Terra Nova S1E4 “The Runaway”
Forget what I wrote after the pilot. Terra Nova has made it clear it has no interest in raising, much less answering, anything Lost got near. It would rather be full of dumb storylines with dumb characters, terrible dialogue, and just be boring. That’s really the worst part, isn’t it? I hated Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen not because of the racial stereotype robots, or that Devastator had testicles. I hated it because a movie about giant robots was boring. And right now I’m feeling the same way about a show about dinosaurs.
The first two post-pilot episodes were practically self-contained procedurals. Yeah, we got to know Malcolm, but I know almost nothing new about Terra Nova or the Sixers. The pilot had constant motion on these fronts and had a decent plot (once Josh was about to be killed, at least), but the next two killed this momentum. And I figured maybe this episode would help a bit, since it directly involved Terra Nova’s relationship with the Sixers.
But due to terrible writing, I know nothing more about either. There’s so many holes in every character’s reasoning, it feels like this episode was rewritten 40 times. I’m not a paid television writer, thank god, so I don’t have to catalog everything that was wrong with this episode. But this was a failure from top to bottom, and it signals me ditching Terra Nova for now. It might be on in the background, but I will not be actively watching the show any more. It shows no signs of progress. My favorite plotline is Maddy being “courted” by Pvt. Handsome. My girlfriend asked me tonight, “Does this show even need dinosaurs?”
Maybe Terra Nova should be out in the wilderness, to amp up the drama (a la The Walking Dead). Maybe there should be more tension within the family. These are all things TV critics have suggested. Expecting these changes to make a difference is ignoring the fundamental problem: there is no writing on this show. It is all money and idiocy, and the money is going to dry up eventually.
