I was finally able to watch this episode last night, and it's much worse than I thought.
It turns out that the oddities in the technology were not there simply because they didn't think these things through, or didn't have the right experts on hand, or whatever. Instead, the deficiencies were deliberately placed because the writers knew the problems they wanted the characters to solve, they knew how they wanted them to be solved, and they broke the technology accordingly.
Take the incident with the door: Electronic locks are designed to fail-safe, in the event of a power loss. This almost always means that they will automatically unlock, to allow for evacuation. The exception to this is if there is an overriding concern for security.
So, fair enough. It seems really odd that The Eye, of all places, would have such an overriding need for security, but let's assume it does.
Of course, it's also really odd that The Eye would be partly shielded against EMP - the storage system is shielded, some of the lights are shielded, but the door lock isn't?
Anyway, fair enough, they've decided that the lock should fail-safe in a locked position. I can just about buy that. But that means there will need to be a manual override. Now, the show provides that... but only on the outside of the door.
What this means is that any need for security exists to prevent someone locked in the Eye from getting out, but not to prevent someone breaking in. So, what, are they using their ultra-important, shielded data-store as a makeshift prison?
But the real kicker was the access passage to get out of the Eye to get to the manual override. This seems fair enough... until you consider that it was built so as to be useable by the only small child we've seen in the colony. Meaning they considered the possibility that said child might get locked in there, but not the possibility that someone else might. Bizarre.
The other situations were equivalently silly. The worst was probably the incident where a delicate (if ridiculous) medical procedure was placed in the hands of an untrained and very scared girl.
But the weapons... obviously, the writers decided it would be cool to have them ward off the dinosaur using fire, and of course our heroes would miraculously have the ability to fire a bow with pinpoint accuracy, over a high barrier, and in the dark! But to get to that point they needed the weapons to not be shielded against EMP in defiance of all reason, and even in defiance of the prior experience of key characters in the show!
The scene I really wish they had had was the one where Taylor takes the broken chip to their resident IT guy (they must have one - there's no way those computer systems just work without them), who proceeds to point out to the just how stupid it is to have your backup chips in the non-shielded section of the base, when a nice, shielded location is easily available.
Still, it's not like they could possibly have predicted meteor activity, in their colony build back before the dinosaurs were all wiped out by a giant meteor...
I promised myself I would stick Terra Nova out for the season, since it was only 13 episodes, was almost certain to be cancelled, and because there's virtually nothing else on. But every episode seems to be a new insult to my intelligence.
The one redeeming feature: the dialogue in their "meadow picnic" was so incredibly awful and clumsy that is makes "Attack of the Clones" look so much better in comparison. If they keep this up, I may even reach a point where I can forgive Jar Jar. Yippee!
