they get the episode the same day it airs in the UK now. If I got them on cable, I'd wait for them.

...but there's the rub: they aren't on basic cable in most areas, so not many people can watch it.


Bingo. BBCA is not on basic cable around here. I'd have to spring for the deluxe package to get it.
 
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