Last night's episode, "Clean up..." was a very good episode, but it just wasn't up to the standards of the previous episodes. Regrettably, it is the fault of the dinosaurs, but we get more about it later.
The actors, for their part, did a good job of following the script, which made a nice transaction from "Undone". As I said before, deaths of Samantha and her partner created a rift in the CP team, and by now it hasn't fully healed yet. Mac, in particular, has attitude problems towards Evan and his "do not kill dinosaurs" rule, but he manages to come through at the end of this episode by not killing the dinosaur he set out to capture. Sadly, because the dinosaur was rather ridiculous and unrealistic, this action was rather undercut, and the broken door to the dressing room didn't help matters either. Mac's big moment was diminished.
On the other hand, Evan and Dylan continue to develop their relationship, which is much smoother than any seen on the original "Primeval". Sure, they are taking it slow (Dylan even had a part-time boyfriend before the beginning of this episode), but considering that in the original series many relationships just went nowhere, this is quite acceptable. This is only the first season, the good ship D/E will have many opportunities to sink or swim in the future.
As will the good ship A/K. If Mac appears to have somewhat recovered after the gorgonopsian episode in "Undone", and will remain on the CP team, Ange has had enough. She never particularly cared about the dinosaurs and mammal-like reptiles and so on, and she isn't submissive enough to go with Evan's flow, so she's leaving CP. Of course, after a talk with Dylan, Evan is trying to salvage his relationship with Ange, friendly and professional, with some Chinese take-out, but this is an IP show we're talking about, so Ange just may up and leave in the next episode and we'll never see her again, and the show will continue with someone named officer Allison Merryweather in the future without being diminished at all: the original "Primeval" had replaced characters throughout its entire course, and "Sinbad" (2012) had replaced its leading lady from Nala (Estella Daniels) to Tiger (Tuppence Middleton) without any detriment to her script.
Character-wise, of course, Ange is unlikely to quit the show, as her "not-a-relationship" with Ken Leeds demonstrates in this episode. It also reveals more insights into Ken's darker side: just like Evan, he had been in a leadership position where people have died, and we still don't know what he did with the juvenile terror bird from "Angry Birds".
And this brings us to the dinosaurs. Officially they're daemonosaurus, basal meat-eating dinosaurs from the late Triassic. In reality, with their chimpanzee-like intelligence, wolf-like social organization and piranha-like teeth, they're just as unrealistic as the beetles from "Fear of Flying". Yes, there were probably intelligent, social, meat-eating dinosaurs in the Mesozoic, but they lived in the Cretaceous, not in the Triassic. The Triassic dinosaur carnivores (like Coelophysis) probably weren't social, they were cannibals. Social hunters generally aren't cannibals; sure, they kill each other and their young, but they do not eat them, just make a point. Solitary carnivores, - i.e. weasels, ferrets, stoats, tigers - do. As a last resort in lean times, but they do, and so did the Triassic carnivorous dinosaurs. Thus, I doubt that they were social.
And I also doubt that they were particularly intelligent. Until the end of the Triassic, the scene was dominated by dicynodonts (Lystrosaurus, Placerias) and by basal archosaurs, called raisuchians (Postosuchus, Saurosuchus) that were big, but much smaller than such dinosaurs as Plateosaurus. Daemonosaurus simply didn't need to be smarter than an average squirrel: it would probably survive anyways.
So: good script, good acting, but completely unrealistic dinosaurs. I seriously hope that the future episodes of P:NW will avoid this mistake.
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