Monday, April 06, 2009

Primeval - Episode 2 (season 3)

They certainly know how to do spooky scary suspense, don't they? This episode of Primeval was full of it. Most of this episode was set in a spooky abandoned house containing a scary sprite-like monster which was always creeping up on people.

It all started with Cutter discovering, via a weird, wire-frame 3-D model (best line in the episode - "Couldn't you have done all this on a computer?"), that he could predict where anomalies would appear. But not when - which is kind of limiting considering they could appear at any point in time within millions of years. Of course, Helen Cutter must already have some way of predicting when/where anomalies appear or go to because she's able to use them so well.

Anyway, this model showed that an anomaly should appear in an old abandoned house so (some of) the team went off ghost hunting. I mean, dinosaur hunting. Except this week's creature was certainly not dinosaur-like. Must be a future monster (any ol' excuse to have a sneaky, chameleon, imp-like creature). There was also stuff about some kids going missing in the house years ago - obviously they went through an anomaly. So - y'know - the usual stuff.

This episode was creepy and scary but it did drag at times. The story could have been told in a half hour episode not 45 minutes. Lots of atmospheric shots and suspenseful score as folk crept around used as padding but not too much story. Still, the scariness was done well for an early evening TV show.

The main interesting bits were the introduction of Danny Quinn - hopefully, he'll be back (he left the police force in the end so he could join up) - and Helen Cutter getting her henchmen to steal her husband's DNA, setting up next week's clone episode. In fact, the preview of next week's episode looked pretty exciting. Again, another surprisingly good episode. Grade: Fine.

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