Primeval – Series 2 – Episode 5 – Review (Spoilers)

It’s rather like a sudoku puzzle that you’ve almost finished, and then realize you’ve made a mistake somewhere along the way…

Synopsis
A little girl and her dog enter a new anomaly to a barren and sandy world.

Conner’s machine has gone haywire. He discovers that spyware is intercepting the warnings and routing them elsewhere.

Helen turns up at Stephen’s flat again and continues to lead him to believe Cutter is part of a conspiracy and that he’s shut out. While he’s not looking, she contacts Leek, who has a team of mercenaries waiting the enter the anomaly. The mercenaries are sent through.

Cutter arrives and Leek scarpers.

On the other side of the anomaly, the mercenaries see the little girl, trapped. Their leader refuses to go help her. In fact, she’s trying to help them, but it’s to late. Something under the sand wipes them out.

Conner has a new machine, an RC robot, which he sends through. It relays telemetry and video back. From the low oxygen and high CO2 levels, Cutter concludes it is the Silurian or Ordovician on the other side. They see the girl and Cutter and Stephen go to rescue her.

On the other side, they discover the remains of the mercenary expedition, and make it to the girl before the creatures get them. The anomaly closes.

Stephen confronts Cutter when it becomes obvious that he knows something about a conspiracy. Stephen points out that he can never trust Cutter because of this.

A new anomaly opens and, with the help of the girl, they escape the giant (10-15 meter long) scorpion-like insects and jump through the new anomaly into a paleolithic-renenactment amusement park in modern day Ol’ Blighty.

Once again the day is saved, except that Conner broke off his relationship with Carolyn via text message (against Abby’s recommendation as to the means), and she’s trashed the flat and (possibly) killed Rex. Will Conner ever be able to say, “I love you” again to Abby now that he’s responsible for the death of her pet?

Analysis
It’s another “pick on” episode, with some shocking liberties taken with science, but should I be surprised by now?

But let’s start at the other end of the spectrum: Stephen.

You can really feel his anguish, can’t you? Here’s the man he’s worked with and trusted and a dear friend for years, keeping secrets from him. Keeping secrets from him about suspicions (but no conclusive proof) about a third person or persons. Betrayed! Oh the humanity! Stephen what a martyr you are… you hypocritical son of a bitch!

Whoops! Was I sleeping with your wife, Cutter? Did I forget to tell you that? Sorry, I had a little secret from you.

Oh, did she seem to be turning out as the seeming villainess in this story? Well, I guess it’s OK if she runs around my flat naked, take showers (anything else?) and fails to give us the answers we really need. Oh, and while I’m at it, I won’t bother to mention to anyone on my team that she’s still around.

Yeah, Stephen, you’re a fine one to be condemning Cutter on secrets and conspiracies.

“Scumbag” is too nice a word for you.

Meanwhile, what have we learned about this conspiracy? Well, the goal in the last few episodes has been to delay Cutter and his team finding the anomalies. We now know that Helen and Leek are arranging for heavily armed mercenaries to enter the anomalies, without the slightest clue where they are going, equipped with only a plastic cat carrier (“Here, kitty kitty! Nice kitty kitty”), into the past attempting to recover something. Presumably, since they don’t know where they’re going (and don’t seem to care), they must not care what they bring back, either.

That sounds like a really well thought-out plan, doesn’t it? In the eight or nine years Helen has been wandering in and out of the anomalies, she hasn’t been able to collect cat-sized specimens? She’s certainly survived without the benefit of heavily-armed mercenaries – something they couldn’t do for an hour.

So, the plot still doesn’t add up, let’s look at the science.

I suppose I have no reason to believe one way or the other, but somehow, I don’t think Conner’s robot would be able to work via remote control on the other side of the anomaly, nor would I expect it to be able to transmit back.

Assuming it did transmit back the telemetry, would Cutter really be able to say that it was “Silurian or Ordovician”?

The writer tries to get themselves out of doing their homework by surprising our heroes with the gigantic scorpions. Yes, that’s one of nature’s little surprises that our paleontologists weren’t aware of.

OK, I’ll buy that because we are talking 488 to 416 million years ago. As the rocks get older, there’s an increasing chance that they have been eroded away. Who knows what fossils were lost forever even before mankind evolved?

72 Million years is a long time, and lot was happening on Earth during those years. Certainly during this time there were primitive land vegetation and the encroachment of life on land, but… 15 meter sand-dwelling scorpions? Not only does nothing like it appear in the fossil record, it would completely invalidate the current understanding of the progression of life on land. Not since Doctor Who and the Silurians do I recall someone so completely screwing up the geologic timescale.

Ignoring that, just ask questions like: What would they eat? Why would they grow so large? Predators evolve to consume prey, what is their prey? The millipede-like things were too small to be a logical match to the scorpions. Where do the scorpions get their water?

Yes, there were giant sea scorpions, which may have made a push onto land, but insects and arachnids breath by absorption. In a sea-based creature, the oxygen content of the water plus the natural buoyancy results in size limits different from a similarly organized land creature. It’s thought that the giant insects of the Carboniferous (359-299 MYA) were possible because that period of time had very high oxygen levels. Conner’s robot detected low oxygen content in the atmosphere, exactly the opposite of what you’d need for gigantism in scorpions. The low oxygen was confirmed by Cutter and Stephen when they went through.

All of this assumes Cutter was even remotely close on his estimate of the time period. Who’s to say they weren’t on a high desert plain in the late Permian or early Triassic?

Come on writers! 20 minutes with Wikipedia wouldn’t hurt before you start writing.

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