'Terra Nova' on FOX HD - Page 5

Well, I'm not going to get my hopes up, but I'll still tune in with the hope of seeing something big with sharp teeth eat people.

If that happened on Survivor, I might have actually wanted to watch.

Pavarti?

The Brits rejected 'Outcasts', which dealt with similar themes. BBCA just telecast it over here and I thought it had potential, but moved a bit slowly at times. This one will certainly be more action-oriented.

But if they want a critical mass of viewers, there's going to have to be cool dinos, and lots of them. Back-stabbing, lip-locking soap-operatics will only take you so far. Gotta' bring the kid demo in en masse, and hang onto 'em.

Or "90210 BC!" That's what I'm afraid will happen.

I bought Outcasts on BD knowing full well it ended with a lot of questions, etc. I actually bought it just to watch Hermione Norris in another role - she was great in MI5 (Spooks)

I'm actually liking Outcasts quite a bit. Its setting in S Africa really does give an other-worldly alien look to the landscapes.

No, it's not 100% action filled, yes it has its share of soap, but IMO, it has just enough difference & alien feel to it to have been a good sci-fi series, worthy of another season.

Wished it wasn't canceled but that's the way it is
Enjoying it anyway.

IMO, the one thing that distinguishes it from our own failed Caprica is the writers didn't jump around too much from sub-plot to sub-plot. Even when they do jump characters, the jumps all act to move the theme of that episode forward. Unlike Caprica where every 5 minutes we were getting another thread and none of them were connected. Each has its flaws, but in my mind, Outcasts was much superior storytelling even tho both got canceled.

And I'd rate Outcasts better than Torchwood Miracle Day in a nano-second

Agreed, CJ is excellent sci-fi, I also recommend it very highly.

You should try 'Charlie Jade', then. Also set in South Africa - Capetown, a stunningly gorgeous place. One of the best "hard" science fiction shows ever made, IMHO. Can't recommend it highly enough!

You can find the DVD set here. Note it is PAL/Region 0 (Aussie). You may have to hack your machine to play multi-region discs; usually not a big problem. Worth. Every. Penny.

Ha - got caught in the ol' edit/re-post spin cycle.

Edits should retain the original post time, looks like you deleted and re-posted.

I agree. Charlie Jade was excellent. Too bad they never made the second season. The synopsis was very intriguing.

[edit] Oh, I forgot to mention, I DID purchase the DVDs and was very happy with them. [edit]

Yep. I hate edit tags and sometimes 5 minutes isn't enough time to get the post the way I want. I wish they'd jump it up to around 8 or so.

Nobody is going to look down on you for edit tags. I'll go back to a post two days old and edit it if I notice a typo - even if nobody responded and the conversation has moved on.

They needed a U.S. investor to make a second season happen, and the SciFi Network wasn't interested. They bought CJ on the cheap and viewed it as burn-off programing. Did no promotion before launch and ended up scheduling it during the coveted 2:00 AM Tuesday morning time slot, presumably bumping an infomercial for Ginsu Knives. Because, you know, they already had such a strong lineup of great serialized science fiction shows; just no room for another.

I presume NBC Universal still owns the American TV rights. This show would be a good fit on TNT for rebroadcast, I would think. They'd give it the promotional push it needed the first time. If it was successful, then there would be momentum for producing that long-awaited second season. Jeffrey Pierce is still young.

Yeah, I know. I didn't say it was a rational thing.

Haha! So have I, no big deal. If I change the content or context of the post, I'll bring it forward with a comment about why I'm updating/re-posting, but syntax or spelling edits? No big deal.

I will definitely check it out. Thanks for the recommendations, guys!

That depends on which era they travel back to. Let's not forget that the age of dinosaurs lasted 163 million years before the asteroid wiped out all the larger species. It's only been 65 million years since then. If I were sending people back to the past, I'd prefer to give them 163 million years than only 65. I'm just saying.

That was a great strip. I wish they had turned that into a graphic novel, like they do with the better Judge Dredd strips. Flesh Book 2 was good too.

Now I'll have to get out my old progs from my old 2000AD collection.

Not having seen the pilot, my assumption is that they really didn't have a choice as to exactly what era they popped out in via this "stable wormhole" or whatever it is that allows them travel to the past. Maybe it just opened there and nowhen else.

If they go back 85 million years, they've still got 20 million to go before the planet has that Really Bad Day. No problemo.

I too was really unhappy when they moved it from what ever slot they started showing it in, to the middle of the night, AND THEN they never finished it. Part way through the series, they just stopped. Apparentlly there were some vague promises that it would eventually finish, but like another really good SF show, Defying Gravity, such promises had no basis in reality. Charlie Jade was well acted, written, and had an intriguing premise. No wonder there was so little interest in it.


I agree, but I WON'T be holding my breath.

The DVDs were great!

The reason they moved CJ to the ungodly hour was it was getting close to zero ratings in its initial prime slot.It was a series you had to pay attention to for sure.

Ala Asteroid hit...one of the producers stated that being the new earthers or whatever they are calling theirselves will have a couple million years of warning they can surely have an asteroid defense in place by then. Even today if it was certain that an asteroid would hit the earth in 2000 years I would think we could devise some sort of plan in that "short" amount of time. Of course you would have those science skeptics say the science is all wrong.

An interesting idea for a story would be to learn that the extinction event was NOT an asterioid, as assumed, but the end result of some new technology the time travelers developed in the millions of years that follow after resettling in the dinosaur era.

This show will have to give a plausable reason why these travelers, presumably due to some catastophe or problem, not only needed to re-settle in the past, but why exactly they would go way, way back, 100 mill years or more, to a very hostile planet, vs, say, somewhere between 100-50,000 yrs ago .....
Presumeably the "butterfly effect" or "new timeline/tangent" would kick in either way .. so I'm curious as to why so far back ...

Region 0 doesn't exist. Aussie is in region 2. If the release is set to be played in all regions, then regions 1 thru 6 are set. A DVD set to "0" would not be playable anywhere (except maybe in region hacked players ).

I do not believe that DVD players are hackable to make them play 576i material on 480i machines, as that is a hardware issue with the playout section. The hacking is to get around the region issue. So, first you need a player that will play both 480i and 576i discs and then it needs to be hacked for region playback. I have a JVC that will convert 576i to 480i29.97 and it was a hacked player for all region playback. I hardly ever use it as I do 576i playback on my computer.

Having watched the first hour, I don't remember anything that indicated that they had control of when or where, with where being a different timestream (in order to get around the issue of going back into the past and wiping out the current future).

It seems that a probe was sent that they never found, because it went into a different timestream. I'd have to rewatch that section to double-check.

If intelligent humans have been around for about 50,000 years, and we have left the earth in such a sorry state, sending back a genetically diverse enough sample population millions of years will cause the same thing to happen, just much sooner in the earth's history. I really doubt that in 100 generations, ANYONE will remember that we came from the future. Humans will STILL cause an ecological disaster.

And speaking of which, wasn't the earth's temperature like ten or fifteen degrees hotter then than it is now?


I knew that, so I can't really blame them for the schedule change. Some would say, if they had promoted it properly, it would have done much bettr, but maybe it just was not palatable to U. S. audiences.

It's that kind of short-sightedness that got us into trouble in the first place.

Yep, you're right. The Amazon listing says Region 0 for some reason. My disc package says Region 4/PAL. I made my Marantz DV7600 DVD player Region-Free (or All-Region) with the hack, which in my case was simply entering a four digit code with the remote. Couldn't have been easier. I was able to select PAL output in my player's settings menu (vs. NTSC).

Yep and that's why Greenland is called Greenland. It was a warmer climate then and grew things.

Of course then there was the Little Ice Age around 1600 which occurred after the Medieval Warm Period. Sure things are death, taxes, and the climate changes.

As I recall, they gave 'Charlie Jade' virtually no advance promotion and there was no publicity push at all - no media critics wrote of its premiere, nothing, nada. They just dumped it on the schedule at 10:00 one Friday night. They kept it there for 2 weeks and then exiled it to that early morning death slot. It's not that it wasn't palatable to U.S. audiences; it was that only a tiny fraction of the network's audience even knew it was on the air. People never got a chance to sample it.

SciFi Network had no skin in the game with CJ. They paid none of the production costs (it was a combination South African and Canadian production) and were able to pick it up cheap. They viewed it as filler programing, a big mistake IMO. Given a proper push and considering how well it was received by the people that did sample it, CJ could have had a nice run here in the States. But the Syfy Network hasn't got a very good track record with hard sci-fi; they don't seem to believe in it. Ironic, no?

According to Wikipedia: Erik the Red named it Greenland supposedly in the hope that the pleasant name would attract settlers. Erik was the 10th Century Don Draper.