Primeval Series 1-5 (2007-2011) - Review

Starring: Douglas Henshall, Andrew-Lee Potts, Hannah Spearritt, Lucy Brown & Ben Miller

Written By: Adrian Hodges (Head Writer)

Directed By: (Various)

Certificate: 12

 

Up until now, dinosaurs and prehistoric life don't have much in the way of a regular place on UK television screens. While always popular with children, and always having a home on the silver screen, especially thanks to films like Jurassic Park and its sequels, they've never entirely made it on mainstream television. The closest they've come to enjoying such success was with the 1999 documentary series Walking With Dinosaurs – a series that absolutely deserved all its critical acclaim. But with Primeval, could the ancient creatures be about to make the transition to a mainstream drama series?

 

Anomalies are starting to appear – doorways leading to different times either millions of years in the past, and some leading to the future. With the help of government official James Lester, Professor Nick Cutter helps assemble a group to fight the terrible dangers that come through the anomalies, and to help the creatures that are lost in time to return home. While working to discover the cause of the anomalies and to face what comes through them, the team have their own problems to deal with, including love, loss, personal differences, and averting an apocalyptic future...

 

Primeval gets off to a great start thanks to a likeable and interesting array of characters, the standouts being team leader Professor Nick Cutter and his wife Helen. The two share an ever-changing, troubled and deeply fractured marriage and both Douglas Henshall and Juliet Aubrey do a great job at making this relationship feel convincing. In particular, Juliet Aubrey manages to easily make Helen the best human villain of the show, far superior to the likes of Christine Johnson and Philip Burton. (Spoiler Warning!) Even after Helen's death at the end of Series 3, the team don't ever feel safe from her schemes and grand plans, and I was left wandering if she had set any further traps for them from beyond the grave. Seriously, I wasn't even sure if she was really dead! We also have characters like James Lester, Connor and Abi. With these three, we get some of the show's biggest laughs, particularly when Ben Miller as Lester plays his lines straight, and not forgetting the utterly charming “Will they? Won't they?” relationship between Connor and Abi – a relationship that changes and evolves very well over the course of five series.

 

I've heard many fans of the show argue that the quality of the series started to decline following Douglas Henshall's decision to leave the cast. While his departure was heavy-hitting and the show may have been better off with him carrying on for a bit longer, it's unfair to overlook Jason Flemying's stint as new team leader Danny Quinn. Though it took a while for him to get the job, Danny was still a very likeable protagonist, and looking back, I can't really picture anyone else doing a better job with the character than Jason Flemying. In fact, Series 3 introduces a fair few of the show's best and overlooked characters. Though her time on the show was brief, Laila Rousass managed to make Sarah an incredibly enjoyable character, similarly to the brilliant and bubbly technician Jess, who shared quite a sweet on-screen relationship with Becker in Series 4 and 5.

 

With so many characters to include in each episode, I suppose it should be inevitable that not every character in Primeval gets the same amount of development or comes across all that well on screen. While in earlier series, I would probably argue that Stephen and Claudia/Jenny were the weak links of the original team, the character that suffers the most out of everyone is easily Matt in Series 4 and 5. Despite being team leader and being on a mission to save the future, Matt never really becomes anything more than the mission he has to complete - it becomes his only defining character trait. Even his relationship with Emily ended up being one of the most forgettable things about the show. Becker is another team member that seems to suffer from a lack of anything distinctive about his character, and although his relationship with fellow team member Jess lightened up plenty of scenes, Becker doesn't entirely become anything more than a hunky security guard.

 

However, it goes without saying that Primeval's biggest hook is the various creatures that come through the anomalies. It isn't just dinosaurs that end up in the present, and its thanks to this that there's instead a much wider and more interesting range of creatures coming through. I admired Primeval's decision not to have the obvious contenders to come through the anomalies straight away, and it isn't even until Series 2 that we encounter our first proper dinosaur. Don't expect any T-Rexes either, at least not until the show's penultimate episode. Rather than get the kind of creatures that we'd likely see in Jurassic Park, the show instead introduces us to lesser-known but still just as dangerous creatures including the Gorgonopsid, the Anurognathus, sabre-toothed tigers, the Pristichampsus, as well as a Kaprosuchus. It makes for a really great watch to see how well-suited these ancient creatures are to a television format, whilst also helping Primeval to stand out and set itself even further apart from other shows.

 

The thing that allows Primeval to show off its creativity the most though, is the fact that anomalies don't just provide a doorway to the past, but also the future. When you're writing about creatures from the past, you're somewhat restricted as to what creatures you can realistically get away with, but when bringing in creatures from the future, you have a much wider field to play with. This was something the show's creators recognized and made full use of, with Series 3 even being accompanied by a competition for viewers to create their own creature and have it featured in an episode. Primeval's version of the future is undeniably bleak and home to some truly horrific creatures. The Future Predator is a definite standout, and it's not hard to see why they feature in so many episodes. They are easily my favourite among the team's many adversaries, and they remind me a great deal of the xenomorphs from Alien, being just as fast, just as deadly and just as difficult to kill. The show's ventures into the future allow it to explore the implications and dangers of time travel and its effects. From Series 2, the character of Jenny pretty much embodies just this, with her character representing the damage done by the team making changes to the past, and only Nick and Helen being able to remember Claudia Brown.

 

For the most part, the many creatures in Primeval are brought to life with some fairly good CGI work. There may be the odd moment that looks a bit off or something that doesn't feel quite right, but considering that the production team are having to work on a TV budget, the special effects deserve a lot of praise. The special-effects heavy creatures interact with their environment very realistically, and its testament to both the production crew and the actors involved that it genuinely feels like the team are being put face-to-face with these creatures. In particular, creatures such as the Future Predators, the raptors in the shopping mall and the Silurian Scorpions – some of my personal favourites – look terrific. Speaking of the scorpions, I've become aware of a certain amount of criticism surrounding the scientific accuracy of several creatures, with some complaining that certain creatures have been over-sized to the point that there wouldn't have been anywhere near enough oxygen in the atmosphere to support them. I can understand why this may annoy some viewers, but I can't say it bothers me: they still look great, they're successful in scaring younger audiences and they still provide plenty of fan-pleasing moments.

 

Speaking of fan-pleasing moments, Primeval has them in a constant and plentiful supply. Again, they may not fare well in terms of scientific accuracy, but if they don't get your inner nine year-old grinning and hopping about madly, then I'd argue you might not be watching it in the right way. Not to spoil these moments too much, but whether it be seeing creatures like the Gorgonopsid and a Future Predator battling it out, seeing a whole plethora of creatures come through a series of anomalies in the fantastic Series 5 finale, or even a certain character reveal involving Helen towards the end of Series 3, there's plenty of exciting drama to be found. This couples well with the constant sense of grittiness and realism that's particularly prevalent through Series 1 to 3. The first version of the Anomaly Research Centre (the ARC) while definitely a sci-fi base, also has an industrial kind of atmosphere to it. Often, we'll have to watch the team dealing with the creatures armed only with tranquilizer guns, or in the most serious cases, real guns. Also, the majority of the creatures end up coming through anomalies that open in everyday locations, such as swimming pools, shopping malls or hospitals. These are settings that the majority of us are familiar with, and this helps in immersing the viewer even more into the show's very urban world.

 

It's a real shame that by the time Series 4 came along, the show ended up losing some of this grittiness and sense of danger. When Series 4 started, the show was going through a lot of major changes in terms of story, but also behind the scenes. Due to major financial losses in 2009, ITV almost ended up axing Primeval at the end of Series 3, and if it weren't for a deal that was struck between ITV and UKTV Watch, Series 4 and 5 would have never have been made. With this deal going on, the producers decided to go for a major update and overhaul of near enough everything in the show, introducing new characters, new writers and directors, a new title sequence and even a completely new ARC. Unfortunately, while this change in style wasn't necessarily a bad thing, the feel of the first three series ended up being lost. The last two series ended up feeling too polished, especially the new ARC base, which felt as though it could have been lifted from near enough any other sci-fi film or programme. Even smaller things like the team's new electronic weaponry ended up making things like fighting against the creatures feel just that bit too safe. It's lots of changes like this that combined to make Series 4 probably the weakest series of the five. Series 4 ended up spending far too long on an uninvolving love triangle between Matt, Emily and Ethan, had no real standout creatures of innovative settings, and even manage to botch Danny Quinn's highly anticipated return by having him leave a mere twenty or thirty minutes later, and is never seen again. It isn't until Series 5 that the show picks up the pace again, with better narratives and unique settings such as having Liopleurodon attacking a submarine and seeing the ARC be overwhelmed by a swarm of dangerous beetles from the future. I was also glad to see Ethan thankfully getting removed from the equation, and the New Dawn series arc actually starting to go somewhere.

 

I'm not saying that the first three series were superior to Series 4 and 5 in every area though. On the contrary, one of the biggest shortcomings of the first three series, and it's something I've picked up on more as I've got older, is that it often tries just too hard to be “cool” or appeal to a young teenage audience. Not all of these moments are bad, as the raptor motorbike chase through the shopping mall is legitimately fantastic, but the majority of these moments stand out for all the wrong reasons. I'm thinking of moments such as Abi and Caroline's incredibly forced fight in the Series 2 finale, Connor's friends in Series 1, or the image of Abi zooming down the M25 in a sports car – none of these things ever came across as “cool” to watch, not even when I watched the series in my early teenage years. This is probably the one area where the last two series actually feel superior, as by this point, the show reaches a stage where it seems to have grown up and has realized that you have prehistoric life roaming the city streets – you don't have to try any harder to appeal to a younger audience by being “cool” with fast cars and grungy music.

 

Overall, Primeval is a show where I wouldn't hesitate at recommending it to anyone, and even by its very first episode, the show proves that it is far more than just ITV's attempt at recreating their own version of Doctor Who. It's by no means perfect and I'd probably say its more fun to watch and to enjoy at a younger age, in order to fully appreciate it. Yes, it has some troubling teething problems, such as a handful of underdeveloped characters, sometimes trying too hard to be “cool” and an annoying over-use of the Wilhelm Scream. However, there are far more positives to be found here, including characters such as Nick Cutter, Connor and Abi, well-developed adversaries such as Helen and Phillip, a whole range of creatures coming through the anomalies, and just the pure entertainment value.

Primeval



7/10