And P: NW is back, vigorously, only not so much. With just
four (not counting this episode) eps left until the season’s finale,
“Breakthrough” has more in common with the pilot episode, rather than the
others.
Let us elaborate. The pilot episode of P: NW was a good
episode, but it suffered from a jerky, uneven script. “Breakthrough” suffers
from the same malaise, though perhaps it is elaborate, for the old team has been broken in the previous episode
(“Truth”). The fallout of Evan’s little breakdown is felt even now, for Ange is
missing, and Mac is undecided and has an existentialist crisis: how can he be
both alive and dead at the same time? Personally, I think that he should unfreeze
his dead self and touch it, to see what would happen, but that is not likely to
happen.
To make matters worse, as they are hunting for the dinosaur,
Evan and Dylan have to content with Evan’s old rival, sheriff Carter from
Eureka...I mean Colin Fergusson...I mean Howard Kanan...sorry about that.
Eureka was a great show, pity that it ended (albeit on a hook). Anyways, Howard
is not only the black sheep of the Carter family, he’s also Sheldon Cooper from
“Big Bang Theory”, though older, and without his loyal Leonard to keep himself
grounded, after Evan surpassed him in the photonics technology field. Oh well,
Sheldon never liked being upstaged by Leonard or anyone else either.
Unlike Sheldon, however, Howard has went one step further
and pulled a Helen, by actually going through a time anomaly with a time
detector that he had made, admittedly, but still... Considering that before
that he lived a hermit in his mansion and now will have to fare for himself in
the Cretaceous, dealing not just with tyrannosaurs, but also with the K-T
extinction, it is an open question as to whether or not he will make it there
or have a nervous breakdown and die. Still, Howard did provide a foil and a
personal opponent to Evan Cross, so I’m grateful to him even for that and hope
that he will return in a later episode or season (also because those one-episode
guest stars are getting annoying).
Even if Howard does not return, he already has done a lot:
Evan has finally started to think about his personal future and whether or not
his anti-dinosaur quest is beginning to cost him too much: it already cost him
Ange and Evan is naturally reluctant to bring a stranger into the fold into a
CFO position as well, while his secret project is fully underway. Cross
Photonics is not yet Stark Industries, it seems.
Dylan, meanwhile, tries to make Evan feel better by claiming
that he and the rest of his team (herself included) are making the world a
better place, by not killing the prehistoric animals but returning them to the
past. Sadly, there are problems with her speech.
First, Dylan rambles. It may have been intentional to the
plot, but also rather incoherent: a speech about protecting her family’s sheep
with barbed wire, but wolves were still caught in it... wha? Evan came into
this gig solely to avenge his wife and to prevent anyone else being killed by a
dinosaur or any other prehistoric animal, remember? Considering that several
times by now he and his team have failed, where and how does the sanctity of
life came to playing a role in this?
Mind you, it is a good thing that Evan did not say anything
to Dylan about this: the last thing he needs to do is to antagonize another
member of his team, with Ange already gone and Mac on the ropes. But honestly?
Dylan is rapidly becoming one of my least favorite characters of the show,
sadly. Her latest bon mot claiming that as an herbivore the Triceratops is harmless is just adding
insult to injury: think rhinoceros, which is one of the world’s deadliest
animals; or if the rhinoceros too foreign for Canada, think a moose cow,
protecting its calf from any threat, real or supposed, with hooves the size of
dining plate and really sharp, eh? But since Dylan, as part of her Predator
Control training, usually had to deal with carnivores, she had probably
forgotten about this...
The flowers for the Triceratops
are really just adding insult to injury: while flowering plants were becoming
widespread at the end of the Cretaceous, when this dinosaur did live, they were
still nowhere as prominent as in the modern times, so I doubt that the horned
dinosaur would have eaten them on a regular basis. But that’s just Dylan for
you, and the soldiers picking flowers from various front yards were just an
attempt at humor in the current episode, I reckon.
While Dylan had to deal with the military in person of Ken
Leeds, Toby also had to deal with the military – in person of his secretary.
That woman could be either purposefully obstructive or just obtuse, but either
way, she has become a communication obstacle between Leeds and the CP team that
Toby will have to deal with in the future.
Of course, this raises a question as to why would the
military initiate a conflict with Evan and CP – so far Evan was relatively
co-operative with Leeds and doesn’t appear to hold a particularly anti-military
stance, but Leeds’ superior, the unknown and unseen colonel, has taken a
dislike to Evan all the same, and Leeds is getting caught in the middle...
Finally, Mac came back to help Toby ‘put the dinosaur back
in the box’, quote unquote, so that is good. It is also nice to see him and
Toby getting along, since means that the team Moby is progressing smoothly (as
does team Devan, but lately I am starting to dislike Dylan a lot, as I said
above). The only thing that I feel commenting about is Mac’s disappearance act
at the end of the episode: military training or not, how did he vanish in the
blink of an eye? Did Helen Cutter give him sneaking lessons or something?
Other than that, however, the Toby-Mac interaction was the
smoothest part of “Breakthrough”, anything else was reminiscent of the scene
where Dylan is observing the Triceratops
with no other person in sight, and suddenly there’s a banging sound, rather
like a gunshot, and there’s still no action, no reaction from either Dylan or
the dinosaur. Otherwise the scene is great, but that strange sound ruins
everything and makes it disjointed.
So is the case with the bigger part of this episode: the
dinosaur was excellently done, both in CGI and as a dummy, the music was
appropriate to the end by further underlining the tension running throughout
this episode, but the plot itself was just too disjointed, especially by the
standards of the previous episodes and came short of being great.
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