I watched the pilot and second episode of the new sci-fi offering Terra Nova the other day. For the uninitiated: our world is royally screwed and barely habitable about a hundred (ish) year from now. Technology has surprisingly only-sort-of come to our rescue, in the guise of a "crack in time" that allows us to send people and objects 85 million years into an alternate past (note the key word "alternate" there - it's code for "now we can make up whatever the hell we want, and put Jurassic and Triassic creatures in the Cretaceous period. Woot!". It's a very special form of Handwavium.) So we recruit the best and brightest to send on a one-way trip back to live with dinosaurs in the hope that it''ll inexplicably help those stuck back on Pollutions R Us.

Because that totally makes sense.

There are: dinosaurs who're about 130 million years late; a violent rebel faction with apparently no actual dogma or purpose other than to hint to the viewer that the settlement has a dark and sinister ulterior reason for being there; a mysterious missing son of the Camp Leader (can't even remember his name, but his face looks oddly super-real) who forbids anyone to go near some waterfalls where said son, who apparently knows something everyone else (except maybe Camp Leader) doesn't, keeps leaving weird drawings; teenagers who do the exact opposite of anything anyone says and fairly inconsistent, anachronistic technology developments that lead to me continually forgetting that they're actually vastly more advanced than us and so being utterly surprised when they can synthesis some pheromone in about two hours.

It kinda feels like Jurassic Park meets Lost.

I have two main issues with it. One, is that they keep offering glimmers of ideas that could be interesting, and then doing the least interesting thing with them. Like the finale to the first season of Heroes, you keep looking at all the interesting places they could take this, and yet they always choose the really obvious one you'd discounted out of hand because it was so damn obvious. But I can mostly forgive that.

But I take serious issue with the characterisation. If you can call it that. I'm fairly certain that somsone took one book on character archetypes, and one book on character cliches, handed them to the writers and said "there's your source material, build from that. And I don't want anything that can't be referenced". 

They're like placeholder-characters, seriously. There's no individualisation, they are purely an archetype. To the point where sometimes the entire conversation between two characters is a cliche. And not just the situation, but the actual words. They are characters who are purely there for the purpose of the plot, and the plot seems to be a Lost-like attempt to show us how clever the writers are, and how they're able to blow our minds with things we never could have seen coming.

I'll be honest, I never watched Lost. Had I heard that the ending managed to wrap all the loose ends and demonstrate that the writers actually knew what they were doing the whole time, I'd be on it like an infinite chocolate machine. But what they actually showed was that they'd painted themselves into a corner so many times the best they could come up with was more nonsense of the kind they'd been peddling for the previous seven years that wrapped everything up in a giant (albiet disguised and cross-bred) cliche. I suspect that has rather diminished an audience's patience with bizarre-mysterious-plot-happenings. Or rather, diminished out trust that the intellectual investment involved in following them is worthwhile.

Terra Nova hasn't gone there yet. The second episode was largely filler - nothing further developed about their existence, or any of the "mysteries". But their characters are still cardboard cut-outs, utterly, completely predictable and dull. There's nothing of interest to hold on to, no reason to tune in other than to see what they're doing with the idea (and that's only good for another couple of episodes).

Archetypes are very useful, when used in the right way. But the right way is not "plonk into your story as-is".