Primeval New World 'Breakthrough' Jan 22

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.

Primeval New World 'Truth' Dec 17

Last night's episode had fully compensated for 'Babes' sexual innuendo and then some, not to mention that it had revealed a significant chunk of the show's back story, but let's try and get it in order.

Now, the episode began with the dinosaur Pachycephalosaurus, and though it is a very interesting dinosaur in its own right, its job was just to be an engine for Evan revealing the truth, bits and pieces of it at least, and it just as easily could've been some other animal, prehistoric or futuristic, so we'll talk about it later.

Evan, now, he was the star of this episode and its main problem. Apparently (there was a lull in the action) after the dinosaur had sneezed on him, Evan began to break mentally down: he began to hallucinate, to see the dinosaur that killed his wife (Albertasaurus, the smaller, faster cousin of the T-Rex), his younger and married self alongside with his wife, and also Mac v.2 - roughly in this sequence. Some of the hallucinations, primarily those of the dinosaur, were auditory rather than visionary, so whatever the Pachy had spat on him, it was some potent sh*t!!

Pachy aside, in the episode Evan, or rather Niall Matter, released his inner badass - very impressive acting, you can honestly believe Evan's deteriorating mental condition, as he goes into a quasi-robocop mode, intent on blowing the entire Cross Photonics in order to change the time line and to save Brooke from certain death. This kind of ruthlessness was probably demonstrated only by Helen Cutter, when she intended to prevent humanity from evolving in S3 of the original series. Incidentally, this only reinforces my theory that Helen spent the rest of her screen time after Stephen's death in S2 growing more and more unbalanced - but for her, it took 10 episodes and she was always ambiguous; for Evan, who's the main hero of P:NW, it took about half an hour of screen time: guess the idea about women being tougher (more resilient) than men has some truth in it!

Evan, to make things even more tense, intended to change the future (and to kill himself and the rest of his field team) to make the world a better place, so it was really fortunate that Ange and Dylan managed to stop him before that. Otherwise, things would've changed in the future, but for the worse (or not).

Dylan, now, had less of a personality development than Evan or the rest of the CP team, not counting Lt. Leeds. Then again, considering that this case of personality development has opened new rifts in the CP team as well as re-activated old ones, this may not be so bad: one of the episode's final scenes is Evan admitting to Dylan that on this day he and his secrets have pissed every one of his friends, not counting Dylan herself. Toby, Mac and Ange may or may not jump ship of dinosaur hunters after 'Truth', but Evan will have to make it up to them somehow. A lot. And personal skills, unlike technical, are Evan's weak spot, as such episodes like 'Angry Birds' and 'Babes' have shown, so he and the others will be in a dark place for a while.

And in Mac's case it'll be particularly dark. I'm guessing that in the original time line where he didn't die fighting the dinosaur or at least managed to get back through the time anomaly, he ended up in the British army rather in Cross Photonics, and may've eventually replaced captain Becker as the head of the original ARC's security detail, or at least became a part of it. In this time line, Evan Cross intervened and Mac came to Canada, BC, and became a firearms expert instead. This, of course, probably caused more ripples in the timeline, but in Mac's case, he's most likely experiencing a case of 'what-might've-been', where he became a British dinosaur hunter and got killed at approximately the same age that he currently is. (It's kind of dicey, given that the mannequin stand-in for Mac v.2 looks exactly like what it's supposed to be - a mannequin.)

And why am I thinking this? Because the end of the very first episode of P:NW had Evan stare at the frozen corpse of who we now know to be Mac v.2 - and his uniform had an ARC logo on it. But that is something that will probably be developed more (or gotten rid off altogether) in the next episodes of P:NW.

Anyways, Mac now knows that Evan knew him before they met, sort of, and Mac isn't the sort of man to deal with unpleasant surprises easily: for him (and for many other people) springing this sort of a surprise is a definite breach of trust, and unlike Toby, he may quit CP, though it's anyone's idea where he'll go from there.

Toby, of course, will be with Mac all the way, seeing how she has rescued him from the freezer room. She may be gay or bisexual or whatever, but she now clearly counts Mac as important and close enough to save from a certain death. For a woman who's not the most trigger-happy or outdoors-savvy (that's Dylan), she can certainly think and act fast, especially if there's Evan losing his marbles and packing serious heat in the same room.

Basically, like Dylan, Toby didn't develop too much if compared to Evan or Mac in this episode. In this instance, she's the lesser half of the ship 'Moby", just as Dylan's the lesser half of ship 'Dyvan', now that the ship 'Evange' has sunk - Ange told Dylan when the gas dispersed and Evan was out cold, that she's leaving CP again.

Then again, though, even at the beginning of the episode Ange didn't appear all that keen to have a 'ship with Evan, nor did she go with him, Dylan and Mac to capture the latest time-displaced animal - guess that the woodland outing in 'Babes' provided her with enough field experience to decide that she doesn't like it. That said, she was clearly hurt (emotionally, not physically) to realize that Evan still cared for Brooke more than for her; maybe not as sharply as Emma Frost, when she realized that Scott will love Jean, first and foremost, when Jean 'the Phoenix' Grey disappeared (due to various Marvel comics time lines let's leave it at that), but still. No woman really likes to hear that she has a more favored rival, and to Ange Brooke was that rival, maybe even when she was alive (what was the relationship between the two women? Maybe we'll learn in the next episodes, who knows?).

Of course, if Ange really does leave CP, does that mean that she'll go and work for Sung (or whoever) instead? More importantly, will she stay on the show? I think that yes, she will, but I also think that this issue - will or will not Ange remain working for CP as a CFO - should be resolved quickly, rather than drag it for the rest of the S1.

Finally, there's Lt. Leeds, and I have to admit that in his case, his character appears to be developing into a more secondary character than the rest of the cast: he probably has the least amount of screen time, right alongside Ange and Toby, but even Ange and Toby had more screen time than Ken Leeds recently, and I don't really like it. Unlike 'Fear of Flying', 'Truth' showed that Leeds can stand up to Evan, at least from time to time, and to get him out of trouble too, especially legal-wise, as this episode has shown. So, maybe the good RCAF lieutenant will have his day...

Finally, the dinosaur. Well, the dinosaurs, but Albertosaurus appeared here only in flashbacks and hallucinations, so let's talk about the Pachy instead. It's a neat dinosaur, not quite belonging to any established group, save for that of its own, the Pachycephalosauria. It has several species, but at least two of them, Stygimoloch and Dracorex (featured on the original series from S3 onwards) may be Pachy's juvenile specimens, and the same situation may be with other species of pachycephalosaurids as well.

In addition, Pachycephalosaurus is a very unusual plant-eater - it may've been one of the biggest omnivorous dinosaurs (rather like the modern wild pigs than the deer or the antelopes) of its time. Considering that most of the dinosaurs can be classified as herbivores or carnivores easily enough, the Pachy's omnivory can be considered to be quite unusual.

Finally, in this episode of P:NW, the dinosaur's 'role' was strongly influenced by the 'Jurassic Park' movies franchise. It rammed the car - just as it did in 'Lost World', (where it appeared on screen for the first time) and its sneeze that launched the real conflict of the episode easily reminds of the even bigger sneeze in the first 'Jurassic Park' movie.

Thus, 'Truth' had a lot of tense, personal drama & action, had important character development in several, if not all, primary characters, and a very interesting dinosaur for a cameo, but no sexual innuendo and little humor. Ah well, you cannot have everything.

PS: This week's P:NW video featurette has plenty of humor, if you want it after watching the ep.

Primeval New World "Clean up on Aisle Three" Dec 3

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.

Primeval New World 'Angry Birds' - Nov 19

In the last night's episode, the Cross Photonics team had to deal with several marijuana cultivators as well as with a small flock of Titanis (terror birds) that came through a time anomaly.

First, the good. The episode's script was very impressive, the plot alternated between comic and deadly serious almost within a blink of an eye. The marijuana cultivators alternated between comic relief and very real obstacles almost within the same scene - that took some acting skills; but then again, P:NW got good actors, if anything.

And CGI, of course. The Titanis were very life-like, especially the juvenile, and here is a sticky point: the terror birds have appeared in IP productions starting with WWB back in 2001. That said, they were usually acknowledged Phororhacos, yet ever since the original "Primeval" had aired, IP's fans argued about this species.

More specifically, IP never appeared to be particularly interested in the species identity of the terror birds, whether or not we're talking about "Primeval" or "Prehistoric Park" (2006) or etc. Terror birds were terror birds, and that was that. But now, in this episode, we've got Dylan channeling her inner Twilight Sparkle by declaring this bird to be Titanis - based on a fluffy juvenile, as well. Seriously, P:NW isn't a documentary show, after all, so why the bon mot of scientific trivia? (And the meat-eating pteranodon from the pilot ep was bad enough.) Sara Canning (Dylan) should really complain to the script writers about her lines: such scenes rather diminish her character.

Conversely, Dylan's interactions with Evan, with Angelika and the cultivators, other characters, really bring out her character: a strong, caring woman that is trying to rein in Evan's potentially self-destructive obsession with time anomalies and the creatures that come through it. After all, not even Batman could fully pull off being a CEO of Wayne Tech and a masked crime fighter at the same time, and Tony Stark (Iron Man) solved this by becoming affiliated with the US government (even if just through SHIELD), and so has Evan Cross...only with the Canadian government, in the person of Ken Leeds. Considering, that the last shots of the episode had the self-same RCAF man stowing away a Titanis juvenile (whether the same from earlier in the ep or another one - the model looked different) this has potential to backfire.

From Leeds to Angelika. Any ideas why the first shots of her in the ep were upon her legs? Yes, Miranda Frigon has very nice legs, but seriously, her character is a CFO of a flourishing company, why the legs? Is Frigon a leg model or something and angles for some professional PR, I wonder?

That said, Angelika's interaction with Evan in the beginning of the ep was something else: it really did brought out the point that Evan had a company to run and couldn't afford to be a vigilante superhero all the time. Already his involvement with the time anomalies are bringing changes to his company beyond his control, and as Leeds' decision to keep a Titanis indicates, this may bite him in the ass eventually.

Dylan, I should point out, actually agreed with Angelika on this one, so I also cannot help but feel that since Evan rode so roughshod over their mutual objections, at least some of that bad karma that may be coming his way is deserved.

And speaking of coming, the character of Toby (Crystal Lowe) has experienced some major development. Unlike Jess Parker from the original series, who'd been happy to simply work in the labs, Toby is more of a Connor Temple sort of character (what is he up to, anyways, since the pilot?) who can work in the field as well - to Mac's worry. In part, I suspect, that's because the show's producers are Toby/Mac shippers, though I seriously hope that Mac's interaction with his current girlfriend (Susannah or Susan) will be resolved before then: unlike Connor's first girlfriend, who turned out to be sort of evil, Susannah appears to be a rather decent person, a good shot with a tranquilizer gun too. Toby, on the other hand, actually shot one of the marijuana cultivators in the butt, but that was Mac's fault too: all guns tend to have a recoil, something Mac was aware, but Toby (who is a computer expert, not a firearms one) was probably not.

(Speaking of guns and targets, at least one of the terror birds had a minor case of invincibility - it was shot at with a gun and a taser and shrugged of both? IP's terror birds were often tough, but this is ridiculous: sabre-tooth cats like Smilodon very quickly cut them down to size, BTW.)

So. In this episode we had some good acting and CGI, and script, to a lesser extent. All of the characters had their personalities developed further, and there were giant killer ostriches as well. All in all - a good episode.

Primeval New World 'Sisiutl' - Nov 5

The second episode of P:NW was aired on Space last night. Basically, though it surprises me to admit, this episode was simply great.

To recapitulate. The pilot episode of P:NW was already good: the CGI/technology side of the show was great, as it is always with IP shows, and the actors' acting was up to strength. The only flaw was the script: it was rather disjointed.

Now, however, in "Sisiutl" P:NW scriptwriters have picked up the slack, and the show's script finally caught up with the rest of the show's aspects. This is evident in the following.

Initially, this episode introduces two new conflicts/points of tension in the new TANK team: Evan Cross does not like Lt. Kenneth Leeds from the government's project Magnet, and the latter does his best to accidentally piss him off by his amateurish and nervous demeanor and utter lack of tact when it comes to Evan's personal space. Mark you, Evan and his lack of patience is equally at fault, so this is going to be a situation where both sides will have to compromise/adjust to each other (sooner or later).

The second conflict is only in the opening stage: Angelika "Ange" Finch is not enjoying the new development of Evan's dinosaur obsession and is trying to get Lt. Leeds to do something about it, even though Leeds is downright reluctant to do so, and clearly isn't the kind of "alpha male" that Evan is (by the show's standards). Undoubtedly, Ange has the best of intentions of going behind Evan's back with this, but everyone knows where good intentions lead and sooner or later Ange's meddling will backfire on her, and she and Evan will have to clear the air…eventually.

This brings us to this episode's conflict between Dylan and her Predator Control superior officer. Here the scriptwriters added the conflict between truth and conformity, as Dylan has to decide what matters more: the truth or her job. Naturally, in the end she chooses doing the right thing over keeping her job at Predator Control and helps Evan & co to send the giant snake (Titanoboa) back to the Eocene. Still, her superior had also encountered the reptile, so Dylan may yet keep her job at Predator Control for a while, just because she cannot right quit. (That just won't look right.)

As an off point, I want to bring out that it is interesting (and impressive) that P:NW, unlike the original show, seems okay with introducing "people of color" into the cast. The original UK "Primeval", not unlike the US "Friends", had mainly an all-white cast, but here we get the show's producers introduce a greater variety into the secondary cast, if not the main one.

This brings us to the episode's other conflict: between the oil company (unnamed) and the native locals. The latter are led by officer Davis from "Corner Gas", known in real life as Lorne Cardinal. As a consequence, this veteran of acting (CG ran for 6 seasons and 107 episodes) does a remarkable job as a hotheaded wildlife activist, who does his best to try and bring his nephew Leo into the fold. He fails at that, though Leo and he do make up, once the underwater time anomaly closes and the titular monster goes home.

And, of course, the giant snake deserves a separate mention. It was Earth's biggest snake of all times, and it was a constrictor, just like the python and the anaconda, though it is bigger than any other snake on the planet, reaching a length of 12-15 m long. The cryptozoologists (like Leo in this episode) may claim that such a snake (megaconda) still lives in the waterways of South America, so far there is no credible evidence to back up their claims, so officially Titanoboa is extinct.

(Note: no offense to Leo, but Ogopogo cannot be a Basilosaurus for several reasons that aren't important here, so let's move on.)

Being such a massive monster, the real life Titanoboa probably wasn't as spry on land as the show's version. However, since P:NW isn't a documentary show, this is still within acceptable reasons, especially when compared to the messed-up Pteranodon from the pilot. Also, animal fans should know that constrictor snakes have a second row of teeth on the roof of their upper jaw and they are hooked, so if a Titanoboa bit something like a rubber raft one or more of those teeth would be left behind, to be sure, and they wouldn't be confused for a tooth of a shark or a killer whale, believe it!..

That said, this is something not unlike nitpicking and is a matter of taste (and principle), not unlike those rather annoying (and pointless) wide angle shots of the cast during the presentation of the episode, so that is not relevant. Even with that in mind, "Sisiutl" proved to be a very good episode of P:NW, and I seriously hope that the upcoming episodes of this show will be just as good.

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.