Reviews Series / Primeval

Episode 1 review

An excellent start to an excellent series.

This episode introduces us to the characters of Nick, Stephen, Connor, Abby and Claudia, and sees them travelling to the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire (yay!) to do battle with a large prehistoric predator.

The episode gets off to a fairly slow start, but this is necessary to introduce the characters. Fortunately, the story is interesting and entertaining, and once we finally get to the action scenes, they're good. This episode also makes use of a fair bit of humour, which more some recent episodes have lacked somewhat, and it really is quite funny. In particular, the scene with James Lester is very amusing.

The creatures in this episode include Rex, the show's loveable mascot, as well as a Scutosaurus and a Gorgonopsid, all of which are brought to life with reasonably convincing CGI. Presumably Somewhere A Palaeontologist Is Crying at the supposed experts with their repeated references to pre-Triassic animals as "dinosaurs", but this is unlikely to bother most viewers. In fairness, they do acknowledge that the creatures are not actually dinosaurs... and then proceed to call them that anyway.

This episode also introduces the Helen Cutter mystery in a very intriguing manner. She is introduced as a backstory character, seemingly dead, but there are clues that there may be more to her disappearance than meets the eye...