Terra Nova Season One Finale

Well, Terra Nova saved it up for its season one finale just concluded on Fox tonight - and, with this season cut short, and a second not yet announced, this may well have been the series finale.  More would be the pity.  Tonight's two hours were the best since the two-hour season premiere, and in some ways even better.

One major character bravely dies.  Two even more major characters are almost killed, but somehow survive.   All characters are operating at their very best - or worst - which makes for a good story.

The most significant development - which goes beyond any individual character - has Jim traveling back to the future to blow up Hope Plaza.  This means no more people and shipments from the future.  One week after Taylor's brilliant, twisted son opened up the port for two-way business - so his partners in the future could make a fortune plundering the bountiful past - all transactions to and from future are finished.

Or are they?  In the last few scenes, we find that the badlands in Terra Nova have evidence of some other transport from the future.   The nature of these transactions could be the foundation of a second season.

As I've mentioned before, there are aspects of Terra Nova which are trite (the pseudo-military in the colony) and even goofy (Jim's family at times).  But there's a lot of vitality, intrigue, fascination with nature and science that wears quite well on this show.

I'm a sucker for science fiction, that's true.  But Terra Nova has something special, and I'd enjoy seeing the lost in the past family and related characters back with the dinosaurs and prehistoric microbes for at least one more season.

See also Terra Nova Debuts ... Terra Nova as Good Biological Science Fiction

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The Plot to Save Socrates
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Terra Nova as Good Biological Science Fiction

As Terra Nova chugs along to its season conclusion - perhaps series conclusion as well - it seems like a good time to assess what went wrong and right with the show.

Time travel is the central foundation of the series - people traveling from the future back to the prehistoric past.   But as a continuing time travel story, replete with the paradoxes of time travel - if I travel to the past to make my current world better, and I make the change in the past which does make my current world better, then why in my better current world, where I was growing up, would I have wanted to travel back to the past in the first place - Terra Nova offered little.   That general scenario was never Terra Nova's - the travel to the past is just to find a better life - but Terra Nova so far has not picked up on any other paradoxes, which are like fruit for the picking in time travel stories.

Dinosaurs ala Jurrasic Park are also an obvious mainstay of the series, and Terra Nova did pretty well on that score, though no great shakes.  The smaller screens of even today's big screen television sets are just no match for dinosaurs on the big movie screen, and dinosaurs do even worse on iPads.

But one area in which Terra Nova has excelled is in its thoughtful treatment of the natural world in the past - not just special effected dinosaurs - or what is otherwise known as biological science fiction.  A recent episode featured big insects outfitted with spy devices, an earlier episode had memories lost because of micro-organisms, and with Elisabeth's high tech medical knowledge playing a role in just about every show, the organic has really flourished in this series.

I admit to having a soft spot for biological science fiction - three of my novels pictured below delved into these themes (The Consciousness Plague about the loss of memory, and The Pixel Eye about squirrels outfitted with spying chips).  And I indicated in a piece on the History Channel about the evolution of science fiction a few years ago that I expected biological science fiction to be the next wave (replacing physics as the leading science-fiction science).

If Terra Nova does get a chance to continue - which I hope it does - it would do well to more prominetly mine this rich vein of stories.






See also Terra Nova Debuts

Terra Nova Debuts

Terra Nova debuted on Fox tonight.  It bears some similarities to Falling Skies over on TNT this summer - Spielberg involvement, families under duress, female doctor, human enemies and other kinds of enemies, and more.   But in Terra Nova the Spielberg influence is most seen in the dinosaurs - ala Jurassic Park - and the mechanism is time travel not (yet) aliens from outerspace.

As readers of Infinite Regress know, I love science fiction, and the time travel precincts of science fiction even more.   Terra Nova has a nice set-up - a crack in time which allows humans, suffering in the 22nd century from an environmental apocalypse, to send small groups of people back in time, some 85 million years.   This is intelligently done - not only does the time sieve drop people into the past, but into a new, alternate reality.  This allows the story to avoid the paradox of how if we travel to the past the future (our present) isn't immediately changed - perhaps to the point where travel to the past becomes either unnecessary or impossible in the first place, so why and how did we travel to the past in the first place?  And the alternate reality conforms with one way of surmounting that time travel paradox - a solution which says that every voyage to the past instantly creates a myriad of new realities, with the result that the travel to the past in Reality A need not conflict with or be erased by the new Reality B created by the time travel.

Meanwhile, even you're not as big a fan of such metaphysics as I am, you'll still find lots to like in Terra Nova.  The dinosaurs - ranging from long-necked leaf eaters to deadly raptors - are top drawer.   There's a group of humans pretty much at war with the Terra Novans - the sixers - and there's evan a guy (son of the commander) who went missing a while ago, and is apparently trying to unravel the complex time lines and perhaps control the future on his own.

I'm all for all of it, and I'll be here with reviews of every episode.

For more on time travel, see my The Enjoyable Trouble of Time Travel, not to mention all the time travel reviews in this blog, which you can find by clicking on the label below.

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The Plot to Save Socrates

"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

---

Enjoy listening to audio books? Get a free audio book copy of The Plot to Save Socrates - or any one of 85,000 other titles - with a 14-day trial membership at Audible.com ...