Terrable: A Tale of Dickheads and Dinosaurs

Before I even watched Terra Nova I thought of the title I would use for this post: Terrable. Not that I’m a pessimist. No, if I liked it I would have used Terrabrill, which is the better title. I wanted to like Terra Nova purely because of this, I’ll be proud of that title all week, like that time I came up with the best pun ever (you had to be there/I’m still smug about it) a few weeks ago.

You can see by the actual title that this is anything but Terrabrill. At first Terra Nova seems a bit confusing, there is so much clunky exposition during the first hour of the pilot that it’s pretty hard to follow. That is until you realise you’ve already seen it. At its simplest, it’s Stargate meets Jurassic Park, but it’s so much more than that. There’s echoes of Avatar what with the jungle and weird creatures, and they even have the crazy colonel from Avatar playing a crazy colonel. There’s a forbidden zone just like in Planet of the Apes, there are some strange hieroglyphics on some rocks just like in Smallville, there are “others” just like in Lost, there’s even a weird midget guy just like in Twin Peaks. Well not the midget…yet. There is hardly anything original about Terra Nova, you’ve seen everything already so what’s the point of it?

A spork is just two pre-existing things mashed together and that works fine so why can’t you mash several films and TV shows together? Well you can, and they have, but much like the spork it’s not a revelation. A spork doesn’t function better than a spoon or fork, and Terra Nova isn’t better than Stargate or Jurassic Park, it’s not even better than Avatar.

*This may be a good time to explain the premise of Terra Nova. It’s the future (2149), Earth is overly populated but luckily a rift in time and space enable the people to start a colony in the Cretaceous age where there are dinosaurs and shit.*

Its formula may be readymade for success - the money thrown at it means it probably will be a hit - but there’s something inherently shit about it. It looks nice and all but so did Avatar, and what’s a beautiful setting if it’s populated with dickheads? And boy are there some dickheads. We’re introduced to a family who have broken the law by having three children (in 2149 you are only allowed two) and their reason for having three children? We just felt like it really. We just felt like breaking the law for shits and giggles. Just so we’re even more sympathetic towards these rebels the dad punches a policeman and goes to prison. Oh the injustice. He then precedes to break out of prison and smuggle himself into Terra Nova with his family.

So they’re a flippantly lawless family but they’re not annoying, boring but not annoying. Well maybe the teenage son is annoying. Maybe he is like Tom Cruise’s son in War of the Worlds, fucking annoying. Carrying around a hatred for his dad like it’s nobody’s business. “Oh I hate you and it’s all your fault I turned out to be a total prick” and all that bollocks. It’s understandable because he left a girlfriend behind in 2149, and he wuvs her. It would be understandable if he wasn’t cavorting with some other broad a mere twenty minutes later.

I could probably live with this, so what if the characters aren’t interesting and one of them is irritating? If the concept is good then I’m in, I fell in love with Lost before I even noticed how dreamy Sawyer was. Terra Nova could have been brilliant, unoriginal, but brilliant all the same. It’s easy to think that Lost was bad because of the ending, but it was truly great at patiently giving you details and keeping you intrigued. Aversely Terra Nova sets out to explain everything as quickly as possible, and badly. To tell us what Terra Nova is, the sister of the family (didn’t catch her name) tells her annoying brother what it is, because he seems to be more clueless than us. She might as well have looked straight into the camera during her expository speech. She even told us about how it’s a parallel timeline and therefore we needn’t worry about the butterfly effect. She was very clear on that.

We’re given too much information too soon and with this there is no mystery or intrigue. The family are told they cannot leave the confines of the colony, ooo what’s out there? I’m interested, but ten minutes later we find out exactly what’s out there. The forbidden zone is no longer a mystery, it’s just Jurassic Park and shit. We learn that there are others out there, but we immediately learn who they are and how they came to be. Lost was able to keep their “others” shrouded in mystery for almost three seasons giving us little details here and there, Terra Nova managed about thirty minutes.

There might be more revelations to come but they have shown us too much too soon, Jack Bauer wouldn’t catch the terrorist in the first hour and then relax for the next twenty three. There’s not much you can do with dickheads and dinosaurs and you have to think that the show will only get more and more ludicrous as they run out of ideas. Why dinosaurs anyway? Are we that impressed with them? I wanted to like Terra Nova, I wanted it to be Terrabrill, but it’s Terrashit.

Reasons to hate 2010: Part One

2010 has been alright hasn’t it? Or has it? Rather than focus on the positive side of this year I cannot help but be a pessimist and ruin it for the rest of you by compiling a list of why 2010 has been shit.

Avatar

OK it’s the biggest film ever but because of that fact many are treating it as the best film ever (it’s not). From a technical perspective it is one of the most important films ever made and will be forever notes as one. Despite this it’s far from a perfect film or even a great one. A forgettable film has been made unforgettable thanks to the hyperbolic reaction it has received.
It’s really annoying to listen to someone banging on about how brilliant Avatar is and how they’ve seen nothing like it. We’ve all seen it, every last one of us and as a result it’s something we can talk about without being afraid of being put down with “you fucking mug, what you doing watching that gay thing”. Usually a sci-fi film would illicit this kind of reaction from the average un-geek man but not Avatar, it’s like it has diplomatic immunity. I know people who liked Avatar but would never see Star Trek in a million years because it is unrealistic! People like Avatar because other people like Avatar, or Coldplay syndrome as it‘s more commonly known.
It has had two cinema releases this year and two DVD releases with another due out next year, if you don’t like it you can’t escape it and while I quite enjoyed it at the cinema I’ve since gone on to hate it because no matter where you turn there is an advert for it. Two sequels have been announced already and I fear I will have to go through the pandemonium twice more.
The thing is, the film doesn’t warrant any of this, it’s just not very good. It is too long, the dialogue is atrocious, the acting is bad, and the plot is unoriginal. The special edition had an extra 8 minutes added, why? It was long enough already, don’t make it longer! In between the action scenes we are treated to a wonderfully dull dialogue, it’s truly awful and feels like they forgot all about it and wrote it an hour before they started filming though if that actually happened it may have came out better. It’s the script that makes the actors look bad but Michelle Rodriguez would look bad either way. All through the film there are echoes of Aliens and the plot rips off Pocahontas, Princess Mononoke, Dances with Wolves and even the Fast and the fucking Furious to an extent! The effects may look great but the actual film is something completely different and the Academy Awards should have really picked up on this before they nominated it for best picture.

Alan Wake

Alan who? Alan Wake was a game on the Xbox 360 this year that had received quite a lot of hype and while it got some very good reviews I couldn’t help but feel disappointed. Excited that a game actually had a written story and even promoted that fact I expected something that I never got. Alan Wake and his wife go to a small town not to dissimilar to Twin Peaks, his wife goes missing, weird things happen, there’s twists and turns and in the end nothing is explained and it doesn’t make sense.
All throughout the game Mr A.Wake narrates as if it were a novel, the problem being it’s the most boring novel ever written, but still not as boring as Alan himself. Promoted as TV show-esque, the game fails to feel anything like a TV show, yes there are cliff hangers at the end of each level (I mean “episodes”) but there is no suspense created as you can immediately find out what happens next by simply pressing A. You spend most of your time walking or waking up in the middle of a dark forest in which you have lost your torch and gun (again), or you might talk to a few kooky yet inevitably dull “characters” and you’ll definitely fight the same enemies again and again throughout the entire game.
Alan Wake deserves criticism because while it looks like a good game, and for a while it makes you think that, it just isn’t fun to play and you’d be better off just watching a real TV show, speaking of which…

Lost

Six fucking years of my life! ARGH! Lost was brilliant, I will stand by that statement but I can’t escape the fact that it was also shit, I’ve never seen a show like it and probably never will again. It seemed so intricately planned, the writers declaring they had it all worked out well in advance, the discovery of the others, the hatch, the Dharma stations, Jacob, the other others, it was an unfolding mystery that asked more questions with each new answer, until we found out about Jacob that is.
From around season four it looked like Lost was getting silly but buoyed by Damon Lindelof’s earlier admission that it all tied together in the end I kept watching and by season six when it was really silly I was still watching with a devout faith that would make a catholic blush. Then came the episode “Across the sea” which is probably the worst episode in the entire six seasons, gone was my faith, it wasn’t an all mighty epiphany but a humble realisation that it wasn’t going to end the way I wanted it to and that the many questions asked weren’t going to be answered.
As I woke up extra early on a Monday morning to watch the finale it turned out I was right, it didn’t end well. Six fucking years of my life! ARGH! Initial confusion turned to eventual anger as I struggled to come to terms with the lame ending, I didn’t sleep for days and it was weeks before I showered, I ended up living as a savage in a nearby woods (might not be true). I have several hundred still unanswered questions and “oooo it’s all a bit mystical” just doesn’t count as an answer in my mind. That said the very final parting shot was near perfect and there were some very well written episodes, particularly the Desmond ones. But still, six fucking years of my life! ARGH!

To be continued…

Lost's most annoying characters

So as we go another week without Lost, it leaves me with more time to dwell on the shit storm it left us with. Now we have perspective on the whole endeavour, it's changed my opinions on some of the characters. Some of them seemed relevant back when we didn't know what it was all about, but now it's over, we have learnt that they didn't matter in any of it, and that if we ever want to watch it again, we can just skip their flashbacks/forwards/sideways all together. Below is a list of these annoying characters.

Kate

For such a central character to a TV show, it is strange that she is one we care about so little. There are reasons a many for this however. Number one, from the start, we learn she is a criminal, we later discover she has killed her own father, lovely. Number two, she is intent on having both Jack and Sawyer, leave one for us! Number three, she wants to get involved in everyone’s problems, but goes mental when asked about her own life. This makes her a harassing murdering slag, and is why I didn’t care about her.

At the end of the show, it became clear that all these characters were on the island to redeem themselves, but even at the end, Kate never really did that, hell, she didn’t even show much remorse for her crimes. How were we supposed to empathise with her struggles of being a fugitive when she was guilty? Yes, other characters killed, but their actions were understandable to an extent, where as I can’t even remember why Kate killed her father. And she stole a lunchbox when she was a kid!

Another “annoying Kate moment” came in the last season, when Sawyer opens up to her about his feelings for Juliet. Sawyer walks away, and it is Kate who bursts into tears! Why is she crying? And why are we supposed to be sad that she is sad for Sawyer? It just made me dislike her even more.

It was originally planned for Jack to die at the end of the pilot episode, with Kate taking over as the "leader", thank your gods that didn’t happen.

Rose And Bernard

For all the brilliant multi dimensional characters in lost, it is these two characters who have the least dimensions. They don’t work individually, and they hardly work as a couple. What gets me about these two dicks is their persistence, they never leave! We only saw Rose in the first season, who was a moody bitch who sat on the other side of the beach, NOT HELPING. There’s been a plane crash! People are injured, hungry, thirsty, and most likely lost loved ones themselves. The cynic I am, I just saw her as lazy and selfish, and excluding a rare moment of empathy for when she and Bernard are reunited in Season 2, it turns out she’s a complete bitch to him, and he’s better off on the other side of the island.

As the series went on, it became clear that they had no direction, and no impact on any of the several hundred plots, so why were they always there? And they just didn’t want to help, there were people dying, and they just sat there eating all the Dharma food. Again, lazy and selfish. I suppose they looked after Vincent, you have to start with something small I guess.

If there were to be Lost spin-offs then a shit sitcom featuring the two would probably be made. Bernard does something stupid (perhaps in the style of Larry David) and then Rose just insults him for 20 minutes.

Walt

Now let’s get this clear, Walt wasn’t a bad character, the writers just didn’t think it through. My one biggest question at the end of Lost was “Why did you waste all that time making Walt appear to be so integral to the whole fucking thing?”

Walt had special freaky X-Men powers, and remember when Locke saw him after he had left the island already? I wanted these questions answered, and they never were.

The explanation for this is no doubt that the actor had a growth spurt, but for all the stupid shit they did put in the show, they could have no doubt managed to find a way around this. More than likely, they just got bored with him. It’s a shame, because I really liked the direction the show was going in the first few seasons, and I was looking forward to a massive revelation involving Walt and the others. When you think about Walt, it raises so many unanswered questions, especially the polar bear.

Jacob

Another intriguing character who was ruined. I know we got to find out who he was but remember when he was first mentioned? In Season 3 Jacob is referred to as the Other’s leader. Everything Benjamin does is because Jacob has told him to do it. But this seems pretty inconsistent with the Jacob we know in Season 6. The “first” Jacob, was mysterious, he was unseen, and unheard. We saw that strange Clockwork Orange style room, and then the cabin Locke and Benjamin visit. When we find out who he actually is, it’s a bit of a letdown. Why is he completely different to that thing in the cabin? What the hell was that all about? To me, it’s just another case of the writer’s “making it up as they go along”.

I was expecting quite an evil character, who was manipulating everyone, ordering the death’s of several people, but in the end, he was really just this naïve man who wanted to prove that mankind wasn’t all that bad. Like Walt, they could have really built on the mythology, and made a very evil character, but instead Jacob was the good guy, and the man in black was the bad guy. It just didn’t make sense.

The man in black

Why? What was the point? “What do you mean people won’t watch a tv show that’s just about a plane crash? Let’s have a monster? OK!” What we all thought was just an “ordinary” monster, right from the very first episode, was in fact just a man, and they didn’t even explain that very well.

The black smoke was one of the biggest mysteries of Lost, and it was a bit of a letdown to find out that it was just a man who wanted to get off the island, but for some reason couldn’t. If we were to believe this, then it would have helped if we were told why he became black smoke (I‘m not buying magic light!), and why he couldn’t leave the island.

Why could Benjamin beckon him? Did that mean he was taking orders from the man in black and not Jacob? That would have been plausible, but it’s explained that this wasn’t the case. As the man in black and Jacob ultimately became the two most important characters (to the plot anyway), it would have worked better if they had more time to develop. Across the sea is not acceptable in any form, and had they been unravelled throughout the season, they may have been more believable. To me, it looks like they ran out of ideas, and the man in black was the best they could do.

The Mother

Across the sea is one of the worst Lost episodes, and as it came so late in the series, it was even more disappointing. It’s intent was to explain Jacob and the man in black, but in the end it just confused us more. Everything about this episode was confusing, especially the introduction of a new character, their mother.

Where did she come from? How was she different to people? Why didn’t she like them? And why did she steal babies? She wasn’t likeable, she didn’t have a point, and she died at the end of the episode, so why raise all these questions so near to the finale? This was the point in the show where I knew none of my questions would be answered, I had hoped for some, but after seeing this episode, I knew that NONE of them would be answered (and they weren’t).

The mother was a typical “other” character (ragged clothes and stealing babies), so it may have worked better in a flashback about how the others came about, and maybe at the beginning on the season as opposed to the end.

Claire

By far my least favourite character in the series. From the beginning she was just there to flesh out the cast, like Hurley, Charlie, Michael, Rose, Boone, Shannon, Sun, Jin, Vincent. Hurley liked food, Charlie liked drugs, Michael liked shouting, Boone liked Shannon, Shannon hated everything, Sun liked her English teacher, Jin liked shouting, and Claire, err, liked giving away babies.

For all the other character’s issues, they were pretty much inconsequential, Claire’s pregnancy made her more involved than she should be. We had to go through the whole tedious flashback (with the psychic), and then the whole kidnapping kafuffle, and then the actual birth, all in the first season. No one really cared when she was kidnapped apart from Charlie, and he was a heroin addict.

Maybe I just never connected with the character, but for someone who was giving her baby away anyway, why didn’t she just let the others have it, and save everyone the trouble. Could have saved a lot of lives too, get in the corner with Rose and Bernard!

She disappeared towards the end of the series, and again no one really cared. When she did come back, she was mental! It made her twice as annoying, but delivered one of the funniest moments of season 6, when everyone kept trying to ditch her. They should have in season 1.

Nikki and Paulo

There were quite a few stale periods in the series, especially during the third season, and Expose was Lost at it’s most stale. Stand alone episodes worked in most science fiction shows, the X-Files, Buffy, Star Trek, etc, but not in Lost. Lost was all about the plot, and characters, so to introduce two (not entirely) new characters into the foray, and tell a story, that is not only cheesy, but does nothing to expand on the plot, went against everything the show stood for. This was season 3’s Across the sea. Just downright awful.

Driveshaft

Since the show began, every now and again, a song comes into my head, and it won’t leave. That song is Driveshaft’s “You are everybody”. It’s not even a real song! I am not saying that Charlie was a bad character, because I liked some of his story arcs. He was integral to Desmond’s fucking brilliant storyline, and for that, Charlie is ok in my mind, Sure, that period where he went evil was very very silly, and in the flash-sideways-purgatory-doo-da he was a total prick, but the way he left the show (initially) was perfect for his character. My beef is not with Charlie though, it’s with Manchester based rock band Driveshaft, and yes, they count as a character!

Ilana

So they have to go back to the island, but take some other non important (or so it would seem) people with them. They are split apart, and Illana takes control of this new group. She is essentially Ana Lucia 2.0, not because they are both Hispanic, but because they are angry shouty ladies who like to take control. Illana does nothing of any consequence when you think about it. We find out that Jacob was like a father to her (if you say so) so she’s out for blood for the man who killed him, and then she blows up. Vincent was more vital to the plot, she was totally pointless, and I assume there were cheers when she exploded.

John Locke

John Locke would also be on my list of best characters, as he has a genuinely interesting side to him, however, the other side to him is just so fucking boring. The Daddy issue is used so many times in the show, and as Jack had it first, Locke should have had a different problem...which he did, he had no legs, that woman he kept calling didn't love him, he got chased out of some hippy village, it just goes on and on. Your opinion of Locke depends on what version you see of him, and this is why he makes this list, because there is always a good chance you will get boring Locke, instead of interesting Locke. Had Terry O'Quinn not been so good as Locke, they probably wouldn't have used him for the man in black, and we would have had someone like Charlie.