Verdict: I’m hooked.
Hour One:
No slow build-up here. The drama starts right away. In 2149, police officer Jim Shannon is arrested and imprisoned after the discovery of his illegal third child. After all, “Family is Four!” scream the billboards, and he and wife Dr. Elizabeth Shannon already have two kids, Josh and Maddy. Two years later, Elizabeth gets the call: she’s been selected to make the one-way trip 85 million years backward to Terra Nova (TN)! Well … if she leaves that pesky third child behind, that is. So she does what anyone would do: breaks her husband out of prison, sneaks him into the TN-bound group, and smuggles third child along in a backpack. (Yes, in real life it would have been much harder. Hush.)
The contrast of TN earth to 2149 earth is quite dramatic. Bye bye dirty, rotting metropolis; we’re now in a verdant, sunny paradise (where allosaurs often trip the sonic mines). Commander Nathaniel Taylor gives a sweeping welcome speech to the large crowd of newcomers, then meets with Jim to let him know that while Taylor doesn’t really care about population control laws from 85 million years in the future, he’s still got half a mind to throw Jim outside of the fence and let him go play with the allosaurs. Jim counters that he’s a cop and could probably be of good use, but Taylor assigns him to agricultural detail. Which would be like if a chef bragged to you about his awesome cooking skills and you assign him to dishwashing detail. But Jim, just happy to no longer be making license plates, cheerfully accepts. As Jim walks away, Taylor growls. He did! I rewound it three times. He growled. LOL! I like Taylor.
A hot young soldier leads the Shannons to their new home. As they settle in, Josh goes all teen angst on us (He’s mad at Jim for having gone to prison.); then we get our first glimpse of dinosaurs when little third child — ok, ok — when little Zoe wanders off into the backyard and happens upon a herd of brontosaurs chowing down on some treetops. They can easily reach over the fence with their long necks, so Zoe feeds one. “Mommy, can we keep it?” No, Zoe didn’t say that. I did.
The next day, Elizabeth starts doctoring, Jim starts weeding (as Taylor keeps a close eye on him from afar), Maddy and Zoe go to orientation, and Josh skips orientation to wander around. He bumps into Skye.
Who we immediately know is going to be trouble. She leads him to a house inhabited by 16-year-old kids. (One is Max, played by Eka Darville, whom I’ve had a crush on since season one of Spartacus, so PLEASE don’t let him be a throw-away character who’s going to die in like episode two.) Apparently a house full of kids is normal in TN. They all have jobs, you see. I still don’t get it, but whatevs. Josh and the kids head OTG (outside the gate). Wait — really? I mean, I know I’m exactly twice as old as this bunch, but still. Even at 16, running around unprotected in a DINOSAUR-FILLED forest would very much not have been my idea of a good time. In the forest, Skye strips to a skimpy bikini to go swimming, shows Josh a bunch of strange markings on rocks, and makes him promise not to tell anyone about them.
Back at camp, that hot young soldier flirts for a bit with Maddy, whose idea of flirting back is describing a brontosaur’s teeth. :(
In the hospital, Elizabeth tends to an unconscious dude who was shot for stealing. FOOLED YOU! He was only fake unconsciousing. Dude grabs Elizabeth, holds a glowing weapon thingy to her throat, gets the guard’s gun, and bolts.
As Dude hurries through the camp, looking all kinds of suspicious, he catches Jim’s eye. Jim, whose policeman’s instincts have not been dulled by his 22 minutes as a farmer, follows Dude — and tackles him just as he pulls the pilfered gun and gets a shot off at Taylor. Taylor, realizing that Jim is more Robocop than Old MacDonald, takes him for a hike during which he explains that Dude is a Sixer: a member of another group on TN. Sixers (who came on the Sixth Pilgrimage) seemed normal at first, but it soon became clear that they had an ulterior motive. They splintered off from the main group and now live in hiding somewhere in the forest (Ok, is NOBODY afraid of the damn dinosuars?!?!). No one knows who sent them or why.
Taylor leads Jim to where they can look down over TN (great view, complete with pterodactyl soaring overhead), tells him that this new beginning is what they’re fighting for, and offers him a job on the security team. Jim accepts. Agriculture detail crew: “We didn’t like you anyway!”
Hour Two:
Taylor and Jim see Sixers speeding toward TN and race to their own vehicle to stop them. The Sixers are busy firing at a rampaging carnitaurus. “I hate carnitaurus,” Taylor says — then he jumps out of the vehicle and by himself armed with only a gun distracts the carno long enough for everyone including the Sixers to get safely inside the gate.
Taylor’s level of bad-assery: high.
As the dust settles, the leader of the Sixers steps forth. (It’s a chick! A black chick! Yaaaaaaaaaaay, minority females in position of power!!!) Her name is Mira, and she wants to trade meteoric iron (Sixers control the mines, you see, and TNers need its ore) for ammo, meds, and Dude, whose name is Carter. She says they know Carters’s locked up in the brig because they have spies inside TN. (Ooooh! A MOLE! Who is it? Who’s the dirty mole????) Taylor says she can have meds and Carter but no ammo.
Out in the forest, Josh and the kids … are making moonshine. *sigh* Really? 85 million years in the past, and they’re recycling such present-day problems as underage drinking. You’d think they’d be into something still stupid but waaaaaaaaay cooler. Like trying to catch, tame, and ride pterodactyls, which is what I’d be doing. Skye scores points with me cuz she refuses the moonshine when Josh offers her some. Alcohol sucks.
Taylor and Elizabeth chat in the hospital. We learn that Taylor had a son who came to TN as part of the Second Pilgrimage but went missing a few years ago.
Out in the forest, the Sixers are on their way back to their base when they come across the kids’ abandoned vehicle. Two stop to strip it of its power cells. They’re attacked by a hungry slasher; it kills one of them, wounds the other. Back at camp, Taylor et. al realize the kids sneaked out and head out after them. The kids arrive at their vehicle, find it dead, see a Sixer vehicle a few feet away. The others are afraid, but Skye fearlessly heads right on over, and she also recognizes the wounded Sixer inside. (Is Skye is the mole?) She then tells Josh how to slow the Sixer’s heavy bleeding, rattles off facts about the slashers’ preferred hunting methods, AND tells Josh to shoot at them in short bursts to control his ammo. This ain’t no ordinary random 16-yr-old girl, y’all. Sadly, Tasha, the other 16-yr-old girl, is ordinary, and she freaks completely out, leaves the safety of the vehicle, and goes off running through the slashers-filled forest.
Back at TN, the hot soldier, apparently a fan of chicks who know a lot about brontosaur teeth, stops by to ask Maddy if she’s ok.
Out in the forest, the search party runs into a bleeding and in-shock Tasha and figures out which direction she came from. Back in the vehicle, Skye tells Josh she’s an orphan. Then a slasher breaks in and pulls a kid out by the leg, Skye runs out of ammo, Max gets wounded (DAMMIT!); then just as they’re all about to be slasher snacks, the search party finds them. The wounded Sixer has bled to death.
Safely back at TN, Skye tells Taylor how sorry she is. (And I know everyone was glad to find the kids alive, but I still would like to see them get in way more trouble than they did.) Taylor asks Skye if they went anywhere near the falls. She lies and says no. Cut to: Mira and Carter are at the waterfall; they see the kids’ footprints. Mira says Taylor won’t like that. Carter asks why Taylor doesn’t just have the rocks blasted to rubble, and Mira says because the markings on the rocks are Taylor’s only connection to his son. *gasp* It’s Taylor’s "missing" kid scribbling on the rocks! According to Mira, he does it “to remind Taylor of the real reason for Terra Nova’s existence: control the past, control the future.” OOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHH!
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