And then in a later episode someone asks Jim why he and Liz had a third child, and he replies "It seemed like a good idea at the time." ...What? How could that possibly seem like a good idea? Were you out of condoms? Do you have some deep-seated psychological garbage pressing you to put yourself and your family in constant danger? What was it?
China is one of the most regimented countries on earth. Most of it's citizens are reared to think of the group before themselves.
Yet not even this country could hold it's citizens to the "two child" rule.
And you're surprised that an American would defy such a rule?
...You may have a point, but don't a lot of rural chinese have limited/no access to contraceptives?
And as an aside, I wonder if the hard-enforced two-child limit plays into reverse psychology. I don't know exactly how China enforces its law, or if there are any countries that merely have incentives for parents who stop at two children, but I wonder if that would work better.
Well said! I expected the show to be grittier -- in particular I kept expecting Commander Taylor to reveal himself as an evil military mastermind villain. (Thanks, Avatar!) Oh well, no show is perfect.The show was changed a great deal from the original pilot to the product that saw air. Taylor actually was a villain in the original version, Mira was a spy working against him, Jim gets recruited to her cause.
Echoes of this plot really reverberate in the final cut; right up until the last few episodes, I expected Taylor to be in cahoots with the 2149 plot to "Control the past, control the future" and for Jim to realize that the sixers were actually the good guys.
There were a lot of other differences too, Josh was much less emo, he didn't have a girlfriend back in the future that he was pining after and there's a whole plot with him joining a hunter's guild that goes after dinosaurs for meat. The youngest daughter hadn't been found out in the past (she was living with Jim's sister as one of her kids) and there was no prison break plot.
Oh that reminds me, what ever happened to Josh's girlfriend?! She gets thru the time portal, then everything goes to hell, and then I don't remember her appearing or being mentioned again...
It was a bad idea poorly executed.
It was executed poorly (almost entirely on the writing, as most of the actors were fine), but I don't see anything wrong the basic idea behind the series.
Establishing a colony on an "alien" world to establish an escape from a dying planet, and dealing with the "alien" monsters there is a pretty basic sci-fi premise.
