The show has a $20 million budget and yet uses recolored Nerf guns for its soldiers:



There're loads of strange decisions going on in the scripting department, so without further ado, let's just list the things that slapped me in the face from the get-go:

- Several people holding the idiot ball. In this case you had several people rush into a quarantined area, one of whom was a biologist, without finding out anything about why it had been ordered closed off. These guys almost redeemed themselves by wearing breather masks, but tore them off inside the quarrantined area when someone, under the effects of the pathogen in question, shot at them.
- It's the future, so industrial design is impractical. I'm not sure why making communications/computer terminals giant, bulky, spherical desks with curved work surfaces was considered a good idea.
- Most dinosaur-related deaths could probably be avoided by installing fake power stations for them to wreck or hide out in. Have we learned nothing from Jurassic Park?
- Dinosaurs love eating weird stuff. I could buy something brought from the future setting off a dino feeding frenzy, but nickel?

One could point out that a number of the less-than-bright things done did help solve the crisis, eventually, but that sounds like something that would have been better suited to a sci-fi comedy: Imagine a planet where the only way to win through problems is to trust in amazing coincidence and do the worst thing possible for any given situation. I think it'd make a great episode of "Red Dwarf," actually. I am a little curious as to when those in charge of Terra Nova requisitioned a bartender and why they aren't keeping a closer eye on him (ready-made barter material, an ability to hide transactions, has a handy spot to meet up with just about anyone without much suspicion, etc.)?

I think I've found what's really going to bug me as the show progresses: For a last-ditch effort to save humanity and all that, there seem to be a lot of resources wasted on creature comforts. In the last show, a child of the Sixers joins the Terra Novans, and she's presented (eventually) in a cute yellow dress. Combined with the Fiji Resort Hotel look of the homes they've built for the colonists, that seems a little impractical to even have. Unless the colony has a matter replicator, that kind of thing either came from the future with an admonishment of "why did you pack that?" or the colony planners figured "hey, it's tropical, so flimsy clothes for everyone and let's replace half the water with suntan lotion."

I'd even take a nod to some kind of macguffin that lets them utilize plant fibers and other stuff that goes in a hopper on one end and spits out clothing and other simple items on the other. This all assumes that one of the reasons there's not a constant flow of people and material from the future is that the more you send the more energy it takes, but that might be more thinking than the show's writers have put into this. Not to mention the resource-starved future probably wouldn't enjoy the thought of its little yellow dress supply going to people who seem to be getting a chance at a better life anyway.

On another front, the Sixers are being set up as a group that has an agenda, probably to do with the future of the colony. While they live off of things they steal from Terra Nova, their vehicles went from ramshackle to just as pristine as the colony's this last episode, while the Sixers themselves are looking more and more like extras from a Mad Max movie. Unless it's part of a plan to disguise their intentions, I'm not sure why their leader would suddenly start wearing war paint, so I suspect someone decided they needed to look more feral/threatening, but I'm not buying it.

I criticize Terra Nova a lot because I was hoping the concept would be better. It looked to be another shot at a Jericho-style TV show where people had to survive in a harsh environment. It doesn't make for a thrilling sense of adventure when one can fight dinosaurs or whatever is out to kill you, and then retire to your hardwood-paneled bungalow and mess about on your iPad. It kind of comes off like building a split-level home with wall-to-wall carpeting, big-screen TV and jacuzzi in Antarctica for a research expedition. I kind of hoped they'd do something more like the colony on LV-426 (from a deleted scene of Aliens), which, while high-tech, had an air of spartan "we're just getting started here" about it. I may just have to live with it and move on. Anyway, this episode moved more of the plot along and set up a few mysteries without resorting to a dino-disaster or 85-million-year-old disease or anything, so props to it for that.