Did you ever consider that these might be hybrid brachiosaur-wombat mixes? Or do wombats have incisors??
-XT
Really? Argh, there’s always one out there. It wasn’t that good of a pilot show. PM me and I will buy and send you a paperback of Heinlein’s “Tunnel to the Sky”.
“in” even.
- 1 Quadrillion.
Can we set up some kind of remote telepresence kind of thing so my husband and I can watch it with you and your wife? 
I’m guessing it was Steven Spielberg and his penchant for ruining things with gratuitous moppets. The child being taken off for a good fatal gassing by Pop. Control makes a whole lot more sense than the mess of a story we actually got.
Thank you for putting words to a feeling I’ve had for quite a while now. I’ve read a LOT of sci fi in my life, and it has bothered me for a long time that the movies and tv shows that call themselves sci fi so rarely measure up to the books I read, and I don’t understand why.
[QUOTE=xtisme]
Did you ever consider that these might be hybrid brachiosaur-wombat mixes? Or do wombats have incisors??
[/QUOTE]
Sheesh, no one is going to point out that wombats are marsupials and not mammals?? This place is really going to the canis lupus familiaris…
-XT
Nope, but I will now point out that marsupials are mammals…
Exactly! Gods, I thought I was on the wrong message board for a while. 
-XT
I liked it. I know it has some (a lot) of issues with accuracy and it isn’t Hamlet, but it was fun and what the hell else am I going to do Monday nights, read a book?
One thing of course is that the catastrophic event which kills all the dinosaurs should still probably still happen, right?
Yes, in about 5 weeks as some here have predicted.
I’m a little vague on how not finding the probe “proves” it’s an alternate timeline.
All it proves is that they failed to find the probe. 85 million years is a lot of opportunity for it to be destroyed completely coincidentally. And then sending people afterward means they have the opportunity to destroy it intentionally.
And if they’re saving “the best and brightest” why is there a lottery? Are they trying the puppeteer experiment?
Assuming the show survives long enough, bets that the sixers turn out to be generically-religious fundamentalists?
Things I liked:
-the production design
-most of the premise
-the idea that in fact it is NOT a different timeline but people have been lied to (I’m skeptical that that’s actually going anywhere interesting, but it’s at least something new and thought-provoking)
Things I didn’t like:
-cliched family dynamics
-fairly bad CGI
-the boss of the entire society jumps into vehicles and puts himself in harms way on a moment’s notice for routine but dangerous operations. Sure.
Things that seem stupid so far but just possibly might not be:
-ambiguity about exactly how the portal works, is it open all the time, when do they send building material through, is communication 2-way, etc
-ambiguity about why they are interested in meteoric iron
Things that really bugged me, perhaps more than deserved:
-guns that do nothing to dinosaurs. C’mon, these aren’t magical godzillas or dragons, they’re just big reptiles. A machine gun will kill them dead dead dead very quickly, and leave big corpses with huge gouts of blood shooting out.
-the stupid scene after the sixers drive into the compound and everyone has guns on everyone. Not quite as ridiculous as the idiotic standoff in Mexico during season 4 of Big Love, but close. Oh, and that guy who just moments ago attempted to shoot our chief in the head with a gun? Sure, you can have him back just because.
I don’t think it actually does, I think that’s all a lie. That’s certainly strongly implied by the sixers at the end
I’m not sure we really know much about this one way or the other. When is it mentioned either that they’re saving the best and the brightest, OR that there’s a lottery? The only thing we know for sure (I think) is that (a) they have a limited number of slots, and (b) some of those slots are filled by people with skills that TN really needs (ie, doctors)
There might be an element of prescreening involved with the lottery. Or the majority of colonist could be recruited with only a few token lottery winners thrown in to satisfy the masses back in 2149.
Apparently, fusion power continues to elude us in 2149. That is depressing.
It’s complicated.
Does anyone know how to get a screen shot of the pterosaur? It just looked crazy wrong to me, but I don’t want to watch the whole damn show again, even in FF, just to find it.
I think it’s simply a case of too many cooks. To bring a multi million dollar production to the screen (big or small) requires investors and investors tend to want control over how their money is being spent. There’s a reason, I think, why the best stories seem to come from a solitary mind sitting in front of a keyboard. While I would love to see a colonization story ala Tunnel in the Sky, Red Mars or one of Niven’s Known Space stories, the reason these stories have such trouble getting to the screen is that the creators don’t want to give up control over their work and the people holding the purse strings always think they can improve the story. Look at what they did to I Robot for crying out loud.
Aww, I really enjoyed I Robot 
yes well i saw the lion king in 3d the night it premiered. I am going to watch it on demand on my cable!
Unfortunately, this is all I’ve been able to find. The pterosaur is visible just above the tree line at the lower boundary of the compound. And it does have a crazy bend in the left wing that doesn’t quite fit with a single, leading-edge finger support.
Next week, the TNers are supposed to get attacked by pterosaurs, so we’ll see if this was just a fluke, I guess.