[SPOILERS] Only Primeval could deliver an episode that involved imaginative use of its temporal anomalies, then completely drop the ball. This seventh episode is pure filler, but it could have been so much more than the meandering, badly-acted dross that wasted an hour of my life...Here, an anomaly opens in a breaker's yard, relinquishing a Cretaceous-era Dracorex. However, there's an added twist (long overdue for a series involving portals to the past and future) when a Knight (Tony Curran) follows the creature through on horseback. The scene is set for a typical monster-hunt episode, stitched to Les Visiteurs-style comedy as the perplexed Knight trots around 21st-century London believing he's in Hell. The episode even makes use of Sarah (Laila Rouass) for once, although she rather oddly decides to buy a medieval costume and hop through the yard's anomaly to visit Ye Olde England and investigate the Knight's identity...
There were some good ideas here, but all were poorly executed. Truly, this was a stinker considering the potential. The most frustrating thing was how I had a parallel adventure running in my own head that was more enjoyable than anything writer Andrew Rattenbury came up with. So, the Knight hacked at a motorbike, stared at himself in a shop window television, visited a medieval theme pub to attack a burly man with '666' tattooed on his neck, and inevitably wouldn't believe Danny (Jason Flemyng) and Connor's (Andrew-Lee Potts) explanation for this strange world, believing them to be deceitful "demons".
The Dracorex itself was out of action once Abby (Hannah Spearritt) and Becker (Ben Mansfield) incapacitate it at a strawberry field, and Abby took the time to tend to a spear wound the creature had suffered. Any chance of a fun subplot for Sarah in the past didn't come to fruition either, as she just found the nearest peasant child, plied him with chocolate, and got some background information on the Knight -– real name Sir William DeMornay.
Oh, and last week's half-baked subplot about Abby's idiot brother Jack (Robert Lowe) unwisely continued, as Connor discovered Abby's treasured lizard Rex had been lost in a poker game and is now being sold on Ebay. Supposedly intended as comic relief (wrongly believing the knight vs. dragon story was conversely hardhitting drama?), this was a means to plug five minutes, spread thinly across the hour.
There's not much more to say, without randomly selecting a scene to highlight how uninteresting, clichéd, or poorly-acted it was. Some choice horrors: Sarah in the changing room trying on fancy dress like a Sex & The City deleted scene, Sarah sharing chocolate with the peasant kid to earn his trust, the magical appearance of a street carnival, Becker's action-hero dive through crates of fruit, Abby disabling a hardened knight with her patented roundhouse kicks, the glib climax of the Knight discovering his own grave, and the fact that breaker's yard employee got back to work seconds after seeing a dragon emerge from a twinkling timehole...
Overall, episode 7 was mostly terrible and wasted the handful of good ideas I've been waiting for Primeval to exploit for a very long time. How can you mess up the idea of a dragon-slaying knight arriving in 2009, and a trip into history for a main character? Well, here's how. The last time Jason Flemyng and Tony Curran appeared together on-screen, it was for the heinous League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, so I guess that was an omen we should never have ignored.
9 May 2009
ITV1, 7.15pm
Writer: Andrew Rattenbury
Director: Richard Curson Smith
Cast: Jason Flemyng (Danny), Andrew-Lee Potts (Connor), Hannah Spearritt (Abby), Ben Miller (Lester), Ben Mansfield (Becker), Laila Rouass (Sarah), Robert Lowe (Jack), Tony Curran (Knight), Jack Gordon (Tony), Jordan Long (Jimmy The Barman), Brad Damon (Mike), Rebecca Calder (Elizabeth), Patrick Romer (Priest) & Jamie Glover (Village Boy)
