Primeval

I have to say I am a fan of ITV’s “Primeval“. One or two things are starting to grate though.

For example, the episode first shown on Saturday 4th April. Cutter has devised a 3D simulation of the anomalies and used it to predict where and approximately when the next one will open. It duly does – in an abandoned house where something killed and disposed of two lads fourteen years previously.

Once inside, the team behave like soon-to-be-victims in a teen slasher movie. They split up and when Abby hears noises from a chimney and sees dust fall into the fire place, she does not call the others but sticks her head into the hole.

The beastie turns out to be something that has never existed in Earth’s past. The assumption seems to be that it is something that has evolved in the future. In Series 2 the team encountered another beast from the future but on that occasion the scriptwriters had made some effort to come up with something that could have evolved from an animal currently existing. This latest creature shows no obvious relationship with anything currently extant and indeed looks like a left over demon from another show entirely.

Some nice twists though. Helen (Cutter’s ex-wife who appears to know her way around the anomalies) sends one of her goons into the Ark. He is shot and killed but Cutter observes that he has previously seen this man die in the Silurian Era. Nobody suggests “clone” which springs to the mind of all SF fans.

At the end of the episode, Helen breaks into Cutter’s house to take hair from his comb and swabs from a used glass. One cannot help but assume she is taking DNA samples.

My own conclusions from what we have seen thus far:

Helen uses anomalies to get to the (relatively) near future where she clones her goons. For some reason she is planning to clone Cutter. The latest future beastie will turn out to be an alien lifeform brought to Earth by the future civilisation. I will also hazard a guess that Helen spends most of her time there when she is not in the early 21st century, rather than living in the prehistoric past. In fact, I will not be surprised if it turns out she’s from that era in the first place.

Tags: "Primeval", evolution, ITV, time travel