P:NW "The Sound of Thunder, Pt 2" Feb 19

So, let us talk about “The Sound of Thunder, Part 2”. This episode has introduced new plot developments to the show, so let us talk about them first.

As it was said on P:NW’s Facebook page, the finale’s name was derived from Ray Bradbury’s short story with the same name, where a time traveling hunter, after stepping onto a butterfly, changed the entire history – for the worse. Since then, this idea has been used at least once, in 2005, in a film vaguely based on the same concept, and also in 2007, at the end of the first season of original “Primeval”. This concept states that messing with the past is always bad and should not be used.

Unfortunately, the delivery of this idea by the P:NW somehow fell somewhat short; in fact, the entire conveyance of “The Sound of Thunder Part 2” fell short. Two weeks ago, in “The Inquisition”, the actors took Jon Cooksey’s script and managed to ham it up, especially Sara Canning (Dylan Weir); here, they went the other way, and not just them, but Gillian Horvath and Katherine Collins (the scriptwriters) as well.

Messing with the time, i.e. with the past, is bad and leads to untold or unimaginable problems? Perhaps, but somehow the actual reasons delivered by Evan and Connor were less grandiose and more personal: Connor just wants to get back to his wife (Abby, I hope) and not lose her, Evan just does not want to die and disappear up the Albertosaurus’ gut; project Magnet may be able to save the people killed by the dinosaurs and co. from the pilot episode onwards, but Evan would not be around...

No, I am not saying that Evan should have died – he is the main character of the show, but frankly his line of reasoning was weak, especially since he failed to save a lot of people, starting with his friend Drake in the pilot, ending with Mac in the season finale, and over a dozen people in-between, that is all.

On the other hand, he does kill the Albertosaurus, after it apparently killed his wife and Mac (again) and that changes something in the time line...thus nullifying all of the song and dance that was done to ensure that the dinosaur does go back in time and kills all of the right people. That, in turn, makes all of the episode’s lines about the non-violation of the past seem not even hypocritical, but pointless. (And considering that ever since “The Inquisition” Evan’s team was worried that Hall’s people were going to change the past, this is also dramatically ironic, in a moronic way, though.)

As for the other characters, well, Connor got married. Congratulations. I am sure that he and Abby are going to be even happier together now that they got together at last, but... he knew that Evan and the other Canucks were either messing with the time travel technology or had problems with time anomalies of their own and just went back to England and did nothing? What the f*ck was he thinking – the ARC job is to constraint the time anomalies and ensure that the time anomaly situation doesn’t get out of hand, so to ignore the situation in Canada is nothing short of criminal. Both Connor and Lester should be sacked for letting it get that intense and not contacting either Evan’s team or project Magnet to establish damage control. This is criminal negligence, period, and Connor really should not have been so smug, when he told Ange that it was he, who introduced Evan to this whole thou shall not kill prehistoric animals’ philosophy – he was lucky that Evan is an easily influenced guy.

No, seriously, Evan is. He accepted Connor’s policy about the dinosaurs after one brief talk with him, he accepted Dylan’s Greenpeace-like opinion without an argument, and I honestly do not know why he was able to resist colonel Hall so well. Maybe because the good colonel challenged Evan’s alpha male status? I have no idea...

Speaking of males, Leeds’ character has developed little in this episode: he was shown as a take charge and an intelligent man (maybe that is why Evan had problems with him since the beginning), while Toby is actually alive. Yay for Toby, she really had us worried.

But Mac is dead. Boo. And he had not told Evan about any of his and Toby’s ARC related discoveries or about his conversation with Connor (really bland and pointless, if you ask me). I seriously hope that Toby will fill the blanks for Evan and the others, or this plot thread will a) bite them all in the ass; or b) vanish completely, making the audience wonder why was it so important that Mac worked in the ARC in the original timeline.

As for character development – well, Mac clearly was a tragic hero of this season: nothing, not even Toby, appeared to be going his way ever since Samantha died in “Undone”, just as he was about to take things with her to a new level, plus he already had to help his friends to bury himself. I seriously hope that he will not be forgotten in the next season or so, as captain Ryan, Nick and Stephen had been in the original series, eh?

Toby, incidentally, has changed little in this episode, and neither has Ange. Maybe she has done the right thing, by having Connor and his friend (Kieran, was it?) go back to London via the time anomaly express, but for all that we know, this could have been rendered pointless by Evan killing the dinosaur, so I honestly cannot say that either, she, Leeds, Toby or Dylan have changed much. Dylan, in particular, did little other than demonstrate her field experience and her fiery temper; and also she had saved Leeds from the Albertosaurus – this will probably be important in the next season of P:NW (if there will be one).

So: Evan had his reckoning, Connor became thoroughly OOC, Mac is dead, Toby is not and the other characters have remained as they were. Plus the season ended on an open note. A fitting end for the first season of a show that had plenty of both ups and downs.

P:NW, ep 1x01 - Oct 29

Last night I watched the first episode of Primeval: New World and so far I am of a more or less ambiguous attitude towards it.

First, the good. The technology/CGI side of the show was done very well, as always. IP always knew how to create realistic images of prehistoric/imaginary beasts, etc. As computer creations, the dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and anything else that the new team will encounter will be top notch.

The team itself, however, is something else. Basically, P:NW scriptwriters took the concept of the last season of "Primeval" – a six-person team and run with it. Connor Temple, the only character of the previous show to appear on P:NW up-to-date may be taking the role of Lester, or perhaps a senior team member who'll keep all the youngsters in check. And speaking of Connor, I admit that he has grown noticeably more competent than before and also sneakier – I'm not so sure that I like it. He also may be the ARC agent who had saved Evan from a dinosaur attack in the past, dying in the process, but until there is more information about that event, I'm not drawing any specific conclusions.

What about the new characters? As I said before, they have begun to form a 6-person team, just as in the last season of "Primeval", and Evan Cross, in particular, appears to be a younger version of Philip from the last season of "Primeval" as well, or at least that's how Connor sees him. In reality, Evan is probably more like Tony Stark (aka the Iron Man of Marvel comics©), an eccentric millionaire/inventor, who is also a superhero and a man of action. Just like so many other comic heroes, he is driven by his past, when a carnivorous dinosaur ate his wife when Evan and her snuck into a building and found a time anomaly. (More about the dinosaur later.)

If Evan is Tony, then Angelika Finch is Pepper Potts: she's the CFO of Evan's company, and is somewhat of a big sister to him, too: she keeps Evan grounded when he appears to be carried away – just as Pepper did with Tony, though with a slightly higher level of success. When in the beginning of the premier Evan tries to use Mac Randall to get away from a meeting with Angelika (Ange) – that was definitely a sibling interaction, sort of.

Angelika is also something of a neat freak, I suspect, and that is why she's going to be paired up with Lt. Ken Leeds – a Mulder-like character, who may be great at researching, but also really likes his things messy: maybe it drives his creative urges or something like that. His character didn't have much screen time in the first episode: so far he appears to be a tie to the Canadian government for Ange and Evan, and nothing more. He also has a big file on Evan and his company, Cross Photonics, so he may end up being Nick Fury (or at least agent Coulson) to Evan's Stark.

If Angelika is being paired with Lt. Leeds, then Evan is paired with Dylan Weir, an environmental activist and a police officer of some sort. The scene when Dylan and Evan fall through the time anomaly into the Cretaceous, and Dylan ends up on top of Evan (Dylan is a woman, though her name is manly – couldn't they go with Sarah, or Tanya, or something like that?), is pretty straightforward: Dylan is going to help Evan get over the loss of his wife (killed in part by his recklessness, BTW), and probably end up the next Mrs. Cross, though IP shows aren't big on weddings, I should note.

I also note that Dylan appears to be more laid back and accepting than Claudia Brown/Jenny Lewis was: she just accepted that there are radiomagnetic time anomalies in their uni-verse/dimension and went with the flow. Well, I don't see why not.

The last two main characters are Toby Nance (another woman with a manly name) and Mac Rendell. Mac Rendell is a daredevil and Evan's right-hand man: sort of a cross between Stephen Hart and Matt Anderson, I suppose. Toby is more like Jess, save that she isn't anywhere as fashion-conscious: guess the show's scriptwriters did their best of trying to differentiate P:NW's characters from their predecessors.

Sadly, that is probably P:NW's weakest part – the script. The actors, let's say it now, did a good job of sounding out their characters and to make them look real. The characters themselves are flat, though: Evan was the only one who's got some sort of a personal story behind him so far – probably because he's the central character (Buffy to Connor's Angel, if you would), and a personal story for the central character is a must. The rest of the P:NW characters (the supporting cast) have to go without it.

The second script flaw is the lack of a villain. "Primeval" had plenty of villains: Oliver Leek, Christine Johnson, Ethan Dombrowski, Philip Burton, and, of course, Helen Cutter made formidable opponents to the original ARC team. Because, let's be fair, modern humans, especially on their home turf (the 21st century) can outthink and outmaneuver any dinosaur or other prehistoric reptile, if given enough time. P:NW cast really needs a human opponent to test their mettle; otherwise the show will remain inferior to its predecessor.

Finally, there's the scientific angle, or rather – the lack of it. Ever since IP parted from BBC, it was steadily moving away from pseudo-documentaries ("Walking with" series) to true drama ("Primeval", P:NW, "Sinbad"). That said, they can still create more documentary-like shows, like "March of the Dinosaurs" (2011) movie, but they clearly are moving into more fictive shows instead. Maybe BBC, Discovery Channel, etc., are squeezing them out of the documentary niche, who knows?

That said, the lack of paleontological knowledge in P:NW is glaring. Pteranodon is depicted as man-eating bird of prey, literally: it has killed at least one person before it died. There were carnivorous and semi-terrestrial pterosaurs by the end of the Cretaceous, the azhdarchids, like Quetzalcoatlus and Hatzegopteryx, but Pteranodon belongs to a different family, the pteradontids, and it behaved more like a gull or a pelican, hunting for fish in the inland seas. Considering that IP was working with Pteranodon for a long time, since 2002 in "Chased by the Dinosaurs", they clearly know this, so why did they make it into a monster? If they needed a killer bird, why not use a teratorn instead? (Basically, a giant condor from the Ice Age.) Now that would be a giant bird of prey – literally and figuratively.

Then, the raptors. Evan calls them Utahraptors, but IP had problems with their identity from the time of "Primeval": influenced by the Jurassic Park movie franchise, their raptors are just generic sickle-clawed dinosaurs without any allegiance to any specific dromaeosaurid species; here the problem is that Utahraptor lived and died out just before Pteranodon appears on Earth, so they couldn't co-exist. Either that, or P:NW is doing something new with the time anomalies, which is another possibility.

Finally, the big dinosaur that ate Evan's wife, Albertosaurus (as identified on the official site). A smaller, more gracile relative of the T-Rex, Albertosaurus appeared several times in IP productions, but this version is mostly based on the aforementioned "March of the Dinosaurs" movie, except that it lacks feathers ("March" therapods were all feathered instead), and has one of its front claws bitten off. Odds that it will be P:NW's "villain" for this season at least quite good, since Albertosaurus had plenty of strength and speed, a nasty disposition and a decent amount of intelligence. If so, then P:NW can quickly devolve to a "man vs. beast" kind of a plot, and its characters lack "Moby Dick's" complexity to accomplish that sufficiently well to keep P:NW afloat for consecutive seasons. (Most of IP series, not counting "Primeval", are one-season hits.)

So. Good CGI and technology, decent actors and a flawed script. Right now, P:NW can go anywhere, and I will eagerly look over its journey.