FOX news: Terra Nova in fall, Alcatraz at midseason

[Mistral]

I finally watched the Alcatraz trailer-and the wife and I are now very eager to see the pilot. Still reserving thoughts on Terra Nova, though. Frankly, I think the whole concept is a little weak. Start over in the past? Didn't Star Trek do that in an episode? I don't know, seems like a dead-end solution....

 

[Temis the Vorta]

You'd think humans with technology advanced enough to destroy the planet in the first place would be able to exterminate the dinos pretty handily and not worry about being chomped. They don't need to live in grass shacks, they can build a steel fortress and start blowing up T-Rexes with tanks to make T-Rex burgers for lunch. Obviously they aren't worried about timeline contamination if they're willing to time travel at all. They'll probably have some BS rule about how they have to time-travel naked, and not bring anything along, which begs the question how did they bring their clothes (not to mention any dental work they might have had done.)

 

[Witterquick]

Sappiness, plot holes, arbitrary rules, weak premise? Not looking very promising now. I don't know much about the cast though.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Obviously they aren't worried about timeline contamination if they're willing to time travel at all.

Equally obviously, they've never read this.

The instant they arrive in the past, is the instant in which their entire present ceases to exist.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Obviously they aren't worried about timeline contamination if they're willing to time travel at all.

Equally obviously, they've never read this.

The instant they arrive in the past, is the instant in which their entire present ceases to exist.

Or you could subscribe to the theory that what appears to be time travel is actually travel between realities. Time travel to your own reality impossible due to paradoxes but time travel to any of an infinite number of parallel universes is okay. And since vast numbers of those universes will differ from our own only by things we'd never notice (an extra molecule in the atmosphere of Jupiter for instance), you'll never be able to tell the difference unless a helpful screenwriter puts the right words in your mouth that you couldn't otherwise have possibly known.

But this way lies madness...as the Trek Movies XI+ forum has amply proven.

 

[IndyJones]

Alcatraz - I only hope they wont milk this show for more then 24 episodes. Once the secret is out, it would become boring very fast.

Yeah, networks love developing shows for one season runs.

The cast looks very weak. Old guy, fat guy, sympathetic girl with a gun, and a bad-ass killer who doesnt know why he is killing people.

Um, sure.

Old guy? You mean Sam Neill? From Jurassic Park? Yeah, he's terrible.

Fat guy? You mean Jorge Garcia? Fan favorite from Lost? I'm sure people will hate him.

 

[bigdaddy]

Both of these shows will only last 13 episodes.... If Terra Nova ever gets their 13 episodes made.

 

[Velocity]

Time travel is part of the premise. Kinda obvious.

its a bit like Primeval

More like The Lost World

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Obviously they aren't worried about timeline contamination if they're willing to time travel at all.

Equally obviously, they've never read this.

The instant they arrive in the past, is the instant in which their entire present ceases to exist.

Or you could subscribe to the theory that what appears to be time travel is actually travel between realities.

So they're destroying somebody else's timeline and not their own.

And even so: How long do you think it will be before they abandon the parallel thing, just like Time Trax did?

Also: Any bets on whether Stephen Lang's character here will turn out to be more, or less, nutso than his Avatar character?

 

[Temis the Vorta]

So they're destroying somebody else's timeline and not their own.

But the future of that timeline has not yet occurred, so who's to say that it's been destroyed or changed from what "should have been"? There's no rules about how a timeline should go.

As for Lang, I'm callin' it right now: he and Christine Adams' characters are in cahoots, pretending to have some kind of war going on, so they can keep their respective camps in line.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

So they're destroying somebody else's timeline and not their own.

But the future of that timeline has not yet occurred

Not for the colonists, no, but the natives of our present (or the equivalent thereof) in that timeline would certainly disagree.

Which brings to mind, exactly why are they making this into a time travel story? Just make it another planet and be done with it.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Not for the colonists, no, but the natives of our present (or the equivalent thereof) in that timeline would certainly disagree.

They don't exist yet. It's still dinosaur times.

Which brings to mind, exactly why are they making this into a time travel story? Just make it another planet and be done with it.

It has a bit more resonance if it's Earth's past. We know and love our own dinos, but alien dinos would probably have eight heads and be polka-dotted, and hey they'd just be aliens, not dinos at all.

 

[Witterquick]

Not for the colonists, no, but the natives of our present (or the equivalent thereof) in that timeline would certainly disagree.

They don't exist yet. It's still dinosaur times.

Time is not linear. They already lead a happy existence but now everything's screwed up because of assholes from another universe.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Not for the colonists, no, but the natives of our present (or the equivalent thereof) in that timeline would certainly disagree.

They don't exist yet. It's still dinosaur times.

For the colonists, yes. Not for the natives of that universe's 2011.

What if OUR universe was that alternate world? Colonists from another universe showing up in our past, would wipe us out. Why should we be happy with that?

 

[Owain Taggart]

Yeah, I suspect it's not a time-travel story, but a world like ours in a parallel dimension. In Robert J. Sawyer's Neanderthal Parallax, it's a parallel world where humans don't exist and Neanderthals do. Not saying that's what's going to happen here, but It's very likely that the parallel world won't be quite as what we expect it to be, as perhaps the lines of evolution have gone a different way, which would be an interesting dynamic and allow for some creativity. Just because it's a past, doesn't exactly mean it's our past.

 

[JD]

They've already said it will include their own made up dinosaurs, so maybe they'll use the whole alternate world element as a way to explain that.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

For the colonists, yes. Not for the natives of that universe's 2011.

What natives? They won't be born for eons. The future is not set in stone and since anything can happen anyway, nobody is responsible for doing it this way or that.

And who's to say that time travelling colonists to dinosaur times weren't always part of this timeline? Maybe deleting them is what messes up the timeline. This is true regardless of whose timeline it is.

They've already said it will include their own made up dinosaurs,

That doesn't preclude it from from being our timeline. We can't possibly have discovered bones from all the dinosaur species that existed. After all, we haven't yet discovered the bones of the time-travelling colonists (or the BSG people either).

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

For the colonists, yes. Not for the natives of that universe's 2011.

What natives? They won't be born for eons.

Like I said, that's only true from the COLONISTS' perspective.

The future is not set in stone and since anything can happen anyway, nobody is responsible for doing it this way or that.

If somebody in the distant past said that, we in our present obviously would not agree...

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Like I said, that's only true from the COLONISTS' perspective.

It depends on which time travel philosophy they're following in this show (which is something we don't know - maybe the writers don't know either, wouldn't be the first time that's happened ).

Under one rule of time travel, there is no future to any given timestream. It is created by the actions of people living in the "present," and until they act, there is nothing "ahead" of them. It's all just a big blank canvas. Their actions create what is ahead of them. Time travel from the future isn't possible because there are no people yet to travel back in time. Travel from other realities is still possible since those people have already been created by their timeline, which presumably is "going faster" or is offset in some way so it seems to be ahead of the other. Maybe the Big Bang happened earlier in that reality. So it's not time travel at all, although it could appear to be if the realities are similar enough.

Under another rule, each action creates a new branching timeline, and the infinite number of timelines created encompass every possible permutation of reality that is compatible with physics. If you mess up one timeline, that's okay. It's certain that everything will be happening like "it should" in another.

Under yet another rule, the entire timeline has already been determined and nobody's actions can change anything. Free will is an illusion; everyone is just enacting a pre-determined script. Under this rule, time travel can only happen if it was always part of the timeline anyway. Not only is there no danger to time travel, it can't possibly hurt anything. If you can time travel at all, you are required to.

And there are many other rules, such as the notion that time travel does overwrite the future, and if there are time travellers in our past, our own timeline could be being overwritten right now. It could be overwritten a million times per second. We'd have no way of knowing. At any given moment, we think "this is the way it's always been" when in fact, there is no way "it's always been" and we exist in an eternal state of oblivious chaos.