Reply #16: Came across this review, and can't argue with it.

[Abin Sur]

http://www.stripersonline.com/t/819124/so-i-watched-the-new-dinosaur-series-terra-nova

In the two hour pilot the settlers are menaced by several Allosaurs and a pack of vicious Raptor-like creatures called "Slashers". A few people are killed and eaten. The settlers respond by unloading zillions of bullets at the monsters from a variety of guns, yet never actually manage to kill one. In fact, the only effective weapon they have turns out to be non-lethal thingies that shoot pulses of green something-or-other which appears to hurt so much that the Dinos retreat.

Now just pretend for a moment you're a settler. You've come to build a life in a new land. This land is full of monsters and you discover none of the guns they have actually - you know - work. Worse still, the land available to you to settle is one big walled compound only. You can't got out to even take a leak without risking becoming something's lunch. So no homestead or farm for you. Might you not be a bit disgruntled? Don't you think somebody might stand up at a meeting and say something about that? Something like:

"Yeah, hi everybody I'm The Hairy Beast, from the newest wave of settlers. Nice to meet you all. I been looking around all last week and I have a couple of questions. First, why don't we get some guns that work? Remember last week when the two Allosaurs ate my son Phil outside the gate? We unloaded a ton of bullets at it and nothing happened. Well, except that my son Phil got eaten. I'm thinking that if we had guns that could actually kill an Allosaur, maybe Phil would still be around. Why don;t we work on that? And second, why are there Allosaurs in this area in the first place? They're apex predators, after all, there can't be that many around. If we got some guns that work we could go out and prune em back so it'd be safe to leave the compound, right? And those armored jeeps we got don't seem very safe, why not ask the home base to send us a few helicopters? Allosaurs are too big to hide from Helos, and they can't eat em either, so we could fly em around and pop off all the Allosaurs in the area pretty easy. Aren't we supposed to be settlers? Don't settlers settle? Packing ourselves into a walled compound while we allow dinosaurs to roam around free doesn't seem like a growth enterprise to me."

They started this story with a line uttered by the Terra Nova boss: "We're not going to repeat the mistakes of our old world in this one." Apparently defending yourself and your family from things that want to kill you is a mistake - at least in Hollywood.