'Terra Nova' Renewal Could Depend On Mid-Season Flop

[Guy Gardener]

These is what I want from an episode of Fringe.

They get the cast of West Wing and show me an episode form the 12th season in the mIrror Universe. 40 minutes of the West Wing and then we see that Walter is watching it through that looking glass of his pointed at a mirror universe television set.

This is what I want from Terra Nova...

Cancellation.

Oh look.

There's a Cylon on The Firm.

Boring.

 

[Disruptor]

Add Sleestaks to Terra Nova and some scantly clad cave women (who are of course, in 21st century standards of grooming/beauty).

And I probably would still forget its on.

 

[AviTrek]

Shouldnt a show only be bought back if its on its own merit, not because everything else is shit. Even more so with a show like Terra Nova it isnt cheap to make, why continuing paying for an overly expensive under preforming show?

Because in the same interview they said Terra Nova made money for everyone. The question is, did it make enough money to fill a valuable spot on the schedule. If Fox thinks it can make more money from its other shows, then Terra Nova will be cancelled and a new show will be given a chance next year. If Fox think that enough of the other shows bombed that it can't fill enough spots with new shows then Terra Nova will be given a second season.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Yeah as far as we know, most shows, even cancelled ones, make money. But it's all about mo' money.

 

[stonester1]

These is what I want from an episode of Fringe.

They get the cast of West Wing and show me an episode form the 12th season in the mIrror Universe. 40 minutes of the West Wing and then we see that Walter is watching it through that looking glass of his pointed at a mirror universe television set.

That would be awesome.

 

[Kegg]

Terra Nova certainly isn't the best show on television, but it does have a certain charm to it. I'd love another season, but even if it doesn't get one, at least it has a satisfactory ending. There are worse fates for a show.

I'm pretty much with this. Terra Nova was a perfectly adequate sci-fi show that juggled wholesome family drama with a larger community surviving against odds in a sci-fi premise - essentially, a series I can never stop thinking about without mentally including 'sort of like Falling Skies', right down to the hardened grizzled veteran commander with a bit of an edge and the maternal doctor figure (if not literally a mother in the other program).

I actually liked the Shannons, I thought Jason O'Mara was a good leading man and he had good enough chemistry with Shelley Conn. I liked that their daughter was the socially awkward nerd, to invert one sci-fi cliche. Conversely to some posts above, I felt some of the weakest material in the series often involved drifting off to look at side characters, of which only Stephen Lang's Commander Taylor was any interesting.

Terra Nova isn't great TV, but it's good enough, and I don't really have a lot of choices sci-fi wise beyond it. If it returns, I'll be watching, and if not, I'll be watching Falling Skies anyway.

As for Fringe, never saw anything beyond the pilot episode, which I remember really cheesing me off.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

I just go back to reading books.

Let's not throw caution to the winds...

 

[Caliburn24]

I actually liked the Shannons, I thought Jason O'Mara was a good leading man and he had good enough chemistry with Shelley Conn. I liked that their daughter was the socially awkward nerd, to invert one sci-fi cliche. Conversely to some posts above, I felt some of the weakest material in the series often involved drifting off to look at side characters, of which only Stephen Lang's Commander Taylor was any interesting.

My favorite Shannon is Zoe, but they never did much with her sadly. A new world of dinosaurs explored with a childlike sense of wonder could have been marvelous. Instead we only got a brief moment or two of that.

Out of honest curiosity, what were your favorite episodes of season one, and which ones did you feel had the Shannons properly at the center of the plot? I felt the show was always struggling to make them relevant to the main plot of each episode.

 

[Kegg]

Out of honest curiosity, what were your favorite episodes of season one, and which ones did you feel had the Shannons properly at the center of the plot? I felt the show was always struggling to make them relevant to the main plot of each episode.

Well, I'd say James Shannon fit into the show's narrative most effectively. It did feel somewhat contrived that he would rapidly and inexorably become Taylor's second hand man, but he was very good in that role. Doctor Elisabeth Shannon got the usual medical plots - science to solve plot conundrums (DNA of suspects) or to stop some virus/bizarre prehistoric creature from hurting people.

Past that yeah the kids were irregular in how they fit into the series overall arc, but - in the case of Josh and Maddy, at least - they had characterisations and stories and so on. Josh's business about his girlfriend back in the future was handled pretty well though.

As for favourite individual episodes in which the Shannons serve as a founding for the narrative... they kind of blurred together, but the pilot was one of the show's best episodes and it was very much centered the Shannon family.

In the end, it's a series about building a new community - essentially a frontier drama with a sci-fi twist. Centering that on a building block of community, a family, is something that works rather well for the show - Jim and Elisabeth want the best for their children, and the community they've thrown their lot in with, etc.

 

[Draculasaurus]

I hate for any sci-fi show to be cancelled, in principle.
-but I gave up on Terra Nova halfway through the third episode.

 

[davejames]

Out of honest curiosity, what were your favorite episodes of season one, and which ones did you feel had the Shannons properly at the center of the plot? I felt the show was always struggling to make them relevant to the main plot of each episode.

Well I thought the pilot and finale were clearly the best, but I did also like the recent one where Mira captured Taylor and they had to work together.

As for the Shannons, the only one who really got on my nerves was Josh. The rest I thought were perfectly likeable. And of course Maddy and the mother are both pretty hot as well, so that doesn't hurt.

 

[Mistral]

Out of honest curiosity, what were your favorite episodes of season one, and which ones did you feel had the Shannons properly at the center of the plot? I felt the show was always struggling to make them relevant to the main plot of each episode.

Well I thought the pilot and finale were clearly the best, but I did also like the recent one where Mira captured Taylor and they had to work together.

As for the Shannons, the only one who really got on my nerves was Josh. The rest I thought were perfectly likeable. And of course Maddy and the mother are both pretty hot as well, so that doesn't hurt.

agreed. Josh isn't very likeable-he's dishonest, conniving and pretty unaware of his surroundings.

 

[RJDiogenes]

^^ Well, that's my problem with the parents: They are unapologetic criminals. In an overpopulated, resource-depleted world where a limit has been placed on reproduction, they chose to have an additional child. It wasn't an accident and there were no other extenuating circumstances; they just went to the "baby underground" because they decided the rules only apply to lesser people. Then, when they were caught, the father assaulted a cop (even though there were apparently no consequences to having an extra baby, since the mother got to keep her) and was sent to jail. So what did they do? They broke him out of jail and arranged for him to illegally use time travel to escape. It's amusing that these are considered role-model parents on a family drama.

 

[davejames]

Yeah they probably stepped over the line by having an extra kid, but for all we know Zoe could have been unplanned, and their conscience or religious beliefs simply prevented them from aborting her.

And it was clearly a very oppressive, totalitarian state they were living in, so it's only natural (and human) that people would want to rebel against that.

Personally I thought it just made them seem more interesting and real. It's a shame the show had to go and make them so perfect and wholesome once they got to Terra Nova.

 

[Kegg]

It wasn't an accident and there were no other extenuating circumstances; they just went to the "baby underground" because they decided the rules only apply to lesser people.

...well, no. Say what you want about the wisdom or ethics of having a third child, but presumably 'screw you two child families' isn't part of the rationale. There's no sense that the Shannons are really comfortable with the law to begin with or feel it should apply to anyone.

Sometimes people want more than the government mandated limit of children. This is something that happens when there's mandated limits on children in a family (like, say, China), and criminalizing a basic human desire doesn't make it any less human, nor necessarily unconsciable.

No, if I was going to start poking at Terra Nova's ethics, I'd be looking at the balance between the colony and the past. The series does it's damnedest to make the shadowy corporate cabal backing Lucas Taylor into the slimiest shills this side of... welll... Avatar - but what if the past could be exploited to the future's benefit? Terra Nova manages to be such a boundless world because it is such a small colony and as such a very small amount of people are being given the chance of a second life while the vast majority continue to live on a deteroriating world. Whether or not using the resources of Terra Nova for the benefit of that 'future' would be more ethical, or trying to allow for a larger scale of immigration, or whatever are reasonable enough questions.

 

[davejames]

Yeah there were a lot of interesting philosophical questions the show never dealt with. Although to be fair, I'm not really sure the future world could have been helped out THAT much by Terra Nova. You could take care of the food problem certainly, but there would still be the polution. And with just the one small portal, it would take forever to transport enough of the world's population back there to make a difference with overcrowding.

 

[The Wormhole]

To be honest, Earth of the future looks like a total write-off anyway. The oceans seem to have dried up, people need oxygen masks to leave their homes, an orange is considered a delicacy and evil corporations who emply an Army of Thugs are calling the shots. I doubt it is possible to save it.

I too would choose to live in a forest filled with dinosaurs and cut all my ties with that dreary dystopia.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Um, that's exactly what Jules Verne would think of Today if some one gave him a tour.

As a species when did we begin to understand things like "ecology" and "pollution"?

 

[Kegg]

To be honest, Earth of the future looks like a total write-off anyway. The oceans seem to have dried up, people need oxygen masks to leave their homes, an orange is considered a delicacy and evil corporations who emply an Army of Thugs are calling the shots. I doubt it is possible to save it.

Then what about the people of the future? Why not try to drastically expand the size of the pilgrimages (since the Terra Nova colony is both incredibly hard to get into and very small compared to the uninhabited Pangaea)?

 

[RJDiogenes]

Yeah they probably stepped over the line by having an extra kid, but for all we know Zoe could have been unplanned, and their conscience or religious beliefs simply prevented them from aborting her.

Well, they had a flashback that indicated otherwise-- but now that I think of it, the father was telling the story to the kid, so I suppose you could say he was giving the kiddie version.

And it was clearly a very oppressive, totalitarian state they were living in, so it's only natural (and human) that people would want to rebel against that.

But in that Dystopian future, there were good reasons for the restrictions.

It wasn't an accident and there were no other extenuating circumstances; they just went to the "baby underground" because they decided the rules only apply to lesser people.

...well, no. Say what you want about the wisdom or ethics of having a third child, but presumably 'screw you two child families' isn't part of the rationale. There's no sense that the Shannons are really comfortable with the law to begin with or feel it should apply to anyone.

There was also no indication that they were doing anything about it, other than going underground to have an extra kid that other people don't get to have. And then what happens when the kid needs to go to school or get a job? The real point is that the writers just didn't think it all through.

Sometimes people want more than the government mandated limit of children. This is something that happens when there's mandated limits on children in a family (like, say, China), and criminalizing a basic human desire doesn't make it any less human, nor necessarily unconsciable.

Again, they never said anything about protesting the limit, they never gave any indication that they believed the limit to be unjustified, they just went ahead and did what they wanted. Same with breaking the dad out of jail and smuggling dad and kid through the portal. They were never characterized as justified rebels or conscientious objectors, just over-privileged serial lawbreakers.