Terra Nova is Becoming a Let Down

This summer, during my now yearly adventure down to San Diego Comic Con, I was lucky enough to catch a sneak preview screening of the pilot of Fox's new dinosaur mega show Terra Nova. At the end of it, I was impressed to say the least. A dinosaur TV show that looks good? How could we go wrong? (Sorry Dinotopia.) I was genuinely excited. I even tweeted about it: "Great day at #SDCC [...] the Terra Nova pilot was unbelievable." A sentiment I discovered retweeted by the shows executive producer Jon Cassar much to my surprise and internet age excitement.

Unfortunately, since the pilot, the show is not showing good signs.

**Fair warning: SPOILERS are ahead.**

When the pilot aired, I loyally tuned in as soon as I could to watch the pilot again. Still excited. The marriage of a dystopian future with a dinosaur colony? It was like someone made a show for me and the mathematical diagrams that the kids find out in the jungle had started building a Lost-like intrigue. What are the Sixers goals?? Who sent them? Why does the time rift exist? So many questions! I couldn't wait for next week.

Then the second episode aired and it was.... decent, I guess. It felt like a midseason filler episode rather than something that was supposed to keep an audience on the hook. The little mating dinosaurs were going to eat them alive cause they were on their mating grounds! Interesting concept, you've got me. Oh and Elizabeth got in because an old boyfriend Malcolm recommended her? Hmmm, I wonder who this guy is. Maybe he's the Sixer's spy!

It was a good plot line but it didn't really heighten the drama of the show much. No one seemed to care about all those questions they'd established in episode one and that's what I wanted more of. The overall story of the show was barely pushed forward. The pilot had turned my expectations up to 11 and the second episode came in around a 6 or a 7.

But it's fine, it's just one rough episode and I really want to know what the deal is so I'm going to keep watching.

External drama? Check.

So this morning I punched up the ol' Xbox with Hulu Plus (no rush to watch anymore) and the show frankly let me down again. Again the episode was a fun storyline within this world, a strange pathogen is wiping out peoples memories and the only way to prevent it is to infect people with the common cold! Amnesia is a bit used but I still enjoyed the ride but honestly, I'm not hooked the way I should be. Not after 3 episodes and four hours of television.

Will they? Won't th- oh they did.

The problem is that while there is plenty of external drama to deal with (Sixers, dinos, disease) there seems to be almost NO genuine internal drama for these characters. Josh went back to being nice to his dad and everyone in the family is happy in Terra Nova. It only took till the third episode for Josh to kiss Sky and for Maddy to get a date with her super nice soldier boy. There was no time for romantic tension to build.

So what's the tension? Oh, Sky is too nice and she's going to help Josh get his girlfriend there from the future? Malcolm's still obviously got the hots for Elizabeth but he seems like too nice a guy to do anything about it. Our main characters are all pretty happy so why are we still watching? I know when I'm writing a story I'm too often tempted to protect my main characters. They're a part of me and I want the best for them! But what's best for them does not translate to what's best for the show. It seems Terra Nova and the Shannon family have fallen into this trap.

Lost took even longer than Terra Nova to really introduce the big mysteries but the viewer is hooked from minute one and they're not going anywhere. So why? Immediately we knew that most of these characters had real problems. They were criminals, drug addicts, or missing their husband but grasping to the belief that he was alive. Later on, romantic story lines kept viewers watching. Sawyer or Jack?! Juliet or Kate?! Who winds up with who?!? There was extreme intrigue from the get go and that's what Terra Nova is unfortunately missing. 

Yes, at the end of the episode the Sixers pop up and they've got their bartender mole who's now going to hire Josh. They hint at the manipulation of Josh's girlfriend. If they spend their time in the future turning her into a Sixer we could have some crazy possibilities on our hands. Maybe Josh joins the Sixers and it's Shannon family civil war! Is Malcolm a Sixer spy too? Maybe he'll kidnap Elizabeth!

An intriguing image from next week's episode: What Remains

Ok, those are extreme ideas but if the show do some extreme shaking up soon, even a sci-fi/dinosaur/television loving fool like myself might just start tuning out.

*Terra Nova airs on Fox at 8/7c. Photos are courtesy of terranova.wikia.com

Unedited Rant: I Don't Wanna Grow Up

Today, it's personal.

As I'm sitting at my desk plugging away on time wasting newsfeeds about the iPhone 4S, I couldn't help but overhear the banter coming from the cubicle over. Without going into specifics about who these people are or what they do, know this: the cubicle contains four 30s-40s women, some married, some not. Needless to say, I have some interesting conversations. Today's topic though, ticked me off just enough to blog about it.

I'm paraphrasing but the conversation went something like this:

Woman #1: Any man that's over 40 and single must have something wrong with him.
Woman #2: It's this town; it encourages the Peter Pan Syndrome. They just refuse to grow up.
Woman #1: Yeah, there are no real men in this town. 

This is the problem I have with dating and why we guys (and by we I'm mainly referring to the nerd crowd) find it so difficult to put ourselves out there. This wasn't a dumb, ignorable article in Cosmo, this was straight from the horse's mouth, pure eavesdropped truth. Yes, maybe not all women feel this way, and yes the idea is that I would never be able to be with someone that felt this way. I understand that but this is a belief that is fully out there, that loving the things that you loved as a kid somehow makes you less of a man.

I'll agree that Los Angeles does encourage us to keep living the dreams we had as kids but why is that a bad thing? Why should I not still love my comic books, video games and even kids movies?

So this just started another question turning. What exactly is it that makes a real man in their minds? According to them, there are no real men in LA. So okay, is a real man someone who swings an ax in the woods? Because I'll bet you can't find those in NY, Chicago or Miami either. Does that mean that anyone working in film & TV can't be a man because we chose a career that is essentially playing pretend on a large scale?


I decided a long time ago that I was no longer going to hide my nerdiness from the people I date but when I have to worry about people seeing me as a boy because I have some Captain America posters in my kitchen. Am I supposed to hide something that is not just something I do in my spare time but also in my professional life?


Well forget that ladies. I'm gonna keep playing pretend till the day I die and I'm going to keep my nerdy art. The fact that LA promotes the 'Peter Pan Syndrome' is a good thing. I want to stay young as long as I can, even if it's just at heart. A kid sees the world with wide eyes. With excitement. With a desire to explore. A belief that the world is ours for the taking, no matter what any grown up says.

I'll grow but I'll never grow up. It's just in the little ways that I show that I'm maturing... for example, now my Captain America posters are framed.

Webcomic Wednesday: The Ho Formula

Determine your 'Ho Factor':

H<0.01:    Truly chaste (or a dork).

0.02-.03:   You take sex very seriously.

0.4-0.9:     You could get out more but you've had a fair share of excitement for your age.

1-4:           You're not too wild, but you've been around the block a few times.

5-9:           Nothing wrong with playing the field... or the stadium      

10-14:       You should probably get yourself checked.

H>15:        A true embodiment of the manwhore/slutty lifestyle.

*The Ho Formula is for entertainment purposes only and The Kid in the Hat takes no responsibility if you or your loved ones are offended after scoring high on the ho scale...... skank.

Webcomic Wednesday: Job Hunting

For those who don't have some amazing super vision, you can either click the picture to read the text or read it below:

August 30th, 2011

The job hunt is tiresome. The wild openandwellpaidjob is rare and elusive, hiding among the jobyouwantbutisfilled or camouflaging itself as a winged unpaidinternship. One must approach the jobs with caution for if you think one might be within reach, it can vanish in an instant, leaving no hint of where it's gone.

I've heard spotty reports of mass gatherings of openandwellpaidjobs in certain places around the wide world. The jobs can be found posting themselves at these sites, as if waiting to be found. After exploring these options, I've concluded that there are simply so many hunters, one is lucky to even get a chance shot at the jobs.

But I continue stalking my prey, leaving baited resume traps and making job mating calls to draw the creature closer. My supplies should last me for the time being but the search for the openandwellpaidjob becomes more desperate by the day...

Webcomic: Poetic Umemployment

Occasionally words cannot contain the babbling going on inside my head so I'm going to throw in a webcomic every now and again. And so without further ado, my premiere attempt at the world of webcomics: Poetic Umemployment.

And hey, I'm new to this so if you've got thoughts, comments, criticisms... whatever. Please feel free to let me know in the comments!

Gravity is God and Albert Einstein was a Prophet

For as long as we've been around (roughly 5771 years), we've been asking the question: what is god? Now, I'm fairly confident in what I can say that god is not. God is not a dude in the sky with a white beard and a robe. God is not constantly watching us and judging us, putting us in a book under naughty or nice.

What I do feel that I know is that god is something that the human mind is incapable of comprehending. God is something beyond this plane of existence but peeking through into perceivable space. Confused yet? Just stay with me cause it makes more sense in a bit.

God is gravity. We are god. The planet is god. The same way that all of our cells somehow manage to work together and make us live, by some bizarre bit of chance, us being hear makes god "live". But just as those cells don't know how the whole body functions, we don't know everything about how the universe works. The mysteries of the universe: dark matter, black holes, gravity; these are the very definition of mystical forces.

Gravity is the force that binds everything together in the universe. Without gravity the galaxy doesn't stay together, the earth doesn’t orbit the sun, and we don't stay on Earth. Beyond this, gravity is at once the most simple of forces and the most complicated. It's easy to understand that an object falls to earth but understand the why, that's where we find god.

To completely understand the ins and outs of how the universe functions is such a lofty goal the comparison to understanding god is inevitable. Even if we understand every bit of gravity, where did the design come from? Why should the universe work that way? Why should we need air to live, or be limited to our small plot of dirt and water? It takes an amazing type of person to even begin to answer those questions. Perhaps even… a prophet.

I know, I know. Now I just sound crazy. A physics prophet but hold on there's room for them in my crazy theory. I'm not talking about Moses or Elijah. No, the prophets as I see it are people like Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein.

Every animal on earth understands on some level that when you drop an object it falls to earth. It's when man was able to think and ask the question why that we began to approach god. It was when the answers to questions like that were discovered that god was showing itself to people.

Now don't think that this is some Contact thing where god's going to show up as your deceased father. The way these "prophets" see god is that their mind takes a step forward in evolution. The mind of someone like Newton or Einstein has opened up to a new level of consciousness and seen a piece of the how the universe works in a way that no person had been able to see before.

A 2-D illustration of the spacetime curvature theory.

Einstein the best example. Until him, we'd understood the how of gravity. All objects have a gravitational pull, the bigger or more dense the object is, the more gravity it has. But why? Why should an object pull other things toward it just because it's larger and more dense? Einstein saw why, in short it was his theory of spacetime curvature. I won't get into describing it here except to say that it's like throwing a ball onto a sheet that has a weight in the center. The object goes towards the ball because the weight has created a well that the ball falls towards. (Wikipedia has a pretty nice beginner entry on spacetime for us scientist wannabes).

Einstein was the first to be able to see into this piece of the universe; this piece of god. Then, like a prophet does, he shared what he had learned with the rest of humanity, translating god into something we could comprehend. Compare it to the idea of Moses, translating the word of god into the Torah and the Ten Commandments. He translated god into morals that the Jewish people could understand.

That brings me to a final point. I'm Jewish. I don't consider myself an atheist or even an agnostic. Can I do this? I don't know. It's a bit of a crisis of faith for me honestly, but more so I believe in the morals I was raised on. The way I was raised, especially regarding religion, taught me to question everything and explore any theory, any possibility. My thinking and philosophizing brought me to this conclusion and I think that at the end of the day that’s what religion should preach above all us: question what you're told.

On researching this post I found a quote by Carl Sagan:

"The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by God one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity."

True, it's not fun to worship gravity itself. The laws of physics are significantly less dramatic than the laws of the Judeo-Christian god. Charlton Heston can attest to that. More than that though, a god that doesn't preside over us means that our lives are in our own hands and that is downright frightening.

If you know what this image is from... you win.

Sure, physics won't help us in a time of need and it won't smite wrongdoers, but what I don't agree with Mr. Sagan about is that this version of god is "emotionally unsatisfying". After all, what could be more magical than something completely and utterly unknown?

New Site Launch

UPDATE 8/16/11 (i.e Months Later...): I'm relaunching this blog. The launch will be complete with regular posts! At least that's the plan. On writing this I can't help but think of a particular xkcd comic.

Let's hope I keep it somewhat interesting. Happy reading y'all!