Terra Nova

[Tribble Threat]

I just watched Terra Nova, and I thought it was great! High quality mystery, good characters, and good portrayal of the Terra Novan culture. What'd you all think?

 

[Timo]

Back in the day, there was a lot of griping about the unrealistic aspects of it. But it's quite the archetype of how colonization in Trek usually happens, and how it probably should, given the parameters. Instead of a team of disciplined astronauts planting the Earth flag for the queen and the country and then eating some apple pie, we have this group of adventurers who are distrustful of Earth and eventually end up considering the planet their mortal enemy, due to happenstance and a failure to communicate. And then unexpected things survive the mandatory apocalypse, and a strange culture emerges.

Might be all the unexpected here suffers from being so predictable: consistency with Trek traditions is not an exclusively good thing, I guess...

Apart from that, it's nice to have a solid location shoot, good props, and a plot that actually unfolds rather than just milling around. But I guess all the classic complaints about ENT pacing and acting could be made here. And I'm left missing a defining character moment from any of the main players.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Tribble Threat]

I did feel like this episode tread ground that Trek previously covered in other episodes, like Miri for example, but it did it better than the other shows did. Terra Nova also showed that the writers understood a the sense of scale, how the first interstellar trips were real long treks. And it told a story that can't be told exactly the same way on any other Star Trek show, because the writers wrote took into account that Enterprise is takes place one lifetime before the first Warp Drive.

 

[Go-Captain]

Kind of reminds me of a mix of stories about colonial America with the one town which just disappeared, due to utter unpreparedness and the population likely merged with local Indian tribes, and how the Salem witch trials might have been induced by naturally occurring LSD in the well water. Instead of we have unprepared paranoids influenced by radiation they lack the skill to deal with.

I remember it being a bit boring. Not terrible, but ENT repeated a lot of stuff.

 

[Mutai Sho-Rin]

It’s all shale - but I liked it.

 

[trekshark]

I liked it overall. It fits with TNG where they stumbled across human colonies that had left Earth early on without follow up.
I could see after surviving a nuclear world war where lots of people would want to go start their own colony elsewhere once warp became available and humans ended up going off in every possible direction from Earth.