Have they no staff at all?

I guess I should get this review out of the way before the next episode airs…

Synopsis

A paintballer at an amusement park is killed by a big cat.

Meanwhile, Conner has to break another date with his girlfriend. In case the audience was too dim to pick it up last week, this week, they beat the audience with the information that she is a plant. But for whom? Do we care?

Conner demonstrates his anomaly detector, but while the detector says there’s no anomaly, the report of the mauling at the park comes in.

At the park, the owner refuses to close down and evacuate, so Cutter and his band of (at least armed, this time) misfits starts searching for the cat. Conner is mystified why his anomaly detector isn’t working.

Stuff happens, the give Conner a gun again, he shoots a guy in a lion suit through the head, we all have a good laugh.

Cutter’s plan is to make big pits and trap the cat. It would appear the ARC can’t muster a qualified backhoe operator, but in a pinch, Abby, the herpetologist, happens to be a whiz-bang heavy machinery operator. The cat attacks Cutter, Abby distracts it with the backhoe – using it like a giant cat toy.

After a daring, incredibly stupid and totally doomed to failure attempt to run away, Cutter gets lucky and lives.

Back in the pit, he discovers the boyfriend of one of the park’s workers.

He confronts her and she reveals that she raised it from a kitten. She’s been talking with Stephen, and she’s concluded that Cutter and his people have been conducting hideous genetic experiments and created this poor animal. The cat tries to kill Cutter, but in the end kills the girl. The cat is tranquilized and the day is saved.

Back at the ARC, Leek tells Cutter the cat died in transit and was immediately cremated. Then we see Leek paying Conner’s “girlfriend” to continue spying on him.

Analysis

The second series of Primeval has been a bit like watching a train wreck in slow motion.

I’ll spare the usual complaints about, “What the heck does the ARC do?” and move to questions like, “Since they don’t do anything, and Leek is the chief facilitator of the organization, why does he need to spy on its members? Doesn’t he have access to everything, anyway?” Of slight interest might be, “Who does he work for?” but, since we’re in a different universe, I’m not entirely sure who runs the ARC, without any kind of a hint of who the opposition would be, and why there would be an opposition in the first place, the question hasn’t got legs.

This season, Stephen has been questioning the “rightness” of what they’re doing – keeping secrets and all that. Coming from a guy who has been sleeping with his boss and friend’s wife, that’s positively hilarious.

In fact, they’ve been beating us about the head and shoulders with it. This episode, in which the girl dies supposedly as a direct consequence of the secretive nature of Cutter’s work is just a new club in their arsenal of subtlety.

To be honest, it’s only after been pummeled a bit that I realized the writers were going after this theme in the previous series. Conner’s nutty friend was killed because he was trying to dig into the team’s secrets. At the time, rather than see it as a serious indictment of secrecy, I saw it as a manifestation of conspiracy-looniness.

Since secrecy is the only thing this story brings to the table, let’s look at this a little bit.

In our culture, there is a presumption that information kept secret is a dark and evil thing. That’s simply not true, at least, it isn’t a truism. I’ll play the devil’s advocate and say that, sometimes, it’s better to conceal. It is not possible in all cases to consult everyone as to what should and should not be made public.

Children have died in the UK because a newspaper published information on a study that link MMR vaccinations to autism. Otherwise sane and rationale people began preventing their children from having this crucial vaccination based on information that turned out to be inaccurate. It wasn’t false information, per se, because it was the results of a study. The study itself proved to be wrong.

People are not always able to digest and comprehend information, particularly information about risk. How many refused to go swimming after the movie Jaws came out?

If the people who run the ARC, presumably the British government, revealed to the world that holes in time were opening up and prehistoric monsters were coming through, what would happen?

Some people would be terrified, but would it be justified? Shouldn’t they be more worried about being killed in London traffic?

Other people would be hunting the anomalies. What would happen if they found one? Would they go through? Of course they would! Who wouldn’t? Would they change history?

The anomalies are an extremely dangerous phenomena – one that threatens the very existence of all we would call reality.

This is a secret best kept to as few people as possible. People will continue to die either way, but which way are the stakes higher? In this case, it isn’t possible to find out without choosing the later course.

The point is made that the girl died because of the secret. Did she? She found a flippin’ saber-tooth kitten in her garage and decided to raise it – no matter what she thought it was, that was not a sane course of action. Nor was it sane when she buried her boyfriend that the cat had killed.

What would she have done differently if she’d known the kitten had come through a time anomaly? Turned him in to be destroyed? Not likely – she’d have done the exact same thing.

Therein seems to lie the problem – no one is bothering to think about the situations or characters before they write these stories.

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