Review: TERRA NOVA Season 1 Episode 1 Genesis (Part 1)

What a show!  That's just for starts.  I can't even begin to tell you how excited I am about Terra Nova right now.  This show can draw so many comparisons to Lost and I just hope I can cover them all here for you now.  I will clear this up first though, this is not a J.J. Abrams show, nor are all the people in the show dead from the first episode, yeah I know we didn't know that until the very last episode but that's not what Terra Nova is about.  This is new, all new and although it draws comparisons from Jurassic Park I really think this is going to be a lot better than the original movie or any of it's predecessors.

If you are watching this show in England on Sky1 then I don't want to ruin it to much for you, so maybe you stop reading now.  The show will premiere on Sky1 at 9pm on Monday October 3rd 2011 so be sure to come back read and comment then.

The show starts in 2149, a time when the world is facing an environmental crisis and measures have been put in place to restrict the size of peoples families, food that people eat etc, etc.  It focuses mainly on the Shannon family who have overstepped the mark in the family planning department and had a third child, they get searched in scenes reminiscent of Equilibrium their third child is found and Jim Shannon (Jason O'Mara) is thrown in prison.  Jim's wife Elizabeth (Shelley Conn) is offered a place in a new civilisation called Terra Nova, this is a place where the Human race plan to rebuild 85 million years in the past, the whole family get there eventually with Jim breaking out of prison and then the family smuggling their illegal third child over the border!  I suppose you could call it border.

I have to be honest I was a little board with the opening, it was a good set up but for me it was just a little to computer animated, especially in a show from Steven Spielberg.  If you didn't have that though then you would have no reason for Terra Nova and that part is over within the first 15 minutes, I suppose it does deliver a message to us all.  Look after the environment.  Drive a Prius.

The minute the 10th Pilgrimage land in Terra Nova you are gripped and the comparisons to Lost start.  It's immediately apparent that this is so much more than just Humans vs Dinosaurs, a wealth of characters join in as you learn that the 10th Pilgrimage are not the first Humans to inhabit Terra Nova and there have been 9 other groups before them, one of which has formed a bit of a splinter cell, a colony away from the rest of Terra Nova and we know them now only as Sixers and their leader Mira.

There is your first comparison to Lost.  The Sixers could kind of be classed as the others from Lost and they are going to prove as mysterious as their ABC counterparts, we got whole episodes about the others and their backing stories and I'm pretty sure the Sixers are going to be the same.  From there we can move on to the point where the Shannon's son goes with some other youngsters on an adventure into the new wilderness, there we are shown drawings on rocks, seems like code of some sort, remember that cave in Lost anyone?  We learn that this is a script of how is all began but, what?  Terra Nova or something else, the sixers colony perhaps.  Maybe Commander Taylor (Stephen Lang) went to Terra Nova to find his missing son.

Jim Shannon is definitely the Jack of this show, Commander Nathaniel Taylor is John Locke with his agenda and purpose already worked out and then you have Mira from the sixers, clearly the female Ben Linus.  One more to mention that we haven't been introduced to yet, Commander Taylor's son who has been missing for years now, he is responsible for the drawings on the rocks, Jacob possibly.

This is the first time I have seen an American TV shows first episode not called Pilot, maybe they are sure that this would work.  I would say they got that right.  This was a brilliant opening to what looks to be a brilliant show and maybe we all finally have something to fill our schedule since Lost left our TV screens.  If the first couple of hours are anything to go by then this show is worth an hour of your time week on week.