[SPOILERS] A good attempt to shake things up, but episode six quickly turned silly and repetitive. We began in media res, with Danny (Jason Flemyng), Connor (Andrew-Lee Potts), Sarah (Laila Rouass) and Abby (Hannah Spearitt) all dressed in '30s-style eveningwear, stuck in the middle of a forest being chased by Phorusrhacids (a.k.a, "terror birds", a.k.a those things from Roland Emmerich's 10,000 B.C), before we zip back in time to see how we arrived at that point...At the ARC, Danny's on a wire doing a Tom Cruise impression from Mission: Impossible, testing the ARC's security for Becker (Ben Mansfield), just as Connor and Sarah manage to activate The Artifact, which spits out a three-dimensional display that assumedly predicts anomalies. Civil servant Christine Johnson (Belinda Stewart-Wilson) notices their breakthrough from her nearby high-rise building, so sends her team into ARC to takeover Lester's (Ben Miller) operation. Fortunately, the ARC team are alerted to her arrival, so most escape to a nearby "safe house" in the woods -– a few abandoned cabins from the 1930s, full of antiquated equipment. And, wouldn't you know it, it's at that exact moment an anomaly opens in an ancillary building's basement and releases a ravenous group of "terror birds"...
The problem facing Primeval is how to avoid simply retelling the same story, with new creatures, week after week. The first season suffered enormously from that problem, season 2 managed to weave in a mytharc to keep things a bit more interesting, and now season 3 is beginning to get slightly more creative with the plots. I just wish it all made any real sense! I'm still confused about exactly why Christine is a villain; we know she's Lester's boss and is aware of the ARC, so why does she swoop in to steal The Artifact? Isn't she on their side? If she does have her own agenda that isn't compatible with what ARC are doing, we need to be told about that. It just felt too arbitrary having her rush into ARC and assume command from Lester. She's shown her hand too blatantly. As a superior, couldn't she get access to ARC anytime she wanted and just order them to give her The Artifact?
The idea of putting the characters in a wood was also a little strained. Maybe I missed something (as I'll confess I left the room for a few minutes for the little boy's room), but why exactly were two dilapidated huts from WWII considered "safe houses"? And why did everyone suddenly decide to dress up in '30s-era clothing? Don't they have more pressing concerns?! What was their long-term plan, exactly? Live there like hermits forever, surviving on decades-old canned corned beef? Sure, we have to suspend our disbelief that another anomaly would appear where they'd decide to run to, as that's the nature of the show, but together with everything else going on in this episode... that just compounded this episode's silly feel.
But, ignoring all that, I guess it was mild fun seeing everyone run around the woods being chased by giant ostriches. Paul Farrell's story certainly went through the checklist of things to do in that situation: a Jurassic Park-style car chase, catching one of the birds with a wire snare, having Danny suspended from a phone cable between trees with birds leaping up at him from below, hitting the birds with wine bottles flung from a clay-pigeon launcher, luring the killer birds into a minefield(!), etc. It was a shame the budget didn't seem to stretch far enough, though -- with too many shots relying on actor reactions, or just CGI beaks jutting through windows. The direction by Cilla Ware tried to make everything hang together, but it got too incoherent at times, then became rather tiresome. You can put up with 10-minutes of watching people get attacked by monsters, but this episode stretched it out to nearly half the episode!
Back at the ARC, Christine got to trot around, sneer, and take stereotypical delight in sitting at Lester's desk. What is it with Primeval and evil women, incidentally? Like I said, because Christine's intentions are so incredibly vague (we only know she wants The Artifact, like Helen Cutter does), it was difficult to care about anything going on. You need to feel that the good guys are under threat when the villain's around, but I was really just hoping Lester would ask Christine what her game is. Someone needs to!
Overall; okay, you certainly got your action fix if that's why you watch Primeval. And I know most people do. If you just want CGI and people running around being chased by creatures, you can't go wrong. But, if you're quickly bored unless there's the semblance of a coherent story behind it, and characters that make sensible decisions, I found this to be quite lacking. It felt like a rather awkward way to get the characters into old-fashioned clothes to run around the woods avoiding CGI. I kept hoping for some clever reason behind the abandoned cabins (a proto-ARC facility, perhaps?), or why the anomaly had appeared there... but nothing came. And the fuzziness over Christine's motivation meant the ARC-based subplot was just a means to punctuate the story for a breather, and lacked the big developments I was holding out for.
And the less said about the scenes where flying lizard Rex was lost as part of a poker game with Abby's younger brother, the better. Or the unwise decision to set Christine's comeuppance to "Somewhere Over The Rainbow", a music choice that just reminds you of Life On Mars' finale.
2 May 2009
ITV1, 7.20pm
Writer: Paul Farrell
Director: Cilla Ware
Cast: Jason Flemyng (Danny), Andrew-Lee Potts (Connor), Hannah Spearitt (Abby), Ben Miller (Lester), Ben Mansfield (Becker), Laila Rouass (Sarah), Belinda Stewart-Wilson (Christine Johnson), Robert Lowe (Jack Maitland), Jack Gordon (Tony) & Michael Wildman (Captain Ross)
