Primeval, Volume 3 (BBC/DVD/2011)
Now in its fifth season ( although its releases are in “volumes”), “Primeval,” while not the best-written of all sci-fi television shows, lacking as it does deeper characterizations for their prime actors, but is suspenseful and, at times, thoughtful, which gives a strong underpinning to the superb CGI effects. The previous four seasons set up a gripping premise that one of the team that investigates Anomalies in the space-time fabric that allows creatures (and humans) from other epochs to enter our time frame and create all sorts of havoc, wants, in fact, to destroy the world as we know it and create….well, that’s never quite made clear, but the havoc certainly is. Juliet Aubrey played the character that was killed off earlier in the series, but flashbacks keeps her in our consciousness as the remaining team fights off giant worms and insects and dinosaurs.
The fun lies in the young team racing about, defeating less-intelligent species as they eat numerous extras in our time. There is a love-interest between the two younger ones, Connor Temple (Andrew-Lee Potts) and Abby Maitland (Hannah Spearritt), especially when they stumble back into today from a year in the Cretaceous Era, dodging foul air and nasty predators. Of course, they don’t get any less pretty for their ordeal, an understandable, if irritating, fact, playing to a targeted audience that is not into unfashionable reality.
But the event for this season (Volume3) is New Dawn, a collaborative effort by Conner and Phillip Burton (Alexander Siddig) to open myriad Anomalies around the world and collect them into one massive power-grid for all of humanity’s needs. Only lead Matt Anderson (Ciarán McMenamin), who is revealed to be from the future, knows the grim repercussions of this act of insanity. So the bigger issues are, in fact, tackled, adding to the adventure. However, as a hated nitpicker, why does Anderson have an Irish accent if he is from a distant future? Of course, the show is shot in Ireland (using, perhaps, taxpayer monies, so Irish-actor involvement may be part of the deal). But he’s fine in the lead role and he’s been given a love-interest in Emily Merchant (Ruth Bradley), who hails from the late 1880s (another visitor from an Anomalie). The actors are up to their individual moments (not that much is asked of them), and the writing is adequate. Direction keeps it going.
All-in-all, a series that has sustained my interest but clearly isn’t going to make artistic waves.