TV GUIDE: Critic's Guide to the Week in TV: Finales, Musical and Comedy Divas, and More!
Dec 19, 2011
by Matt Roush
'Twas the week before Christmas, and I can't remember when so much was stirring on TV this late into the year. Here are some highlights from an unusually busy pre-Christmas week...
... DINO-MIGHT? The biggest cliffhanger regarding the two-hour finale of Fox's time-tripping family sci-fi drama Terra Nova (8/7c) isn't so much what happens on the show, which is fairly standard action-adventure mayhem, but whether it will return for a second season next year. (That decision should be made fairly early in 2012.) If you can accept the fact that this lavishly produced exercise in escapist corn has more of the feel of an old-fashioned comic book than a newfangled graphic novel, it's not that hard to enjoy the melodrama. The finale gets off to a strong start when an invading mercenary army from 2149, acting on orders of the greedily rapacious Phoenix Group, explosively interrupts the arrival of the 11th Pilgrimage. Sheriff Jim Shannon (Jason O'Mara) is violently sidelined in the skirmish, and wakes days later to a disorienting tableau of military occupation. With Commander Taylor (Stephen Lang) MIA in the wilderness, Jim plays resistance leader from the inside, but eventually the entire Shannon family has to go into hiding, resembling the Von Trapps at the end of The Sound of Music. And at times, it's just as schmaltzy. It's not much of a spoiler alert to report that the Shannon kids, who make Cindy Lou Who look edgy, are never in any real danger. Except perhaps of a saccharine OD.
The villains, meanwhile, are cartoonishly garish, starting with Taylor's psychotically vengeful physicist son Lucas (Ashley Zuckerman). When Lucas boasts to a tool named Weaver, the most odious of the Phoenix leaders, that they could strip half of this unspoiled continent of its natural resources in six months, Weaver actually cackles, "That's what I like to hear. ... Be one hell of a barbecue down here." Oh, Weaver, you're asking for it. In the course of the action, the source of Lucas' patricidal enmity is revealed, and Jim executes a drastic plan to stop Phoenix that will change the colony's and the series' future, if there is one. And should Fox decide Terra Nova is too costly an enterprise with too little return to keep going, there's just enough closure in this finale to keep the fans from going too T-Rex...
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