I might be willing to over look even the more serious breaches of common sense and science.
It's got people going back in time to live with dinosaurs. I'm not thinking this will be a case of hard sci-fi. Personally, I just hope for internal consistency (be consistent with your bullshit science) and have a decent explanation for most things. Frankly this looks no more implausible than Stargate.
but this is Fox here. If it doesn't start with and maintain amazing ratings, it won't last a full season.
That's my biggest concern. Fox has no tolerance for shows that don't hit it out of the park. If they don't explode in their first half season odds of them getting to finish it are slim, forget a second season.
and I thought about how bad the film version of the great novel Jurassic Park was.
The film of Jurassic Park was still a good movie. There was no way to translate one of Chricton's dense tomes directly to the silver screen without some major, major cuts.
Besides, the first time someone on the show calls a pterosaur or an ichthyosaur a "dinosaur," I'd have to stop immediately and go put a flaming bag of dog shit on some producer's door mat.
If someone who should know better does it I'll agree with you. If one of the civies does it that's allowable given the number of people who still think Brontosaurus is real and that the T-Rex drags its tail.
Someone on TVTropes put forth the idea that they're going back to dinosaur days in order to dodge a temporal paradox. That since all the dinosaurs will go extinct anyways they can do as they please without reprecussions so long as they don't screw with small mammals. I can live with this though there's still the logical issue that you can't know what setting up this outpost will do, you can't know what killing off dinosaurs, some of which preyed on the mammals could do, and so on. This wasn't so bad if you figured they might only go back 66 million years, give themselves a clean million years to work with but limit the potential impact on evolution as much as they can. 85 Million, for a good 20 million pre extinction sort of fucks that all up even worse. Not to mention is this just an outpost, time traveling rest stop, what? Because if this is a colony I can assure you, spreading out over a continent or even large area of it is really going to fuck with the way things would naturally develop. I'd be happier if they just said that every time you time travel you create an alternate reality so that you don't have to deal with paradoxes. That raises the issue then of why you'd pick a time period with 12 meter, 4 ton carnivores roaming around instead of 62 million years ago when the biggest land predator was the size of a cat.
