TV Review: Terra Nova Episode 1.06
Terra Nova returns after last week’s World Series pre-emption. Only this week we get ‘CSI: Terra Nova.’ Sorry, too easy. Anyway, the colony deals with its first murder (the human-on-human variety). Was the plot gripping or grating? Let’s take a look.
Quick ‘n’ Dirty Review:
A lone soldier named Foster heads to an outpost, and gets his face eaten off by a hungry nicoraptor waiting inside. Hello, yourself.
The next morning, Jim and Malcolm find the remains, and the first assumption is that Foster screwed up and left the door open, which was how the nicoraptor got in and dined on him. But Detective Jim Shannon is on the case, discovering deep scratches on the inside walls of the outpost, meaning that the nicoraptor had been trapped inside the outpost before killing Foster. Elisabeth’s autopsy reveals galesaur blood on Foster’s remains. Galesaurs are a nicoraptor’s favorite food. In short someone murdered Foster by way of dinosaur. Scandal!
Jim and Washington begin talking to soldiers who knew Foster, discovering that there was a woman he was seeing on the down low.
This mystery woman, Rebecca, is actually married and denies that anything other than flirtation happened with Foster. But her husband Howard Milner knows she had an affair and confesses that he killed Foster out of jealousy. Furious that Terra Nova has experienced its first murder, Taylor banishes Milner from Terra Nova forever with only a few supplies.
Elisabeth is less than pleased at Taylor’s unilateral decision, and urges Jim to see if Milner’s confession was actually legit.
So Jim tails Milner and after some coaxing brings him back to the compound. Milner confronts Rebecca, saying that he knows she broke up with Foster some time ago, but tried to take the fall for her.
But Rebecca denies killing Foster, saying that the dead soldier’s excessive gambling at Boylan’s bar was a huge turn off. Taylor agrees to let Jim reopen the case, and its discovered in Foster’s financials that someone owed him a huge amount of money.
It eventually comes out that another soldier named Curran actually killed Foster to get out of paying him. So once Taylor and Jim take him outside the compound, Taylor proceeds to kick Curran’s ass and leave him at gunpoint with no supplies. Talk about frontier justice!
In the B-plots, Malcolm found an ankylosaurus egg that hadn’t hatched yet. It turns out that a birth defect had kept the baby from hatching, so Elisabeth performs a high-tech surgery while the anklyosaurus is still in its egg. That allows it to finally hatch. And guess what, Jim and Elisabeth's youngest daughter Zoe wants to keep it. Well, its either that or a dog’s Cretaceous ancestor, which I’m sure was no Lassie 85 Million years ago.
Josh, the eldest son, is still working at Boylan’s bar. Boylan asks him to do an afterwork task that should speed up getting Josh’s ex Kara over to Terra Nova from 2149. And Skye is STILL helping him out. Damn, she’s got it bad for this douche. Anyway, there is a little hitch in that plan as Boylan’s bar gets raided by Jim and Taylor’s men during their murder investigation. And apparently Josh never told his parents about working in a bar. So Jim puts a kibosh on that, much to Josh’s dismay. But Jim then changes his mind, which ends up being a huge mistake.
It turns out that Josh’s task involves meeting up wit Mira (Leader of the Sixers) outside of Terra Nova. Using this to her advantage Mira makes Josh swear that in order to get Kara over here, she will someday ask him to do something that must be done without hesitation. And like a whipped dumbass, Josh agrees.
My thoughts:
The episode started off sloooooow. Eeesh. But it picked up toward the end. The murder plot was ok, but not the gripping stuff of a crime novel or anything. Again, the whole Sixers storyline really betters the whole show as the stuff happening in Terra Nova just kinda bores me. The show is still finding its rhythm so we’ll stick with it to see which way it goes.
- CCE