Last night's episode of P:NW was great, though I still liked "Sisiutl" better, and here is why.
It all began with the "beetles". When it came to insects, "Primeval" had the following:
- S3 had the "megaopteran", a giant insect from the future that laid its offspring into other creatures like the modern parasitic wasps do, but had supposedly descended from the tiger beetle.
- S5, on the other hand, had a giant burrowing blind insect that ate people and a much smaller species that looked vaguely like the modern rowe beetle, whose queen was larger than an average member of the swarm, and who also ate people.
- Now we have a beetle that lays its eggs into other creatures like the "megaopteran" did, who is blind and lives partially underground, as the giant burrowing insect did, and who lives in swarms and has a bigger than the average member queen as that other future insect did. In other words, this beetle is a mixture of the previous three insects, all of which were from the future, and only one of which was recognized as a beetle, actually.
This is the reason why I have problems with the last night's animal: it is not from the past, whatever the official page says, it is from the future. The Jurassic no longer had high enough oxygen levels to allow insects to reach almost 2.5 m in length as the queen beetle did and so, well, you get it? P:NW may not be a documentary, of course, but it is still realistic and scientifically accurate enough to know that insects of this size belong in the future, not in the past (not counting the Carboniferous, but the beetles didn't exist back then, actually).
Frankly, I don't know why P:NW had to claim that those were Jurassic beetles, when they could've as easily been from the future and their role in being this episode's antagonist wouldn't have changed one bit.
After the beetles come the people, and I got to confess the actors really carried this episode through. The plot itself, I confess, appeared to have suffered from a too-large 'red herring' - the plane. Evan and Dylan spent almost the entire episode 'cannibalizing' it in order to make it fliable again and in the end had to give it up, as the last of the pilots died. Got to admit - the demise of Joe and Caitlynn (the pilots) had been two of the most heart-rendering moments in the episode: the original series tended to rescue people outside of the main cast (for the moment) that went through a time anomaly; P:NW apparently decided to change all that - and I got to admit that that had worked. Whatever else, "Fear of Flying" had been a very tense, dramatic episode and the actual defeat of the characters by the prehistoric vermin made it even more poignant. (And the fact that the time anomaly remained open at the episode's end does not promise anything good, either.)
Speaking of the characters and the cast, this episode also introduced Susan, Mac's new girlfriend and a fellow action junkie. Got to admit, I'm not sure what to think of her. On one hand, judging by the "Primeval" experience, any girlfriends & boyfriends from "aside" usually proved to be evil, but on the other hand that may not be the case here, and she appears to be as competent as Mac is when it comes to hunting chronologically displaced animals and insects. So, I'm holding my judgement on her until the later episodes.
So: insect chimeras that never existed (and couldn't exist), many dramatic and drastic turns and twists of the plot, a major relationship development between Evan and Dylan (Niall and Sara), and we get to see Toby (Crystal) in her bra and knickers at the beginning of the episode. This makes this episode a definite success, as far I as can tell.
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