I am hooked onto Downton Abbey. I have been looking around for a good period film and was thinking to myself that we have had nothing since Gosford Park. By sheer coincidence, the writer of Gosford Park - Julian Fellowes - is the creator of Downton Abbey.

This is the story of a fictitious Earl and his family who live at the estate of Downton Abbey. The story opens in 1912, the day after the sinking of the Titanic. The first season ends with declaration of war and the start of World War I.

Season Two runs through the years of WWI and with 2 episodes to go, I assume will end in 1918.

The sets and production values are worthy of any big budget film. The acting is top class, with a raft of fresh new faces (new to non-British viewers, at least), anchored by Hugh Bonneville as the Earl of Grantham. International audiences may remember Hugh Bonneville as the good natured stockbroker Bernie from the Hugh Grant-Julia Roberts movie "Notting Hill".

I have to admit, with the follow-up episode (numbered 3, since the pilot was two back-to-back episodes), Terra Nova seems to have found its feet. 

It was nice to see the family behaving as one unit, rather than squabbling the way they were in the pilot. 

This episode was structured more like a stand-alone story, with an external threat in the form of the migratory pterosaurs that wreak havoc on the colony, until Dr. Shannon along with a colleague helps to find a solution.

Said colleague turns out to be an old flame, and obviously, this sets the foundation for some future conflict between Jim Shannon and Dr. Shannon.

Looking forward to episode 4.

Hmmm, a bit of a mixed bag. 

Unfortunately, good special effects are no longer enough to get an audience to like a show. So, the scenes of a future earth covered by haze, or of the Terra Nova station set 85 million years in the past are taken for granted. Especially, when we've all been told that Steven Speilberg is the executive producer.

The characters, at the moment, seem a bit two-dimensional. Commander Nathaniel Taylor (played by Stephen Lang) looks like he's in a repeat of his Avatar role. The Shannon family look like they have stepped out of a daytime soap...they have surprisingly good skin tone for a family that has been living in an ultra-polluted environment...and father Jim Shannon looks in great shape for a guy who has spent 5 years in a maximum security prison without a breather mask. So much attention to the special effects, so little attention to these basic plot points. Even the entire manner of their inclusion in the 10th pilgrimage to Terra Nova was unbelievable.

I have to admit, that the pilot did deliver on thrills and action. The dinosaurs are not as well rendered as in a proper feature film, but the producers cleverly manage that by not putting them on screen for too long or in full-on shots. However, the editing and the sound makes up for all that. The night-time slasher attack was particularly gripping.

I felt the other Spielberg TV production "Falling Skies" did a much better job of character development...clearly Robert Rodat, the creator of Falling Skies has far superior screen writing chops than the guys writing Terra Nova (Rodat wrote Saving Private Ryan...'nuff said).


Of course, all these complaints are not going to stop me from watching every episode of the show. Science fiction, dinosaurs, Stephen Lang, Steven Spielberg - all good enough to compensate bad scripts and irritating, ridiculously good looking characters.