Primeval – Episode 4 – Review

“We’ve blown our budget, let’s make an inexpensive episode.”

Synopsis
Helen Cutter has been taken into custody, but she’s being uncooperative. She says she’ll tell all she knows, but only to her husband.

She warns Cutter that a pride of Smilodons are located near an anomaly that opens into London. If they come through, countless lives will be lost. She says she will show them where the anomaly is but only if she can show them personally. Claudia and Lester are certain that she plans to escape. Cutter is more trusting.

Meanwhile Conner has a problem. he’s been kicked out of his flat and convinces Abby to let him stay on her sofa. His “friends” plant a GPS tracking unit on him to discover what his secret is.

Helen leads them to a football stadium where the anomaly is located inside a meat storage area. She leaps through the anomaly. Stephen and Capt. Ryan chase her through the anomaly only to discover themselves on a plain surrounded by dozens of anomalies. She has escaped.

After Stephen and Ryan return, dodos begin coming out of the anomaly. They round up the comical birds and run most of them back through the anomaly. Unbeknownst to them, two dodos escape. One is found dead, the other swallows the GPS tracking back on Connor’s backpack and gets out of the stadium where Conner’s friends capture it and take it home. They believe it to be a cloned experiment conducted by the secret government who obviously have an underground base beneath the football stadium.

The dead dodo is taken for autopsy and starts moving. Inside is a giant parasite which killed its host. The other also has the parasite and attacks Tom, infecting him. In pain he goes to the hospital where an MRI shows there’s a something in his body. The doctor says he needs immediate surgery to try to remove it but Tom bites him and escapes. By now, Cutter’s team knows Tom has been infected and are hunting for him.

Paranoid, in pain and under the influence of the parasite, Tom refuses to cooperate. Instead, he tracks down the dead dodo as evidence of the conspiracy. Abby has the dodo and is cornered by Tom. He refuses to believe anyone might help him, but Abby convinces him she’ll show him the truth and takes him to the football stadium.

The anomaly has vanished. Tom thinks it is a trap, so Abby flees for her life. He catches her just as Conner and the others catch up to him. The SAS prepare to kill him, but Conner stands in the way. He talks Tom into not hurting Abby and then Tom dies.

Conner wants to quit, but Cutter convinces him that Tom would have loved it that he was part of a secret project that only a handful of people know about.

Analysis

It’s very obvious in this episode that the episode has a different director than the previous ones. The style is more music video and juvenile, with more obvious music injected into the show.

This is more of a personal story and CGI is kept to a minimum. Cutter’s personal story is that he refuses to believe his wife is the evil villain that everyone else knows her to be.

Conner’s story is that he has to deal with his friends, who both screw him over (again) and then, ultimately, pay a very heavy price indeed.

Although Cutter doesn’t credit the notion, the infected dodos appear to be a coordinated attack on the present-day. The “spaghetti junction of anomalies” does not appear to be located on the island of Mauritius, so the dodos either wandered out of one anomaly and into another minutes after Helen escaped or they were somehow “sent” to the present.

At the end of this episode, we’ve learned almost nothing new about the anomalies except that there are lots of them “somewhere” and that Helen definitely either can control them, or knows where and when they’ll be.

Next week pterosaurs terrorize (or is that pterrorize?) London.

Note that Primeval has been renewed for a second series.

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