2-hour premiere of Terra Nova just started on Fox. The premise is that the Earth is in the midst of a massive ecological collapse, so they send people through a one-way gate 85MY in the past. Much technical BS ensues - like claiming that within a few seconds of arrival, people would go into hyper-oxygenation and require CO2 supplements.

But the most ironic part is Fox pushing a program based on an ecological disaster on the Earth within the next century - while they do their best elsewhere to lie and obfuscate about AGW.

Wow. I just saw that scene - the CO2 masks being applied. Absolute bullshit but hey, it's TV. My irony meter is also redlining.

They say they jumped back 85MY - late Cretaceous - but then they say they are feeding Brachiosaurs, which lived about 145-150MY ago - late Jurassic.

They have the capability to ship major quantities of sheet steel, armored trucks, windmills - then they surround their camp with a freaking wooden stockade?

They've had 10 groups of arrivees, and they haven't figured out that the teenagers will try to fuck off and skip vital briefings, sneak out to skinny-dip, and make moonshine?

I was expecting the Brachiosaurs to nom the little girl, given how inaccurate the show's been thus far.

Here's a scene from episode 2:

Ok, quick question: WTF are they going to do when the planet killing asteroid hits?

Well, they do have 20 million years to prepare for it...

This is starting in the UK in a week or so. I'll give it a go although I'm not holding out too much hope. Spielberg's involved isn't he? His last TV show Failing Skies managed to not be so brilliant that it got cancelled (yet) and still remain somewhat watchable.

Not bad so far. The kid got up to some believable teenage bullshit. The dad's not really too much of a sympathetic character though. His heart might be in the right place, but so far he's been portrayed as quite dim, violent tempered, and devoid of personality beyond the stock stoic-hero-cop.

I'm not sweating details. Alternate timeline can excuse a multitude of abuses.

I'm just amazed they are prepared to air a show that sets itself 84,994,000 years before the world existed.

It won't last long, it's on Fox after all who uses the ratings bullshit stuff as an excuse to cancel shows since ratings are made up anyway in order to make more room for crappy reality shows. I will give a minium of half a season to two seasons at the most.

I watched this failed abortion last night.

In one scene a Carnosaur, or two, were chasing some folks in a couple of armored cars. The gunners are shooting what looks like miniguns at the theropods. One dino takes a hit to the foot, falls and gets right back up and continues the chase as if nothing happened.

In another scene the teenagers are trapped in a "sixer" vehicle and firing some sort of automatic weapons at "slashers" (some sort of raptor) from mere feet away, and supposedly the bullets just bounce off their thick skin. One line sounding this event is, "Aim at their bellies. Their armor is thinner there."

I doubt I'll be watching this again. It's just too much bullshit in one package. As far as I'm concerned it's a mix of Back to the Future, Jurassic Park and Swiss Family Robinson.

I can't believe the actor, Stephen Lang, that played the security chief from "Avatar" took this role, again as security chief. Fuck me.

RS

Weaver wrote:They have the capability to ship major quantities of sheet steel, armored trucks, windmills - then they surround their camp with a freaking wooden stockade?

I thought that too. All their fancy computers and medical devices and they're keeping out the dinos with some logs.

I wonder why you also don't see the meter-long giant centipedes crawling all through the camp - they climb the fence, but there aren't huge freaking bugs everywhere? Magic forcefield that works on invertebrates only or something?

Presumably with no FDA regulatory body, they can use a rather high concentration of DEET.

Wouldn't our immune systems also be completely insufficient to deal with more or less everything there?

Huh. Haven't seen it (didn't it cost gazillions?), but the premise puts paid to any prospect of filming what would surely be a far superior project: an adaptation of Julian May's Saga of the Exiles books, which plunged humans 2my back, where they were enslaved by two feuding psychic alien races, folk-memory of whom later gave rise to many of our myths. It had umpteen characters and storylines, epic feel - coulda bin designed for a mini-series! Instead - dinosaurs AGAIN!

Were those the aliens that built the pyramids then?

Nooooooo, that was some jumped-up johnny-come-lately Thetans, who wrote their dianetics in hieroglyphics because they knew that followers of L Ron and Von Dan could only read picture-books.

theropod wrote:I watched this failed abortion last night.

In one scene a Carnosaur, or two, were chasing some folks in a couple of armored cars. The gunners are shooting what looks like miniguns at the theropods. One dino takes a hit to the foot, falls and gets right back up and continues the chase as if nothing happened.

In another scene the teenagers are trapped in a "sixer" vehicle and firing some sort of automatic weapons at "slashers" (some sort of raptor) from mere feet away, and supposedly the bullets just bounce off their thick skin. One line sounding this event is, "Aim at their bellies. Their armor is thinner there."

I doubt I'll be watching this again. It's just too much bullshit in one package. As far as I'm concerned it's a mix of Back to the Future, Jurassic Park and Swiss Family Robinson.

I can't believe the actor, Stephen Lang, that played the security chief from "Avatar" took this role, again as security chief. Fuck me.

RS

I'm willing to believe this is an alternate history with naturally body-armored dinosaurs. I can get how some people aren't though. Just like I can believe that they don't want to spend their apparently limited metal supplies on building walls when they have giant timbers they can use. Everyone's got their point where suspension of disbelief fails. So far, I'm good.

I guess I could see that they use local materials rather than imported (i.e. wood fence rather than metal) but their failures to import important still chafes me.

For example - in the pilot, they are all wrapped around the axle around not being able to localize the disabled vehicle - and after the kiddies steal the power-packs back, they still cannot provide an accurate position. Are inertial trackers that difficult to build 150 years from now? And why didn't they ship themselves a good GPS constellation?

This reminds me of an idea I had a while back for a new thread - after reading Niven's Legacy of Heorot and Beowulf's Children - to develop a list of stuff a star-faring colonization or star-gate colonization group would want to take with them, ship ahead or send soon after ... develop a list from simple stuff like axes and knives and body armor to more complex things like bio-medical labs, satellite constellations and blacksmith forge set-ups.

Maybe I'll get off my butt and put pen to paper (or keyboard to web) tomorrow - DIBS on the idea, though!

Pity it won't have any stupid T rexes.