Dear Primeval Executive Producers. I hate you. I really do hate you. When the show was cancelled after Season 3 we fans were sad, especially because the last episode had ended on a cliffhanger. When you managed to negotiate to get it recommissioned, we were thrilled and excited, and it seemed like we had to wait for So Long before the new episodes would be broadcast. But we waited as patiently as we could, and we understood that because Laila Rouass didn’t want to move her family to Dublin when the filming moved there, you had to kill Sarah off. We understood that because Jason Flemyng had already signed up for other work, you couldn’t include Danny. We understood that you had to bring in new characters to replace them but we were OK with that: we’d learned to cope with departures and arrivals before; we’d learned to like Danny and Sarah and Becker, and to boo and hiss at Leek and Christine, so we figured we would learn to like or boo & hiss at Matt and Jess and Philip and all the other newbies.
And what did you give us? Six pretty boring episodes where the newbies’ storylines dragged on and on and on with no sign of resolution; where Matt was more tedious than a plank of wood; where Gideon was a total waste of space; where Jess was perky but wore ridiculously inappropriate skirts to work; where Philip was clearly Up To Something but we never got close to finding out what; and where the alleged action scenes mostly consisted of everyone creeping around corridors and alleys (after inappropriately waving their guns at the public) for ages and ages and bloody ages until there was a tiny bit of action; and where the military went on teabreak at all the wrong times so that Our Heroes could get into trouble with no back-up. And by the end of episode 6 most of us had decided that Primeval had jumped the shark at the end of Season 3 and should never have been recommissioned.
And then you gave us episode 7. And it was BRILLIANT. I was on the edge of my seat for large parts of it, excited, engaged, and pretty much loving every minute, and I actually applauded at the end. So Where Were You before now?! Why didn’t you make this much effort for the rest of the season?! Why didn’t it dawn on you that if you had made earlier episodes as exciting and interesting and dramatic as this one, the viewing figures would have guaranteed you a sixth season? As it is, the upcoming fifth season – which will premiere on a tinpot little subscription channel watched by about fourteen people – will probably come to the terrestrial channel in Britain at 11 o’clock on a weekday night because the viewing figures for season 4 were so bad by the end of it. And you don’t stand a chance in hell of getting a sixth season, you utter utter idiots.
So I am really really angry with you, TPTB (or, as you’re known amongst the Primeval fans, TFWIC but I’m not going to translate that on a family-friendly site). You can write and produce brilliance when you put your minds to it, but too late to save the series. So why bother building up our hopes at the end of Season 3 by fighting for a fourth season, only to dash them again with a lame, pointless season and then get us excited again with the final episode?
You utter, utter IDIOTS.
Yours sincerely, Callie Sullivan
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We now return to our normal service:
The Australian tourist (hey, look, everybody! A non-Irish extra!!) must have kept a tight grip on his phone as he was dragged through the anomaly, because it’s not in the cell afterwards.
Who has the right to lock Emily up? Did she agree to this or was she dragged in there?
It’s rather convenient that Becker – for no apparent reason – is watching footage of Ethan kidnapping Emily just at the right time for Lester to prove his point about how dangerous he (Ethan) is.
Again the ARC crew run around with pistols in plain sight – and there’s no way they can pretend they’re for paintballing inside a museum!
Can they even allow Emily to go back to her own time? She could change the course of history with the knowledge she has of the future.
When Becker and Abby found another anomaly in a small room, I was yelling about why the ladder hadn’t been sucked through it, but when the anomaly closed it looked like the ladder might be wooden rather than metal. Then I noticed the paint tins on the table and started yelling again, but just maybe I’ll let them off this once because these were unusual mini-anomalies and just maybe they didn’t have as much magnetic pull as usual.
Even though I had been spoilered about his return, I was still bouncing on my seat and squeaking, “Danny, Danny, Danny, Danny!” when he arrived.
According to the internet, Terror birds never met humans, so Danny must have found an anomaly and moved to another era at some time after Helen died.
How could the Terror bird possibly have got down that narrow metal spiral staircase?
How could Abby not tell that the bird was on the other side of the sheets? It was making enough noise.
Danny’s return seems to have inspired The Mill – his interaction with the bird as he and Molly belted it through the anomaly was much more realistic than previous episodes. And yet seconds later Becker jumped over the bird’s prone body and even that looked wrong and out of proportion.
Ethan looking at photobooth pictures of himself and another kid in the previous episode had had me wondering if he could be Danny’s brother, and I had even looked up Danny’s brother’s name, but it seemed to be too obvious for the storyline to possibly go in that direction. But why is Patrick Quinn calling himself Ethan Dobrowski? And why has he now got an Irish accent? And, more to the point, why has nobody on the show asked him these questions?!
Lester’s first question to Danny is, “Helen Cutter, dead?” Lester, sweetie, we know you’re fabulous, but how did you even know that Danny and Helen were in the same era for any length of time; and why would you assume that she might have died since Danny’s disappearance, considering how successfully she had survived for the previous ten or more years?
Ethan/Patrick says that it’s eighteen years since he went through the anomaly in the Dobby-house. How the heck has he managed to keep count?
Matt comes out of his interrogation of Ethan and says to Emily that “he’s not the one. It could be anyone. It could be Danny for all I know.” When did anyone have time to tell Emily about Danny?
Philip says to Danny, “I trust you’re being well looked after?” I snorted and said, “Not really – they haven’t even offered him a shower and a change of clothes yet!”
Connor and Abby separate the two anomalies and then both of them lock. But why does the second one lock if the locking device isn’t firing at it at the time?
“Intruder alert. All units to corridor five,” says Jess, and every single member of the military promptly goes on teabreak, with the sole exception of Becker.
How did Molly get into the room with the anomalies? Last time we saw it, it was in the large central area where Danny first confronted his brother.
That poor bird had a really rough day! I lost count of how many times it was fired upon, stunned or smacked with a stick!
When Connor was looking at the swirly diagram on his computer just before he chased off after Philip, I can’t be the only one who was reminded of Nick’s model of all the historical anomalies.
Emily throws Molly to Danny as if she knows that it belongs to him, but there’s no way she could know – not unless Matt really did have hours to tell her all about him!
As the scenes continued to switch between Matt/Emily and Connor/Philip, it seemed so obvious that Philip was going to turn out to be the Big Bad that I was convinced that there would be a twist where Connor would say something that would make us realise that he would be the one who would (innocently and inadvertently) bring about the destruction of the Earth.
How far from the future has Matt come?
Has it dawned on anybody that the anomaly to Emily’s time might have opened on the other side of the planet to where she lived, and/or could dump her in a jungle a thousand miles from civilisation?!
So many questions unanswered. If I had any trust in the Producers at all, I would say that they’re saving the answers for Season 5 but I’m not convinced.
What was the point of Gideon? I was hoping that this episode might finally explain his purpose in this series (apart from giving Matt someone to spout exposition to) but he really did turn out to be the biggest waste of space ever.
And what was the point of Jess moving Connor and Abby into her flat? It was never mentioned again, and if it was supposed to be somekinda plot point, surely we’d have seen them there again?
And possibly the biggest question of all: IS BECKER ALL RIGHT?!
The anomaly doesn't attract the metal chain around the tourist's neck.
So given that no trace of the tourist was recovered is he going to become a part of the tour guide's spiel to the next batch of tourists?
My first thought about the creature's species was the Aepyornis, which may have survived until 1880 (at least according to radiocarbon dating on a bone). The automatic assumption that it had to be an older type of bird, not to mention being right about it, is kind of annoying considering we're dealing mostly with creatures we know mostly, or only, from bones.
Abby says, "Connor, you need to come see this now."
Would it have been that hard to say, Connor, we have lots of anomalies opening!"
Why is Emily hitting the terror bird with the head of "Molly" instead of the sharpened point? Really, that bird has a big old exposed neck that a sharp point could do a lot of damage to.
Then again one could ask why the terror bird didn't use it's feet more? I mean a measly little old ostrich can kill a man with a kick, just imagine what these things can do?
So, Ethan was just a red herring?
While on the one hand that's not necessarily a bad thing it would have worked much better to have seen evidence of the season's real Big Bad taking advantage of it. As it is it's mainly the audience's assumption that Philip is the real Big Bad. The writers left it vague enough that they could still pull a switcheroo on who the Big Bad is.
Callie - What was the point of Gideon?
At one point I wondered if he would turn out to be an alternate timeline Nick Cutter ala Claudia/Jenny.
The tourist is in small, locked room, an anomaly opens, we hear a terror bird & the tourist scream, but later it's said there is no evidence of an incursion.
Uhhhhhh... what? Shouldn't there, at least, be some of the tourist's blood as, presumably, the terror bird probably would have attacked the guy before dragging him off. Or did the terror bird say, "Psst, little boy, I have candy!" & the tourist trustingly entered the anomaly of his own free will?