Things get intense for the ARC team this week, as events at Prospero come to a head and anomalies begin to open up all over the place.
The episode certainly doesn’t hang around. Right from the off we’re thrown in at the deep-end, with a T-Rex rampaging down a busy high-street. The fact that we see so much of the creature in the opening moments is a bit of a giveaway that something else must be up, and sure enough, this isn’t just a regular creature-feature episode. Instead, with anomalies opening up all around the world, there are a multitude of creatures to deal with.
This is something that Primeval fans will no doubt have been waiting for; a scenario where anomalies appear anywhere and everywhere, far out of the reach and control of the ARC. They can’t cover up something that big, and so – finally – the rest of the world has become aware of the anomalies. Unfortunately, what should be a momentous occasion with lots of potentially interesting reaction from the world at large is mostly glossed over with little more than a few unconvincing news reports. The scope of the show is fairly narrow, and that’s fair enough, but it would have been good to see a little more of the intellectual reaction to the revelation about portals to the past and future.
Parts of this episode play like Primeval’s ‘Greatest Hits’, with plenty of recurring creatures from the past few years returning to wreak further havoc. There are Terrorbirds, those pre-Cambrian worms that only hunt in the fog (a tidy little budget saver) and – best of all – an arboreal raptor which has the misfortune of choosing Lester’s car to jump on…
Sadly, there’s a sense of familiarity with it all and – aside from the T-Rex attack at the start – most of the supposed global chaos is (again) reduced to scratchy “CCTV footage” that Jess watches on screen.
And so while some of the ARC team are busy trying to contain the multiple breaches (Jess even has to call in the people who are off-duty – so there are more than six people running the place!), Connor, Matt, Emily and Abby are off trying to stop Phillip from using his machine to… well, save the world, actually.
It turns out that Phillip’s machine will close all of the anomalies, channelling their energy into one “super” anomaly, from which he will derive energy. Matt is convinced that this will go wrong and lead to the destruction of the planet, preferring instead to let the anomaly surge (referred to as ‘convergence’) run its course as a natural phenomena. The fact that we don’t know who is right leads to some nice moments of tension, particularly towards the end with Matt and Phillip trying to convince the other their way is right. Could hero Matt’s intervention be what causes the extinction event? It’s a fun notion to dangle, even as we suspect the show wouldn’t go somewhere that dark with its hero.
This is certainly a solid episode with a lot going on. It’s great to see Primeval attempting something other than just ‘monster of the week’ stories, but you can’t help but feel that the episode where the world finds out about the anomalies and the myriad creatures spewing forth from them, should really be a bit more epic. It’s just not quite the chaotic, world-goes-to-hell moment that we might have hoped for. Some of the sequences just feel like unnecessary filler (Becker in the school), but the final show-down at Prospero, with Abby and Emily kicking ass and taking names, is definitely more pacy, even if it does feature the least threatening evil assistant the world has ever seen in tedious April.
With that cliffhanger ending, it’s hard to predict what will happen next. The machine is on and Connor has gone, while the whole world now knows all about the anomalies. There’s certainly a lot to wrap up in next week’s finale.
Aired at 8pm on Tuesday 21st June 2011 on Watch and at 5.30pm on Saturday 14th July 2012 on ITV1.