Terra Nova (TV series)

Terra Nova is an American science fiction drama television series created by Kelly Marcel and Craig Silverstein. It aired on the Fox Network for one season from September 26 to December 19, 2011. The series documents the Shannon family's experiences as they establish themselves as members of a colony, set up 85 million years in the Earth's past, fleeing the dystopian overpopulated and hyper-polluted present of the mid-22nd century. On March 5, 2012, Fox announced that the show had been cancelled.

Plot

The series is initially set in 2149, when overpopulation and declining air quality threaten all life on Earth. When scientists discover a temporal rift permitting (one-way) human transmission, they initiate a series of "pilgrimages" to a parallel "time stream" resembling Earth's Cretaceous Period. The series focuses primarily on police officer James "Jim" Shannon, his wife Elisabeth, and their three children Josh, Maddy, and Zoe, as they join the colony there, named "Terra Nova", Latin for "New Earth", "New World" or "New Land".

Elisabeth Shannon is chosen to join Terra Nova for her medical expertise, and her two older children with her. Her husband, imprisoned for violating population control by harboring a third child and assaulting an official agent to protect his young daughter, stows away to join them and eventually convinces the colony's leader, Commander Nathaniel Taylor, that his own police expertise is of use to the administration.

Opposing the colony (and its leader Taylor) is a group of separatists known as the "Sixers", so-called because they arrived in the "Sixth Pilgrimage", working in concert with corporate industrialists to strip the Cretaceous Earth of its resources and transmit them to 2149, allowing for massive profits at the cost of environmental destruction.