Oops, we definitely know the reasons why you want to watch Terra Nova. It’s because of Stephen Lang or the dinosaurs. It’s one lame TV series that’s hard to keep, for some, but definitely, it’s worth a try. And that’s depressing when you consider that the Steven Spielberg-produced science fiction series is the most expensive show on TV right now, and that it’s still considered one long shot for renewal even though more worthy network shows — including NBC’s “Community” and ABC’s “Pan Am” — have effectively been canceled. Don’t go now, and see Terra Nova Season 1 Episode 11: Within on December 7, 2011.

 For the latest episode, everything was rock solid and definitely surprising, but the upcoming eight episodes into the series, it’s meager compensation for viewer loyalty.

 Lang’s character for instance, Commander Taylor, who is the first explorer to get in to the time warp that provide an avenue of escape from a totally polluted Earth in order to breed on a virgin, unspoiled, unadulterated prehistoric version of their own world

— finally confirmed what viewers suspected and hoped: that he’s not such a great guy after all. (Of course he isn’t! Why cast the frequently chilling Lang in an unambiguous nice-guy role?) We learned that, like so many colonies throughout real Earth history, Terra Nova is founded on a lie and a crime. That it’s a well-meaning lie and a desperate crime doesn’t mitigate the feeling that Taylor is one dark hombre, and that the Terra Novans’ enemies, a splinter group known as The Sixers, are less an evil force than principled opposition. (I love how they communicate with a spy within the Terra Nova camp via a big dragonfly outfitted with a data chip; here and elsewhere, the series displays a knack for showing you things you’ve never seen before, anywhere.)

It seems that a few years after Taylor stepped through the portal, a legendary general who’s now listed as “disappeared” showed up aiming to relieve Taylor of his command. The general told Taylor that a team of scientists headed by Taylor’s brilliant son Lucas were trying to make the time portal work both ways — an innovation that would allow the inhabitants of polluted Earth strip Terra Nova-Earth of its resources. The general drew his gun, but Taylor drew faster and killed him and buried his body then wrote his son Lucas off as a traitor and banished him to wander the prehistoric jungle. Said jungle is currently festooned with chalk-scrawled scientific blueprints of the two-way time tunnel that Lucas’ dad prevented him from finishing. See him and more in Terra Nova Season 1 Episode 11: Within on December 7, 2011.