The Dinosaur Box
Primeval. Dinotopia. Terra Nova. Primal. Did you know how many dinosaur TV dramas there are? Or that some of them are actually good? Switch on The Dinosaur Box with hosts Thomas Gomersall and Darby Knight as we sink our teeth into every paleo drama you've ever watched, and some you probably haven't too. Featuring detailed and (we hope) humourous breakdowns of characters, themes, production histories and of course, creatures, this is the podcast for anyone who loves dinosaurs, storytelling or any combination of the two.
The Dinosaur Box
Primeval Series 2: Something's Changed... (1/2)
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Back for two more bites! After an already strong Series 1, Primeval Series 2 ups the ante to 11 with its creatures, characters, ambition and imagination, rightfully earning its reputation as, quite simply, one of the very best of the show. Join Tom, Darby and guest host, O’Reilly Carroll, in the first of this two-part review, as we revisit the best sci-fi HQ set ever built for British television, the (literal) alternate timelines Series 2 could have taken, a surprisingly complex debate of government censorship vs public transparency, and our volcanic rage at a character with a disturbing taste for recreating Fatal Attraction's bunny boiler scene with a freezer and our favourite Permian reptile.
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Hello and welcome to the Dinosaur Box, the podcast where we dig up and study dinosaur TV shows to see what makes them thrive or go extinct. I'm your host, Thomas Gomersal. And I'm your co-host, Darby Knight. And joining us for the first of what I hope will be many times on this podcast is yet another guest host, a recent paleo pal of mine, and one of literally only three people in the whole world I've ever met with the same level of paleo nurdery as me. Please welcome to the Dinosaur Box, O'Reilly Carroll.
SPEAKER_04Hello, nice to meet everyone.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I'm really yeah, nice to have you on, O'Reilly. So just very quickly, do you want to quickly explain who you are and how you ended up on this podcast?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, it's quite an interesting story because obviously um met you when I was on a post-night out to the museum with an ex-girlfriend. So I was still um dressed all quite weird in like a leather jacket and boots and stuff, because I was out at a bar last night, and we went to the museum for a laugh because it was nearby. Uh, and while I was talking to her about just uh the exhibits there, I think it was like Cenozoic mammals or something. Uh Tom comes along and is like, Oh, are you talking about that? You know, it's like, yeah, it looks like the one from Walking with Beasts, doesn't it? And then control from there.
SPEAKER_05That was specifically what it was. It was you mentioning Walking with Beasts, and I'm like, okay, I I gotta introduce myself to this guy. Yeah, I don't meet people like this very often, so I gotta take the chances when I get them.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and uh we kind of stood there talking for a while until eventually I think my then girlfriend got fed up with it, and uh you went off to go and see there was like a sci-fi exhibit or something odd at the time.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, we swapped WhatsApp numbers though, and we've kept in touch ever since.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. So um, as for how you ended up on this podcast, uh just plenty of different nights out where we've been together and we've just been talking uh predominantly about Prime Evil or any other of the old British dinosaur shows from the 2000s, and you thought I had some very interesting things to say on those nights out, so now I've ended up here.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. So um on that note, just quickly, what is your history with Prime Evil exactly?
SPEAKER_04Um I grew up with it essentially. So uh it was on the it first came to TV when I was about five years old, I think. I loved dinosaurs growing up, so it was perfect for me. I remember when I was at school, I used to trade stickers in the playground and stuff with classmates, which was quite fun. I had a bunch of the figurines and toys and stuff. And uh yeah, no, I I'd grown up with it. It was a very big thing for me when I was a kid.
SPEAKER_05So this is so unlike my experience growing up as a primeval fan. Like I had nobody to talk to about this at all, as you know if you listen to the well, you do know because you listened to the pilot episode a while back.
SPEAKER_04Oh yeah, yeah, of course, yes.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. Long time listener, first-time podcaster.
SPEAKER_04Yes, this is my first time doing anything like this.
SPEAKER_02As far as I was concerned at school, everyone was very much in camp Doctor Who, and I was very much alone in the minority, I think. I guess in the eyes of a lot of people, it was just seen as too nerdy compared to the fantasy of Doctor Who. They just wanted to escape rather than risk learning something. But that's just not the area that I came from.
SPEAKER_05Well, then at least one of us had people to talk to about the show growing.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. Obviously it was playground level, so nothing quite in depth, mostly just did you see how awesome that fight was? Did you like the raptors? They were awesome.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, well, now we're adults saying, Hey, wasn't that fight cool? Aren't the raptors cool?
SPEAKER_04Yes, we've kind of become fossils ourselves talking about it.
SPEAKER_05So, anyway, we are finally on to a second series or something on this podcast, having up till now only covered first series and one season duds like Terra Nova, and technically also, and I know people are gonna at me for this, prehistoric park.
SPEAKER_04Oh, yeah, no, you're right there. Prehistoric park, it only needed one season. It would have just become very repetitive otherwise. Would I have liked a second season? Yes. It wasn't necessary, no.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I agree. That premise doesn't have as much legs as a drama series, I don't think. You can't really rotate the cast very effectively to liven it up.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, although that's very much a minority opinion in paleo circles. We're getting cancelled after this.
SPEAKER_04Oh boy. You could have done it, but where would you go? We could open the park to the public, but there's a movie series about that.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. But anyway, we're not talking about that. We're talking about the show that replaced it. So, Prime Evil Series 2. Derby, summarise.
SPEAKER_02Okay, so series two picks up immediately after where series one leaves off. Cutter returns from his trip into the Permian to discover that the world isn't the same one that he left. Their work colleague, Claudia Brown, has just vanished from existence. Nobody remembers her, and Cutter is just completely disoriented by what he's come back to. The Home Office has been replaced by a brand new organisation called the Anomaly Research Centre. And just as he's getting his head around what's happened there, a new team member is introduced who happens to be Claudia Brown's doppelganger, a PR manager called Jenny Lewis. She's a completely different person, she has absolutely no memory or recollection of any of the existing team members, and has come into the entire operation completely unprepared for what the rest of the cast have come used to over the last series. The strain and stress all of this change has put on Cutter adds a lot more additional strain onto his tenuous relationship with his friend Stephen, who at the end of the last series it was revealed was actually having an affair with Cutter's wife, Helen, before she disappeared. And throughout the series, the rift with them only widens, they have really conflicting viewpoints on how to undertake their work, control the anomalies, and more importantly, public opinion, and Helen decides to get in the middle of both of them even further and sort of almost feed poison into Stephen's ear, bigging up his ego and leading to a real breakdown of the relationship between him and Cutter. At the same time, Abby and Connor, who've reached a sort of happy, playful, platonic point in their friendship, have their dynamic upended by the arrival of Connor's new girlfriend, who picks him up in a video store, a young woman called Caroline. While Connor's swept off his feet, Abby gets a strong dislike for her from pretty much the first time she sets eyes on Caroline.
SPEAKER_05Loathing. An adulterated loathing, as the song in Wicked goes.
SPEAKER_02And Abby and Connor eventually come to blows over Caroline's, let's say, mannerisms and attitudes towards Abby and also Rex, more on that later. And that just takes the lid off of all the buried feelings they have for each other. Abby's gut feelings about Caroline actually turn out to be spot on as we discover that she's actually being paid by one of the ARC team members that didn't exist before Cutter's return to the present, and that is Oliver Leek, who has his own nefarious schemes and plotting going on behind the scenes right under all of the team's noses. Eventually the team catch wind that there's someone working against them, and they set out to try and expose the mole within their organization. But Leek is prepared for them, he's actually in league with Helen as well as Caroline, and the team end up getting captured by him and learn that he's been taking creatures and keeping them for his own personal menagerie as a kind of strange creature army.
SPEAKER_05Joey's still out on exactly why.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and then all hell breaks loose when all of the creatures Leek has been collecting break out within his private complex, leading to, let's say, is it the best series finale that the show had during its run?
SPEAKER_05Oh yeah, totally, apart from, in my controversial opinion, the penultimate episode of series five, but we'll get to that in about three series time. So when we covered Primeval Series 1, I mentioned that most fans of the show tend to consider either the first or the second series as their favourite. So naturally, of course, the question must be which camp do we fall into? O'Reilly, you're the guesser, you go first.
SPEAKER_04I think series two is the best season. Um it is actually, to be fair, it is a toss-up between series one and two, but I think series two is the best one. It just has a lot more going on. It's visually very impressive, it's held up amazing. There's lots of bright colours, lots of different scenery that we get to see. Uh the characters are more fun to follow in this one, and of course, uh to fill that stupid child brain of mine. There's a big monster mash at the end with everything, and it's awesome. So there's that. Uh yeah, it's great.
SPEAKER_02I think I would largely agree with that. While I don't think series two is as good as series one in terms of writing, it is arguably where prime evil was the most fun, colourful, ambitious, and I guess just shameless with its premise. It just took it and ran, it had the confidence. It was also the start of some of the things that would plague the show in series three and drag it down eventually. But at this point in time they were very minor nitpicks, and on the whole, it was just a fantastically executed series.
SPEAKER_05I kind of struggled to choose between them for a while because, like I said in the series one episode, I do really love the sense of novelty to that series. But all things considered, I think I would have to pick series two. I think it has one of the most interesting creature assemblages in all the five series. It really ups the ambition in terms of storylines, effects, filming locations, etc. And there are some very exciting developments in the Abby and Connor love story, which as you guys know is pretty much half the reason I watched this show.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, this is certainly the series that really set that bar as high as it would go, and I think they set themselves a very tall order in trying to match, let alone exceed that later on.
SPEAKER_05Getting into the personals here, this is also the series that I remember having the most fun in in the lead up to. I remember I was on the official primeval website pretty much every day for about two months before it aired, and I was just constantly theorising on what was going to happen based on the little tidbits they would drop the closer it got to the premiere. And I don't feel I ever got quite that same level of excitement in the lead up to the other series. I mean, don't get me wrong, I definitely did get excited, and I definitely did do a lot of the same stuff as I did prior to series two, but I don't think I ever felt quite the same sort of thrill again for the other series.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, it's a bit different for me, but that's also because I was just so much younger at the time. I hadn't really kind of grown up to the point where I could like wait on the internet and get excited for things up until series three ended. But I remember looking at magazines, oh my god, primeval's finally gonna be on again. Let's go, that's good.
SPEAKER_02I think the only time the thrill really got close for me was when they announced series four, with the trailer led in by Andrew Lee Potts, thanking everyone for wanting the show to come back. And on on a bit of a side tangent, I did go back and start watching all the old series trailers before this. And interestingly, the series three trailer, I can sort of understand why we didn't get that vibe, because there were like unfinished VFX shots in it, and it was all very much focused on action and explosions rather than anything really story-related.
SPEAKER_05True story, I was so pumped to see the second series that I remember having a vivid dream that I was watching an episode of it where an anomaly flooded a building and let a whole school of razor-snouted Ichthya source through. This was before they'd released most of the synopsis for the episodes. And being a dumb 13-year-old at the time, I became convinced that I'd seen a premonition of an actual episode, and so I tried to replicate the same conditions before I went to sleep that night to see if I could effectively dream watch another episode, like Inception or that shit.
SPEAKER_04Which that's quite funny. I had thought I'd seen the movie about a month before it'd come out.
SPEAKER_02No, it's it's weird, it's weird that you say that because when I wrote my first paleo-themed novel, it must have been what, 2012? The climax of that was a Giganotosaurus fighting a Therizinosaurus and both of them going at it. And then when I was sitting in Dominion and I saw them both just on screen together, I was like, am I actually gonna get that in a film? I I I did that! That was me! You stole from me!
SPEAKER_04Yep. Universal really has no original ideas left, did it?
SPEAKER_05Reminds me of that South Park episode where Cartman makes his fake dances with Smirth's film, and then by the end it's been made into Avatar. Oh crazy. So if you haven't seen this whole show before and you listened to the ending of our last primeval episode, you might be wondering: does Cutter ever find out what happened to Eraze Claudia Brown from the timeline, or get her back, or find out if it had anything to do with those two baby future predators that were left alive in the Permian? And the answer to that question is uh well.
SPEAKER_02No. No, he doesn't. Doesn't even come close. We'll get more into the reasons why when we cover series three, but yeah, sorry to disappoint.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, for all the emphasis placed on Claudia's disappearance at the end of series one, there really isn't much exploration of that at all here. Nor even really much attempt on Cutter's part to find out what the change to the timeline even was or how to get her back. The only time we get anything like that is in the first episode when they return the Raptors to their home era, and he decides he's gonna stay in the Cretaceous to try and restore the timeline, which is a flawed idea at best given the point where the timeline change occurred was hundreds of millions of years before that time.
SPEAKER_04And it's a pretty suicidal idea, to be honest. Yeah, let's just um lock myself in the past in a desert with no supplies and potentially hyper-aggressive predators running about. Nice.
SPEAKER_02I think it's funny that you mention that because uh where did I see or hear it? But in the original script, Cutter just wanted to go out into the Cretaceous to die, and Stephen follows him through to talk him out of it. Um a little bit of Stephen's dialogue, you can kind of tell that that was sort of an idea they were playing with when he says, What? Were you just gonna stay and die out here? But yeah, I agree. Outside of Cutter's initial despair and getting to grips with all the big changes in the first episode and then Jenny Lewis in the next few, it just sort of forgets about Claudia a little bit and trying to work out what happens to her. It's just sort of Cutter coming to terms with, Oh, stuff's happened, I don't know how to deal with it.
SPEAKER_05Well, it's not only that, it's also that they set up at the end of series one like the world has been drastically horribly changed by the actions in the Permian, and Claudia's disappearance is just the tip of the iceberg. But really, pretty much nothing else has majorly changed apart from this one particular thing that we'll get to in a minute. The other characters are all the same as they were in series one. They have all the same memories as before, minus Claudia. Their relationships are all the same. You could argue that Abby's flat looks different to how it did in series one, but that's not exactly a noteworthy change.
SPEAKER_02And she drives a brand new model of a Mini Cooper instead of a vintage model.
SPEAKER_04And Connor got some fashion, which I'd love to know what evolutionary change caused that. That would be great for an explanation.
SPEAKER_05The ironic thing is, according to that 2021 Radio Times article about primeval, Adrian Hodges had originally intended for Cutter to come back and noticed that several creatures had evolved differently in the new timeline to the way that evolved in the old one, which would have been a good in-universe explanation for some of the wackier creature designs later on in the show, like the Draco Rex in Series 3 or the Caprasuchus in Series 4.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, that would have given them kind of almost the Jurassic World excuse where it's like, well, of course they don't look realistic because the timeline changed, so ha.
SPEAKER_05Which is honestly better than anything Henry Woe came up with in the movie.
SPEAKER_04Oh yeah. No, that's well, that uh leads to some horrendous level fanboy arguing.
SPEAKER_05But you had an interesting point about this, O'Reilly, which is that erasing Claudia from the timeline actually kind of undoes the whole show.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, it means that series one could not have actually happened because without Claudia existing, she never meets Cutter, which means that they don't get the government involved on their wild goose chase in the forest of Dean, which leads to them finding the Scudosaurus. Would Abby have even become part of the team if they never went out with her? Like how would any of this work? Claudia was quite instrumental to putting the team together. So I just want to know how all of this went ahead.
SPEAKER_02Do you want the hand-wavy explanation? Yeah, sure, that would be good. Uh Tim Haynes said in an interview that Helen went back further and manipulated the timeline to lead to the arc's creation, but then he provided no further details on that. So we can only assume that she made sure the right individuals ended up in the right place. Why why would she do that though?
SPEAKER_04That doesn't help her in any way, shape, or form. That is probably actually a negative for her, unless she really needs things that happen that we don't find out until like series three anyway to happen. But alright. Uh it's very much just yeah, you're right, it's very hand-wavy, it's just like, well, Helen did it.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, and it also doesn't really make sense in the show as presented in the final copy because you get the impression that Helen's just as surprised at some of these changes as Cutter is. Like when she very first meets Jenny in the final episode of series two, she's kind of almost stunned that Claudia Brown has been remade in a different image. So it doesn't really seem like she's really controlling anything.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, it is a very weird explanation that just doesn't really make sense.
SPEAKER_05It does kind of beg the question, why was this whole alternative timeline idea cut? I remember Darby when we were talking about this a while back, one possibility you suggested was that the show already had like four different storylines to juggle, so that didn't really leave Adrian Hodges the time and wiggle room he needed to work this plot in the way he wanted to.
SPEAKER_02Oh yeah, definitely, because you already had, as we've said, the plot of people working against the arc inside the organisation. You've got the Stephen and Helen plot, the Connor and Abbey plot, and the cutter now contending with Jenny Lewis slash Claudia Brown plot as well. So to add in, oh creatures are all evolving differently, and we don't know why, may have just tipped everything in the wrong direction in terms of balance. We've covered La Brea and how that just got tangled into a mess of plot lines. So I think at least in this instance, they were very conscious of okay, a cut's got to be made somewhere to try and keep a streamlined focus. And unfortunately it was the alternative timeline plot that went by the wayside, but series one was a very character-given exercise, so I guess they just maybe prioritised the character-driven storylines over the high concept.
SPEAKER_05Which is a shame because I think the high concept thing would have made it that much more interesting. I just it kind of drives me mad thinking about what sort of areas they could have taken the show in if they'd stuck to their guns on this.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, me too. It would have been really easy to, I guess, sort of build and implement in pieces as well, with simple things like the creature design, perhaps running into one or two other people that Cutter is convinced he knows, but they have no recollection of him. And eventually there, there could have been enough to sway the rest of the team of okay, this alternative timeline thing is something we should probably look into.
SPEAKER_05Another theory I've heard is that it might have been down to network meddling. Basically, the execs at ITV would have mandated X number of action scenes in return for that sweet, sweet financial backing, which combined with the four or so storylines that series two was already having to juggle, like we said, that would not have left Padrian Hodges the space he needed to really explore this idea the way he wanted to. And there are certain scenes that do feel that way when you watch them with that context in mind. For instance, in episode three, there's a scene where Cutter and Abby are digging a pitfall trap for a Smilodon, saber-toothed cat for the layperson, and they find a dead body buried there, and they barely even have time to register this before the Smilodon shows up and attacks them. Abby has this scene where she uses an excavator to fight it, like she's Ellen Ripley battling the alien queen. Get away from him, you bitch. And then meanwhile, Cutter escapes by climbing up a rope ladder nearby and zip lines to safety while the Smilodon chases after him, and then it corners him on the platform at the end. I mean, it's a cool action sequence, but it serves no purpose in the narrative and actually interrupts the flow of the story from when Cutter and Abby find the body. So in that regard, it does feel like something that was written in mainly by network decree.
SPEAKER_02I think ITV had clocked on to the appeal of British sci-fi shows in the States and how I think primeval around this time was gaining traction over there as well. So they wanted to lean into the flashy, action-based aspects of the show that they could really easily market to a mass audience in the States, which I think is why they sort of upped the number of action scenes they had to play with and show off, particularly in this series, and even more so in series three.
SPEAKER_05That kind of annoys me, to be honest. Like, I know they were planning to distribute the show on BBC America eventually, but I don't think they should have compromised the storytelling just for that. I mean you think of someone like Ardman, they never compromised their creative integrity to appeal to the masses. Not even when they were partnering with DreamWorks and had Jeffrey Katzenberg breathing down their necks on Curse of the Ware Rabbit saying, Oh, make this less British, change that for American audiences. I think they should just have been allowed to make the show the way Adrian Hodges wants it, and then let the Yanks take it or leave it.
SPEAKER_02I know, but Uh money and spreadsheets talk, I think it certainly stinks of trying to appeal to the American market.
SPEAKER_04The episodes definitely do get more action-oriented, but also the stakes in each episode keep getting higher, which is something that I noticed. Like I've got here, we start in a shopping center at night, but near the end of the series, we've got a nine-ton mammoth on a highway where everyone's just up there, it's in broad daylight, everyone can see it. So it keeps going up with the risk factor of the creatures, which if that's because they wanted to keep getting more action-oriented, or if that was the way this show was originally intended to be, I'm not sure.
SPEAKER_05Getting on to the other major change in this new timeline. The team have their own Batcave now, the Anomaly Research Center, or ARC for short.
SPEAKER_02Yes, it's the brand new base of operations instead of just ad hoc offices around the home office. I didn't know this until recently, but it was filmed inside an old tank testing facility, but they just sort of redecorated and kitted out with all of the resources and tech that the team needs.
SPEAKER_05I love how they found a real building to use for the exterior shots of the arc. I mean, what are the chances of an actual building with that sort of wacky sci-fi aesthetic actually existing?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I went there was it uh a couple of months ago, late last year, and yeah, it was kind of surreal just standing outside there knowing all the imaginary things that went on inside. What's the name of that building again? Oh, the Duke of Kent building at the University of Surrey.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, that building has become a holy pilgrimage site for primeval fans.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, no, I've I made the effort to go and at least see it. God forbid, try and get into it because it is private property, so you know, be sensible, everyone.
SPEAKER_05You actually have a checklist of primeval filming locations that you're trying to tick off. I think you've done you've done the arc, you've done the railway station where the smilodon attack happens. Uh what are the other ones?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so I've done Black Park, which is where a lot of the Forest of Dean sets and where Cutter punches out a caveman in series two were both filmed. Uh yeah, done Ropley Station, which is where the Smilodon kill happened, done the Duke of Kent building. I swear there's one more that I've forgotten. But yeah, I've I've got a list of well, a map actually of all the different locations to get to. Some of them are feasible, some of them not, but yeah, just try and get to as many as possible and see how they did things and sort of live it a little bit. Thought Park should be an easy one. Yeah, that's on that's on my list eventually. I mean, it is technically just an hour down the road, but yeah, it's just a case of time and money.
SPEAKER_05You're like one of those people who go to New Zealand just to tick off a checklist of all the lot of the rings filming locations.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, thankfully, primeval was filmed far closer.
SPEAKER_05Much easier to get to. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Um but anyway, let's get back to the actual arc itself. So, what do you want to say about it, guys? When I saw it, I think as a kid, it was the place that I wanted to really live and work in the most if it was real. So I'll try and describe it the best I can. It's got corridors going off into several labs, but a big central atrium with a huge walkway around it that leads up to Leicester's office on the top floor. But at the same time, it feels very grounded, futuristic, and modern at the same time.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, as much as they sort of lean into the whole high sci-fi aesthetic, it does also very much feel like somewhere where people would go to work. Like the team have their own coffee corner, gym, lockers with their names on it.
SPEAKER_04It doesn't really jump the shark in terms of realism, is what it does well. It doesn't go too far with any sort of science fiction things. Like, you know, there's no holograms, there's no floating, never taking tables. It's still all grounded. All of the weapons they use are real weapons that could exist. All the computers are still real, tangible things that existed at the time. It's not far future technology, it still keeps itself grounded.
SPEAKER_05Here's a fun little factoid. There was a video that Andrew Lee Potts posted on Instagram a little while back. He was filming The Witcher and happened to be in the same area where they filmed Primeval. And the framework for the Arc Interior set is still there. He went inside it and you could see the skeletons, as it were, of the corridors and the atriums and everything. And that really blew my mind when you first shared it with me, Darby, because I would have assumed all that stuff would have been taken down long ago.
SPEAKER_02Me too. You think someone would have repurposed it for another production, but no, it just looked pretty much abandoned.
SPEAKER_04That's really impressive. It's still there after so much time.
SPEAKER_05There is apparently some debate over the merits of the team having their own high-tech base versus the more ad hoc approach they were taking to the anomalies in Series 1. What are your thoughts on this, guys?
SPEAKER_02I think in terms of identity and being an icon for the series, the arc has it hands down. It still keeps the excitement and sort of sense of discovery that Series 1 had. And from a storytelling standpoint, this kind of operation would eventually need a centralized base of operations for all their resources and as we see in this series, captured creatures.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, um, I do agree. It was an eventuality kind of thing. They did need to have some sort of hub where everything takes place. The only problem with that I have though is again, it falls back into that. Well, where did all of this actually come from? How long has this been here? Because they'd only had a few episodes beforehand in series one. They couldn't have been doing this for too long. When did they decide to build this? Did they repurpose a building? Or like just where did all of this come from? There's loads of people that work there. You always see people in the background at the arc. How when uh what what happened here? How did or how did all of this just come into existence? Um, and of course, as well, up until the invention of the anomaly detector, it's not necessarily the best thing to have everything kept in one single location. You'd have thought maybe there'd be multiple different outposts up and down in the country because you don't know where the next one's gonna show up.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, it does present a problem in terms of keeping this secret. You've got this massive futuristic building crop up in a not even particularly secluded location, from what I can tell. And then, like you say, there's all these staff working there. Although personally, my feeling is that this operates on spy movie logic where everyone who works there is sworn to secrecy.
SPEAKER_04Oh no, that makes sense. Of course, everyone's gonna have to sign an NDA and all sorts of things. Um just be really fun to be a cleaner at the arc and being like, why have I got to sign all of this that the government will take me and my family away if I say anything? Okay, fine, I won't. I'll just I'll just mop the floors. All right. But um, yeah, it it does it does do that very well. It's just again, like, okay, this giant futuristic building, how quickly was that put up? What is the new timeline here? Makes sense. How fast was that build? Where did it come from? Helen and her futuristic technology. Oh yeah, she has like something from Ant Lime and she just throws it out of her pocket, pours water on it, and then boom, arc. That's actually probably something that series three would actually end up doing if you gave them the idea.
SPEAKER_05Good thing Reddit boards weren't such a big thing in the 2000s. Well, anyway, since you mentioned it, uh Riley, let's talk about the anomaly detection device. I'd like you to meet the anomaly detection device or the ADD for short. Actually, that's probably not the best acronym. So, Darby, do you want to talk a bit about what this thing is and how it comes into being?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so in the first episode of series two, Clutter notices that radios go haywire around anomalies on certain frequencies, and he then tasks Connor with building a device that monitors the radio airwaves for any interference that they can attribute to the anomalies, so they can then pinpoint where that interference is coming from and go and investigate it. So, what are your thoughts on this?
SPEAKER_04It was a necessity to have this series make sense. There is only so many times where it could be like, oh, we've got a call that there's a possible creature in Calgeon and have it make sense that the government had kept this all on the wraps. Uh it's a lot of people.
SPEAKER_05I thought you were gonna say have it not just be another Python in a toilet.
SPEAKER_04Oh no, that that could easily be the case, but it's just um the show needed this sort of MacGuffin to keep it making sense that the government was finding these things first before random people were otherwise it would just start to lose its believabilities. Like, okay, well, how do you just know where they are all of the time?
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I agree. It kind of is in the same sort of boat as the arc itself, in that it's something that they would eventually need to have. And actually, I probably wouldn't have noticed this if it wasn't for Adrian Hodges bringing it up in a series two promotional video, but it also builds on the scene at the end of series one where Cutter and Claudia are talking about how they need to up their game so they're not always playing catch-up with the anomalies, and Carter says, Well, I might have some ideas as to how we might be able to do that. So it's sort of a payoff for that earlier scene.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I agree. It evens up the odds of them getting to the anomalies before something comes through, and it brings a new sense of urgency and a sort of race against time to their response.
SPEAKER_05It's also just really good for showing the progress of the team as well, because you see them really growing and building on what they learn and the observations they make in the field. And I think it's also another case of intellectualism being framed as a virtue, and how the earlier series really used deductive reasoning as a means of problem solving over action and guns.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, those two series were scientific, let's say, in their approach, and I think that was certainly a massive asset to the show.
SPEAKER_05Anyway, let's get on to the characters now. So for this particular primeval character analysis, we're going to be covering a mix of old and new, starting with a character who is appropriately quite literally a mix of old and new, Jenny Lewis, the new timelines version of Claudia Brown.
SPEAKER_02For Jenny, I think they deliberately made her very different in personality to Claudia to really drive home that yes, she is the same person physically, but her life and her interests and how she handles herself is all very different. When we first meet her, she comes across as very confident in herself and her abilities as a public relation officer. She doesn't really listen to Cutter or the team or take their warnings very seriously.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, it's interesting how they choose to take that approach to introducing her. She's very calculating, fairly materialistic and self-centered. She very much seems to think that her job description is some sort of joke and she's actually been hired for some other kind of PR role.
SPEAKER_03Dinosaurs. Oh come on. What's this about really?
SPEAKER_05Of course, she is swiftly disabused of that notion in the second episode when she's attacked by a giant Precambrian worm.
SPEAKER_04Yes. When she's told to take the stairs, she has to take the stairs. She finds that out in a pretty interesting manner.
SPEAKER_02Oh yeah. She realizes just how wrong she was very quickly. She's very, I'd say, protective and conscious of her own image. She is very interested in how she dresses and presents herself. She definitely overprioritizes her clothing in a lot of situations. I think that's in keeping with her character, being the PR manager. She is very conscious of how things look and are perceived. And I think that was what she was trying to put forward, more than being a, say, open-minded and collaborative member of the team. She was just trying to make sure she looked the part for the role.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, she uh probably cares a lot about her presentation because she's much more upper class. And uh, of course, she's going to care more about how she looks and what's going on with her. You know, we know she's upper class because uh at least some of the references to the different things she does, or where she has to go, where she lives, and of course that she likes to go play pigeon shooting.
SPEAKER_05I guess it's also thematically fitting as well, because that's kind of what her whole role is, is to present an image to the public. She has to come up with the face of what the arc wants them to see. So it does make sense she'd be fairly focused on her own image as well.
SPEAKER_02And when it comes to a job, she is very laser-focused on doing it as efficiently as possible. And there's points in the show where she almost tips towards the inhumane side of PR management.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, although the flip side is that does make her very good at her job. She is a damn good influencer, real well influencer, not the Instagram type.
SPEAKER_02She's very good at managing and understanding people to the point of being able to almost manipulate them without them realising they're being manipulated. She gets the job done.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, there's this one scene in the third episode after a paintballer has been killed near a theme park by the Smiler Don, and Cutter is trying to persuade the manager to shut the park down. And Jenny ends up brokering a compromise to just shut down the area where the attack took place, as opposed to shutting down the whole park, on the basis that it would attract unwanted media attention. And she and Carter do have an argument about this, where he points out that the cat could just go to some other part of the park and kill someone there. And she makes the case that avoiding attention from the press is what they need to do to keep the ARC's operation secret. And I liked how that argument showed that they both had good points and neither was fully in the right or wrong here.
SPEAKER_02It was certainly to the show strength when it was deliberating those hard questions and having a actual moral quandary rather than just, ah, we'll shoot our way out of it. I think that's what some of the later episodes ended up being.
SPEAKER_05I think that's a lot of what helps to make Jenny sympathetic, even in the early episodes where she is more self-centered and superficial. It's that you can see there is a logic to what she does. You can understand where she's coming from, and her arguments do make sense.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, she's not just blindsiding and creating obstacles for people for the sake of it. There is rhyme and reason to it, and it's normally her looking at the bigger picture, which sometimes the team are laser-focused on just sorting the creature problem out. They don't see the wider implications of how they're going about it.
SPEAKER_04She's doing what she was hired to do, essentially. She's not there to necessarily save lives, she's there to keep the entire operation under wraps and hidden.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, but all that said, you do also see that she does have a caring side to her. Even as early as the second episode, even after she's just been attacked by this worm, Cutter gives her the option to go back downstairs to safety, and instead she chooses to stay and help the team evacuate people who are trapped. And then afterwards, she then volunteers to go back up and help them deal with the worms once and for all.
SPEAKER_02She has a very firm head on her when she is in dangerous situations like that, I think. Once she'd brokered what was actually happening, she can then rationalise with herself, okay, the best course of action is to stick with the people that are trying to sort this out and just help them sort it out.
SPEAKER_05There's also the scene in episode five with the little girl who's disappeared through an anomaly where she's talking to her stepdad and she has to come up with a story, say, Oh, she fell down a pipe. But she is also very sympathetic to him as well. She's like, I know you're upset, but just let the experts do their job. So you can see that she does have an empathy there to her, and she can play good cop, as it were, with the people she's effectively having to lie to.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, she she does have that ability. I mean, she even uses it to um she uses her sort of charm and charisma to bribe the train spotter to give up his SD card containing the pictures of the Smilodon.
SPEAKER_05I was gonna say when all else fails, she can always resort to bribery and sex appeal, like all the best influencers.
SPEAKER_02She can play all the cards, a true industry professional.
SPEAKER_05It also lends an extra level of realism to the team's activities because eventually they are gonna need a PR person or somebody to explain this stuff away to the public.
SPEAKER_04Definitely. They definitely needed someone like this, because there's only so many times the team could come up with a half-baked excuse on the go or whatever. They would need someone out there to come up with stories for all of the things that were happening, because otherwise you could be stuck in a situation where you've got a mammoth on a motorway and everyone's looking at it and you have no explanation.
SPEAKER_05What do you want to say about her relationship with Cutter?
SPEAKER_02At the beginning, I think she viewed him with a sort of reluctant admiration. He was very clearly the expert and team leader, but he had an odd view of her that had her on edge most of the time.
SPEAKER_05That is to be expected when he's constantly calling her Claudia Brown. Claudia Brown.
SPEAKER_01I think you're confusing me with somebody else.
SPEAKER_00Oh, I I know, I know, I know that you think that your name's Jenny Lewis, but you're actually a woman called Claudia Brown.
SPEAKER_02I'm surprised there's not a supercut out there of all the times cutters mention that name, but anyway, his maverick tendencies cause her concern, but at the same time he proves that he does have her back, even when things do get deadly. And I think he does grow on her quite a bit as the series goes on.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I would agree with that. They do clash at first, but he does eventually very much come to respect her ability to do her job. For instance, in episode three with the Smiler Don, they're investigating this NIMBY farmer with a history of illegal lion breeding, and she's the one who persuades him to open his bomb for them so they can see if he's hiding something inside. And you do see him give her this little approving nod, and then she in turn comes to respect him enough to do the odd favour for him behind Lester's back, like tipping him off about this flooded basement in episode four, which may or may not be the lair of this creature they're looking for.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and of course she's using that charm that she has to work her magic on the farmer slash liebreeder, as opposed to this kind of almost brute force bit.
SPEAKER_02They sort of mutually understand each other's strengths and roles and learn to concede to each other when it's better for one to lead in a certain situation over the other.
SPEAKER_05So what do you think are the compare and contrast points between Jenny and Claudia?
SPEAKER_02Jenny certainly has a ruthlessness to her that Claudia didn't have. She's not afraid of gaslighting or manipulating or flaunting herself to get the job done.
SPEAKER_05I'd say she is definitely a bit more strong-willed than Claudia. Like in episode two, when they're dealing with the worms in the office block, and Carter orders her to stay in the lobby, she argues with him and demands to be allowed to see what's going on. Whereas I do feel Claudia would have stayed put in that situation. I mean, Helen even points out when they finally meet that she's, quote, a little more aggressive than the original.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and I mean, like getting back to that, she's much more stubborn. Uh like again, with the office block, okay, take the stairs, and she goes, all of those flights and heels, no chance.
SPEAKER_02They're both very persistent characters, though. That persistence is still there.
SPEAKER_05I would say though that Claudia, as good as a character as she was, she never really grew all that much in the narrative. Pteranodon incident aside, I feel like she always trusted Cutter and believed in him. Whereas Jenny starts off in the opposite position, and her arc in series two is about coming to trust him and find a balance between their two styles of working.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, definitely. Claudia in series one is sort of caught between work pressures and how she really feels about Cutter and the rest of his team. Whereas here, this is someone completely out of their depth, being given an impossible task, and the team helping her to learn a new way of working with them to go around doing it, and she sort of mellows somewhat and becomes a core, important, and reliable part of the crew as things go on.
SPEAKER_05I think if I had to choose between the two of them, I think I'd say I prefer Jenny as a character over Claudia, partly because, as we said, she does have a much more appreciable arc than Claudia ever did, and also partly by virtue of the fact that we do spend a lot more time with her over the course of the show.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think because of series two Jenny has a lot more sticking power in the minds of viewers. Claudia very much went from being a focal plot point to a mere footnote by series three, unfortunately.
SPEAKER_05So moving on to an old character now, Steven. Now, we didn't really talk about Steven much in the series one episode, partly because there's not really that much to talk about him in series one, as there he's basically just the action hero and the bland piece of ass for Abby's somewhat misguided affections. But in series two, he becomes a much more interesting and dynamic character, because this series for him is very much about his fall from grace.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. Um Steven he still has kind of the action man kind of role that he had in the first series. But his personality's definitely shown off more. He's got more to do, he's more than just oh, he's the cool guy that drives the truck into the Gorgon opposite and throws guns around. He still does that kind of stuff, but now we're learning about how he feels in relation to his affair with Helen, as well as also kind of bashing heads with Cutter.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and it eventually costs him all of the things that he holds dear.
SPEAKER_05It's very much a classic Greek tragedy, I would say, because he started off series one very much as the golden boy. He was Cutter's best friend, Abby's love interest, the action hero of the show. And then one by one, largely through his own bad choices, he loses almost all of those things by the end of series two.
SPEAKER_02He sort of becomes more entranched in an opposing stance that keeping the anomalies a secret is wrong of them to do, and that the team should have a moral change of direction, let's say, in how they operate. Do you ever wonder if what we're doing is right?
SPEAKER_03Maybe the anomalies have a purpose. Maybe we should stop fighting and face them. People should know what's happening. Because we're gonna need you to prepare for whatever comes next.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, it is an interesting debate that the show introduces here because, like you say, he takes the view that they shouldn't operate in secrecy anymore, whereas Cutter very much clings to the way they've always done it. Um, what do you guys think are the pros and cons of both sides of this argument?
SPEAKER_04Obviously, with the public knowing, that could be a huge, huge disaster. We already saw in series one that when people find out about what's going on, like Tom and Duncan. Things can go horrifically, horrifically wrong. Uh and that was a really rather minor incident where two people happened to find out because they were basically spying on their friend. Imagine letting the entire populace know that oh, there's this warp through time that happen now, and you could wake up tomorrow with something in your basement trying to eat you. Um there's so many different ways that it could go badly wrong, especially with you know, there could be thrill seekers who go through the anomalies, or you could have corporations wanting to go through and they end up flattening up the timeline and accidentally erasing the human race.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I'd say it gets even worse when you take it from the angle of political extremists trying to alter reality to their ideology. They could potentially try and weaponize it that way. So it can get incredibly messy and far-reaching, far beyond just people have the right to know, which is what Stephen thinks is the ultimate stopping point.
SPEAKER_04You find an anomaly that opens up in the 1960s or in the 1930s, and a political extremist finds out about this. Oh dear. Suddenly the Cuban Missile Crisis actually happened. Uh and it's actually something that would probably be interesting for the show to explore if it were to ever come back.
SPEAKER_05I feel like this is something the Twilight Zone would explore more than primeval level would.
SPEAKER_04Definitely, but it's it's still a risk that could happen.
SPEAKER_05But then again, you could also argue that keeping people in the dark is what has led to tragedies happening already. I mean, episode three very pointedly makes the case for that. And then the incident with the mammoth on the M25 has a pretty high-stakes situation that happens in part because the people involved don't really understand fully what they're dealing with.
SPEAKER_04I think whatever sort of tragedies are happening as a result of people not knowing, like the odd person getting gobbled up by a Velociraptor in a shopping centre, is much better than war or completely erasing humanity.
SPEAKER_02The episode three instance is interesting because you could argue that the fact that Steven says something is what makes it worse. Because in that episode, uh the character Valerie misunderstood what was going on.
SPEAKER_05Remember that name, we'll be coming back to her.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and because Stephen says something, she then leaps to completely the wrong conclusion, takes some irrational action, and perhaps would have been safer had Stephen not said anything at all.
SPEAKER_05You do see him having to wrestle with his conscience in the scenes where he's having to play along with the cover-up or lie to someone about it. It provides a complexity to Stephen's character that wasn't really there in series one.
SPEAKER_02It does. There was little hints that he potentially had a different view of how things should have gone, but it's not really until the anomaly operation here is more formalised and professionalised that he sort of thinks maybe this isn't the right way of going about all of this.
SPEAKER_04The other thing with this though is Cutter's argument switches as a result of what happens when he goes into the Permian. Season 1 Cutter probably would have agreed with Steven. Well, we could start off by telling everyone the truth. But after seeing the consequences of it, he doesn't. Which obviously does not help the already fragile state the relationship is in.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, his view is very much that if people knew about it, it could cause chaos based on his own experience. And also, how could you even really prepare people for something this unpredictable and unknowable? I mean, look at the sort of job we did with COVID.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, there's no real way you could prepare anyone for this by just being like, so there's this kind of like time earthquake that happens and it might lead to a dinosaur being in the shopping centre. Like, what what how do you even go about explaining this?
SPEAKER_02Even if you did try and bring something like this out into the public, you'd be decried as lunatic, a prank, a hoax. People just ignore any in all safety advice. Anomaly deniers.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02And then you get social media influencers going to try and identify and video and live stream these things for clout, and it would just become a horrific mess.
SPEAKER_05Oh my god, yeah. Can you imagine what this would be like if primeval had come out in the age of TikTok? Killed on live stream. Oh boy.
SPEAKER_04But that's what the conspiracies would be great though.
SPEAKER_05But that's what makes it interesting, I'd think. It's the fact that there isn't necessarily a right answer to this, which is why I feel it's unfortunate that it was never really explored beyond series two.
SPEAKER_02What's even more frustrating is that they did set this up somewhat towards the end of series two, a sort of secrecy versus freedom of the press conflicts, and then series three did nothing but tie up and forget about it very quickly. Yeah, series three kind of half-assed it.
SPEAKER_05My personal feeling as to why this was never really carried on is either it ended up falling between the cracks for series three on account of that series having to be almost entirely rewritten at the last minute, or on the other hand, it could be that the writers thought, uh no one's completely in the right here, so we're not gonna take a side in this argument. Fuck it.
SPEAKER_04I can't be bothered to figure out what to do with this. So leave it for a later date. So the second one, basically. Uh a more nihilistic view of the second option, yeah. But it's oh fuck, we'll get to that at some point. They did not get to that.
SPEAKER_05So since we mentioned Helen earlier, someone really didn't learn his lesson from the end of series one.
SPEAKER_04No. Uh can't really blame him. Uh can't we though? We can a bit, but I'm I run on a much more primitive mindset. If I came home and Julie Orbe's just in my bed like that, and then telling me all about how she was chased by a pteranodon or something, and I'd be like, uh hello, hi, yes. All of that moral quandary is going on in my head.
SPEAKER_05Well, I mean, you do see that even as early as series one. You can see that for his so-called loyalty to Cutter in choosing not to go off with Helen at the end, you can see he's not truly willing to leave their relationship in the past either. We saw that even midway through the final episode of series one, where he had no qualms about letting her kiss him goodbye in the cafe when she first tips him off about the future predator. And then in episode two of series two, the fact that he didn't immediately kick her out of the flat as soon as he saw her there, which is admittedly an admirable thing to do given she was injured and needed help, but it probably also gave her the idea that she could come back and abuse his hospitality whenever she felt like it, which is what allows her to feed poison into his ear later on.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I d I don't think Steven had a real sort of spine when it came to her. She had his balls on a stake long ago. He does have really some sort of super unhealthy attachment to her. He listens to her too much, and she's able to influence him and manipulate him, and she knows she can. I don't think Helen truly cares for him. I think that she sees him as something she can use, like a resource.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that unhealthy attachment, I guess, can also be down to the fact that we know Stephen is drawn to danger and risks, and with Helen returning as a veteran of such things with what she's had to survive and endure in the past, I guess that's an additional draw for him to be pulled back to her and trust her more implicitly than the others.
SPEAKER_05She very much plays on his pre-existing doubts about the anomaly operation. She tells him that Lester is the big bad, which he believes for some reason, and then manages to persuade him to take the whole anomaly operation public.
SPEAKER_02She really leans on his insecurities to manipulate him into breaking away from Cutter and the rest of the team. She really probes how things with Nick are never really going to be okay again, and also kind of hooks him in with this whole idea of I know someone's working against your team and I have more information than I'm willing to let on.
SPEAKER_05And by the end, he gets pulled so deep into her web of lies that he just blindly believes whatever bullshit story she tells him.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, up until the point where she can quite literally just tell him that people are dead and he will believe her, and then what? They're not dead, huh? You lie to me.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it's not until the very end of episode seven, is it, that he sort of realizes just how much he's been taken for a chump.
SPEAKER_05It's also the final name in the coffin for his friendship with Kato as well.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, uh, I think uh I've talked to you about this before where it's like it's clear that their friendship is gone, but they still care about each other. They still like have that sort of love for each other, not in obviously the romantic sense, but what was keeping them together as friends is degraded to and it just keeps degrading throughout this season to a point where it's not going to be able to be repaired.
SPEAKER_05Well, that's the sad thing. I don't think it actually is gone to begin with. There's the scene in the first episode where Carter and Steven are having a man-to-man moment, and he does give him credit for not leaving with Helen. He's like, you know what, you could have gone with her, but you didn't. And it does seem like their relationship is on the mend, but then actually it continues to fracture more and more as they start clashing over their approach of the operation, and because Steven chooses to shack up with Helen again. In effect, he's basically making the same mistake he made all over again, with even worse consequences this time.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, you've been right so far. It did look like they were on the mend at the start of the series until Helen undoes everything, and it's sort of episodes three and four, and specifically around Valerie's death, that they start to really disagree on Cutter's leadership style. They continue rifting, and then Cutter starts leaning on Connor at that point, and that just solidifies the more things go on.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I was gonna bring that up. You see Connor start to take Steven's place as Cutter's right-hand man. All the things that Cutter used to rely on Steven for in series one, he increasingly starts to rely on Connor for in series two. And there's a great visual metaphor for this that I noticed in episode three. It's the scene when Stephen receives a text from Helen and covertly walks away from Cutter to answer it. Meanwhile, Connor is the one by Cutter's side discussing the possibilities regarding the creatures and the anomaly. So it's a show of Stephen becoming more distant from Cutter while Connor gradually takes his place.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, shifting power dynamics, and Steven's only brought it on himself.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, it's the whole thing is a tragedy of his own making. Stephen's made his bad lamp line up.
SPEAKER_02Connor sort of naturally grows and is mentored by Cutter into being a more integral team member rather than just the person who knows about creatures. He sort of becomes the tech support and designer and field deployment specialist of all his new wacky inventions. He really steps up in importance in the team in this series.
SPEAKER_05I'm just gonna say this now because I'm not gonna get the chance on any other episode of this podcast. Steven is a dead ringer for Simon from the In Betweeners. Like if they ever did an episode where they went back in time through an anomaly and met a young Steven, Joe Thomas would be the perfect casting for that.
SPEAKER_04That is really weirdly accurate. They do look very much the same. It's weird.
SPEAKER_01Really? I never I never made that connection. Have you seen The In Betweeners? Yeah, I have. You never looked at Simon and thought, hmm, does that guy remind me of someone? I can kinda see it, potentially.
SPEAKER_02But isn't Joe Joe Thomas must be what the same age that James Murray was when they filmed Primeval now, though, right? Probably, yeah. He still looks much younger though. Oh they still look like teenagers almost.
SPEAKER_05Anyway, side tangent. I remember O'Reilly, I talked to you about, and you made a very interesting comparison of how Stephen shacking up with Helen feels reminiscent of Simon simping after Carly. Oh right, yeah.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, almost.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, as you started saying that sentence, I extrapolated to where this is going. It's Simon and Carly, isn't it? Some guys have two heads but not much brain. We also have some new characters this series to talk about, don't we? Oliver Leake and Caroline Steele.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, and while we're on the subject of these two, this is probably a good time to talk about one of Primeval's most consistent weaknesses, it's human villains. The old adage of the villain being more interesting than the hero is very much not true here. The villains in Primeval were always very two-dimensional. They're written more to serve a certain role within the story, unless there's characters in their own right. All the information you're ever given on them is precisely what you need to know in order to understand that they're villains. You don't learn anything else about them other than that. You don't learn about their backstory, you don't learn anything about their agendas or motivations, or if you do, it's usually very vaguely defined.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think I think it's particularly telling when some of the one-off antagonistic characters that appear in single episodes are more well-written than series-long main villains.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I think it should probably go to show that the best villain in primeval is Helen, and she doesn't really start out as a villain. She's more just a rogue that also happens to know about the anomalies as well.
SPEAKER_05But even Helen, who, like you say O'Reilly, was one of the better antagonists in Primeval, I think ultimately even she kind of ended up falling into this trap because she was always very enigmatic and seemed to know far more than she was learning on, and that was a big part of her character. But I think the problem is they learned into this a bit too hard from series two onwards, and so we never really learned that much about her because she was always so enigmatic and out of sight. So we never really got a good sense of who she was, what she knew, what she wanted, and how her experiences had influenced her.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and throughout the first series, she's not really a villain, she's not really evil. She starts to become that in series two, and it doesn't necessarily work. Helen is less interesting when she's doing more bad guy evil things, and they kind of go off the deep end of that in series three.
SPEAKER_02Series three onwards was I think when she got particularly cartoonish. Yeah, cartoonish, I was gonna go with. Beyond the series two finale, she sort of loses herself a little bit to the point of I don't know, you you struggle to give her the same credibility that you did in the earlier series.
SPEAKER_04The show doesn't seem to be able to come up with villains that have genuinely interesting or logical reasons for doing the things that they do.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, the problems with primeval villains would unfortunately go from bad to worse in series three, but that's for another episode. For now, let's focus on the series two villains. Shall we start with Oliver Leek? Yeah, so I will give the writing for Leek its due. It's not badly done for most of the series.
SPEAKER_02No, from his introduction through until the last two or three episodes, he's very much like your sleeper villain. You get an idea that something's not quite right with him, but not enough to really guess what's actually going on, which is sort of the same position the other characters are in as well.
SPEAKER_05You don't get the impression that Leek even is a villain for the first two episodes. He comes across more as very mob-mannered and unassuming, almost kind of dull in a way.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, in those first two episodes, he just sort of set up as a subordinate to Lester, who's constantly talked down to, but is at the same time trying to suck up and big up his own career. Shall I speak to the contractors?
SPEAKER_03No, don't worry, I'll get myself a shovel and a cement mix and do it myself. Because of course you should speak to the contractors, you idiot.
SPEAKER_05To be honest, most of the rest of the team treat him as a subordinate too. Cutter barely gives him the time of day, and there's also that scene in the second episode where Abby and Connor are looking for things to use against the Precumbrian worms. Leek brings them all this high-tech weaponry, and they're like, this is rubbish. We need something that can blow fog away.
SPEAKER_04To be fair, with Cutter's dismissal of Leek, that kind of just fits Cutter's character. He doesn't really get along with the government figure personality. So that suits, but it is pretty funny.
SPEAKER_02It's not really until midway through the series that you get the inclination that he is actually more of a villainous character, and then we know, but the fun is that we know that the rest of the team don't know, and it's how are they going to find out?
SPEAKER_05Yeah, we see him in the third episode having shady dealings in his car with the other villain from series two, Caroline. And then as the series goes on, they sort of drip feed these hints of him secretly pulling the strings and working on his own agenda.
SPEAKER_02We eventually learn that the mysterious figures that keep turning up at the anomaly sites are actually his subordinates. We learn that he's in league with Helen, who's sort of helping him pull all these strings, and then we see him hacking the anomaly detection device to divert any alerts and location information to his own personal laptop so he can get there before any arc response can take place.
SPEAKER_05I'd say that episode six is when Leek is strongest as a villain. Everyone remembers how he sets a mind-controlled future predator on Lester, but there's actually a lot in that episode where you see how good he is at playing people off each other and thinking ahead about what they're going to do next. For instance, once he realizes that Cut has worked out there's someone hacking the anomaly detector, and he and Connor have set up a false anomaly alert to try and lure them out, he sets Jenny up to go in his place, along with all the other Ark soldiers who aren't secretly working for him to make them think she's the traitor, which also means there's no one around the Ark to protect Lester, so he can play out his little revenge fantasy of setting the future predator on him. It's killing two birds, or rather, one boss, with one stone. And then when that fails and he has to flee the arc to avoid capture, you see he's already anticipated that the team will try to hack into his laptop to find him, and he rigs it so that that sets off a time bomb under the van, he's smuggled the future predator in. He's playing a game of 3D chess with them all through this episode.
SPEAKER_02It's very much cat and mouse, isn't it? You think Cutter and everyone's finally got a leg up on him, and then he pulls something else out from under them.
SPEAKER_05And the thing is, he actually succeeds for the most part in that episode. They never actually catch him per se. And when they do find him, it's because he wanted them to. He wanted to lure them to his creature prison and trap them there to hold them hostage to get Leicester to meet his demands.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, he used them as leverage so they couldn't interfere with what he wanted to do, which makes sense. Keep your enemies close.
SPEAKER_05But unfortunately, this is where Leek really ends up falling apart as a villain. He claims his ultimate goal is to gain power. I intend to be very, very powerful. That's literally it. There's no other details given. And he teams up with Helen to capture all these creatures and use this implied futuristic technology to mind control future predators. But why? How does this help you gain power?
SPEAKER_04He seems to think that something is going to happen where you know money's gonna be worth nothing and he needs something physically to give him power. And he thinks an army of future predators hooked up to a very poor security system is gonna help him do that. Uh instead of, I don't know, stockpiling food, weapons, and having a safe place to stay. No, he thinks army full of creatures is gonna help him keep that power in the future. The implication for whatever disastrous event is coming.
SPEAKER_05The implication is that he would release the creatures onto the public to create chaos, which he does follow through on when he releases a Silurian Scorpion onto Bournemouth Beach. So I feel like maybe this is a sort of syndrome from the incredible scenario where he manufactures a crisis and then he and or his agents step in to save the day. But again, how did that specifically help him gain more power?
SPEAKER_04He's like a lesser version of General Shepard from the original Modern Warfare trilogy where he's setting up a disaster and he's causing these things to happen so that he will look good. But the reason why Shepard wants to do this is he wants his name to go down in the history books. He wants to be, you know, seen as this hero, whereas Leaks kind of just I want power. Okay, but over what? What kind of power? Why do you need an army of creatures with funny red lights in their heads to do it? What what? What is your end goal? It's not clear.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, the show never really tells you what the blueprint is here. He just becomes a sort of power-hungry mob boss slash bioterrorist by the very last episode.
SPEAKER_05My feeling is he'd probably make a much better cyber terrorist, given how he was able to hack the anomaly detector. Or if that doesn't work out, he could always go and work for Rex. Let's be honest.
SPEAKER_02There'd be a breath of positive fresh air in that environment, I suspect.
SPEAKER_04I I don't know about being a better cyber terrorist with these um abysmal security systems.
SPEAKER_05And like I say, it's a shame because he's not necessarily badly written as a villain for most of the series. It's just they seem to have forgotten to give him a proper motivation and a proper plan, and that's why I think he just doesn't work in the end. He basically turns into a parody of a Bond villain, right down to trying to feed his enemies to animals.
SPEAKER_01I think the Americans call it dinner theater.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, a little bit undercooked, I think, in the end is what we can call it. Sticking with undercooked villains, we've got Connor's something of a girlfriend, Caroline.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, well, we'll get into her, but before we do, I think it's only right that we address the somewhat problematic choice of casting for this character. So one of the most prominent criticisms of Primeval Series 1 was its lack of diversity. Doctor Who's showrunner Russell T. Davis famously said, quote, Primeval's lack of ethnic casting is frankly shameful. And while we could argue as to whether or not Doctor Who was really doing that much better on the race front, given one of its then only two major characters of colour spent all of the first series and half of the second being the show's butt monkey, the criticism itself was not uncalled for. There wasn't a single non-white actor in the main cast for Primeval Series 1.
SPEAKER_04It's a complete grasping at straws kind of thing. To me, it's like, okay, right, you can't criticize the show on any other merits, so you're gonna go for a low blow attack and play the race card when it doesn't really matter. I mean, from my personal experience, um, obviously, Tom, you kind of know what my dating record is like. Uh, but whenever I've asked girlfriends that I've shown the show to, does it bother you? The response is usually no, it's a TV show set in Britain. I'd expect them to be British. So this is not something that I pick up as an issue, it's not something I've picked up from people that I've watched it with as an issue, but uh apparently Russell T DV's. Wants it to be one.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, well, in any case, in what was presumably an effort to correct this error, in series two they cast Naomi Bentley, a black actress, in the role of Caroline Steele, which, given this is the scheming seductress trying to break up our lily white breeding pair, is a look I really wouldn't say has held up terribly well in hindsight.
SPEAKER_02Uh it's one of those things of if you put something under a lens, you're gonna see what you want. Because this isn't something that even crossed my mind until it was pointed out. And I never saw the race of the actress as a core part of the character. They definitely don't play to any other stereotype. She still acts like any other young woman that age.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I don't I don't think there's really any sort of issue going on there. Um and it's never it's never even really brought up that she happens to be black.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, but playing Devil's Advocate here, I kind of wonder if you're a black fan of this show and you're not seeing any characters in it who look like you, and then when one does come along, she's this wicked temptress trying to sabotage a white man's relationship with his one true white love. I just kind of wonder what the effect of that is gonna be. Like, I mean, even if this wasn't the writer's intent, it's still portraying the show's only interracial relationship in a bad light, which is definitely kind of a yikes looking at through the lens of 2020's racial politics, especially.
SPEAKER_04I suppose you could get that, but I think that really the best way to put it is if you cast a white actress as Caroline, it changes nothing, fundamentally, nothing but so it's not important to a character at all. And at worst, you could really say that the whole thing being an issue is just sort of unfortunate.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I do feel that at the end of the day, I think this is a case of don't attribute to malice what you can attribute to stupidity. I don't think there was any racial bias behind the casting decision. I just think the showrunners were trying to fix a shortcoming of series one and didn't stop to think if this was the best way to go about it. Then again, I should clarify that we're all white dudes, so our opinions on this probably don't count for jack shit.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, no, that's true.
SPEAKER_05You know, I will say this, to the credit of the 2008 internet, when I was on the primeval fan forums reading all the hate comments about Caroline, I never once came across one that had anything to do with her race. Sad to say that would probably not be the case had series two come out in today's online climate.
SPEAKER_02Uh, definitely not. You can go on any post and find a reference to race nowadays, even when it's completely unwarranted. Yeah, we are state of affairs.
SPEAKER_05We are a poorer people for it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05But if you take race out of the equation and just focus purely on talent, I would say they made a good choice casting there, me, Bentley, because this is without doubt one of the most despicable characters in all of Prime Evil, and she plays it to a T. I honestly had to force myself to re-watch all the Caroline scenes when I was preparing for this episode, just because every time I did, it brought back all the 2008 rage I had for this character. She is a complete arsehole, is the best way to put it. Um that's better than the uh one-syllable word people probably use for her.
SPEAKER_04Oh well, yes. Um, the bad things that she does. Where do we start with Caroline?
SPEAKER_02Well, going off of what O'Reilly said, I think what makes her worse is she's not even an honest arsehole, she's a snide asshole. For one thing, she very openly disliked the show's cutesy mascot Rex. The first time she sees him, she doesn't really register him as another living being. She literally just describes him as that thing. What is that thing? Because what is that doesn't sting enough.
SPEAKER_04She's very passive aggressive in how she acts. She always pretends she's being friendly, but she's really just being a complete knob.
SPEAKER_02Abby, you look absolutely exhausted. You really must let me talk to you about makeup sometime.
SPEAKER_05The scene when she meets Rex for the first time and he tries to bite her, he is literally everyone in the audience in that moment.
SPEAKER_02It's the age old, if your pet doesn't like them, then there's something wrong. Foreshadowing. The distaste between the pair of them doesn't stop there because she eventually ends up shutting Rex in a freezer.
SPEAKER_05Oh my god, yeah, that is Primeval's bunny boiler scene right there.
SPEAKER_04I remember my first reaction to that as a kid and just being full of absolute rage. And now, actually, it's it's quite funny. Uh my current girlfriend, she also keeps lizards, and she was horrified when we came across that scene. So a lot of foul language was used.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, and she has no reason to do this to Rex. She just does it to be cruel to Abby. Like the fact that she stuck around the flat until they got home to find him instead of shutting him in the freezer and then leaving. You can tell she wanted to see Abby's pain there. I mean, at least in Facial Attraction, Glenn Close had the decency to not sadistically watch when Michael Douglas' wife finds the boiling rabbit on the stove.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and then even though Rex survives, she then kidnaps him for league.
SPEAKER_04Why is she always just in their house? Like, who does that? Who just stays in someone's house like that while they're not there? She just invites herself over all the time. Yeah, she's very disrespectful. Do you think they should have done something more to keep her out? It's like, uh how why is she always in there?
SPEAKER_02Connor must have given her a key or something at some point.
SPEAKER_05And the irony is she hates Connor almost as much as she hates Rex. Because, like we said earlier, she's only really doing this because she's being paid to spy on him and Abby by Lake. I mean, she's actually pretty bad at faking being disappointed when he has to bail on dates with her for work. She's like, oh shame, that's too bad. It only works on Connor because he's too naive to notice it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, the only time she genuinely really gets annoyed at them having to bail on her is because she's specifically tasked with delaying them and hasn't done as good a job as she liked, and she's more annoyed at that than being ditched. Which is telling.
SPEAKER_05And she speaks with so much venom about him and Rex. Like when she's trying to twist Leek Sarm into paying her more, and she says, You haven't got that little creep Connor trying to stick his tongue down your throat, or when Abby confronts her about stealing Rex in the last episode, she says, Who cares? I was like, bitch!
SPEAKER_02Yeah, she's a piece of work, I think.
SPEAKER_05I mean, props to Naomi Bentley, it's always a compliment to an actor or actress when they're able to generate that visceral a response in you. She does do it incredibly.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and credit to her as well. She did apologize for Caroline as a character in the behind-the-scenes documentary.
SPEAKER_01And is there anything you want to say to the Rex band before we go on? I'm sorry.
SPEAKER_05But again, though, going back to the problem of the villains having no backstory, where did Leek even find Caroline? And why does she want money bad enough to spy on a couple of complete strangers? I mean, what is she a whore who he offered a better opportunity to? That would explain why she's willing to date a guy she's never met for money before. And why she's apparently also comfortable meeting older men in secret CD locations to receive said money.
SPEAKER_04Present day Caroline would be a struggling OnlyFans model.
SPEAKER_05I mean, it beats receiving something else from older men.
SPEAKER_04Oh boy. Oh yeah. I don't know. Maybe it's just someone on like I don't know. Do we do we use Craigslist in the UK? But that's like the obvious answer though is kind of what you said, Tom. That's kind of the easiest sort of explanation for it. Is it's like, oh god, is Caroline a prostitute?
SPEAKER_05Darby, do give your thoughts on this.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I don't know. I th I felt like Caroline was performed with a bit more class than that. She may just be trying to pay off her student loan.
SPEAKER_05Maybe, although you can't tell me the scene where Connor goes to meet her at the cafe and she's wearing a top with a slit in it, exposing her tits. That uh you can't tell me that doesn't have its roots somewhere else. But the goods on show.
SPEAKER_02Maybe she got that top on expenses from Leek.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, it's probably just as well they didn't go with this particular backstory, given the racial optics around Caroline are not great as it is.
SPEAKER_04And also the fairly family-friendly setting that the show is, I would have been. I mean, uh again, as uh you know, as obviously it's a drama and stuff, and we're talking about it now as adults, it is also a show that's kind of geared towards children as well, with lots of merchandise and board games and soft toys and stuff. It would have been a pretty, pretty interesting piece of subject matter to throw in there.
SPEAKER_05You know, I had this moment where I was watching the scene in episode two where Connor first meets Caroline in the DVD shop. It's probably because I already know that she's bad news, but when she's standing there asking Connor for movie recommendations, looking what I'm sure is very deliberately saucy, I kind of try to put myself in Connor's head and just think to myself, is there really no part of you that looks at this situation and kind of just asks the question, Are you a whore?
SPEAKER_02I don't know. Connor strikes me as a person who'd view that as jackpot as opposed to alarm bells ringing off.
SPEAKER_04I think we've talked before, Tom, that Connor's not really very successful or well-versed. He's very naive, he kind of struggles with girls. So um he just doesn't have sort of the knack or the mindset to kind of really get what's going on. It makes him the perfect choice to do something like this on.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, which begs the question: why would Leek want Caroline to spy on Abby and Connor in the first place? Like, what sort of information could he want on them? I know they're main characters that we the audience care about, but they're not necessarily big players within the team itself, relatively speaking. And it's not like Caroline ever finds him anything useful on them that we know of, except when she kidnaps Rex. And even then I hardly think that's worth very much.
SPEAKER_02The way that I interpreted it was I don't think Leek wanted information out of them. I think he just wanted intel to see whether Connor, who was obviously very smart, was costening on to what Leek was doing behind the scenes. I think Caroline was just a ploy to distract Connor away from realising what else was going on, as well as a source of conflicts to keep him and Abby both away from his operation.
SPEAKER_05I can kind of see what you mean. Like in episode four when Abby and Connor leave the flat for the anomaly site, i.e. the same one Leek had dispatched his own agents to, Caroline calls him to let him know, and he says, You were supposed to delay them.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think Leek's playbook was very much a show with one hand to avoid people looking at the other. He was the one that pushed for Jenny's hiring, which I thought could have been a distraction for Cutter at Helen's request, maybe, while Helen distracted Stephen by putting other thoughts in his head and stoking conflict with Cutter, so that all eyes and ears were elsewhere so Leek could get on with what he wanted to do under the radar.
SPEAKER_05The kidnapping Rex thing still doesn't really seem worth it from Leek's perspective. Like, what are you gonna do with the little Slurosaurus when he's got raptors and smilodons and so many other much more dangerous things in his creature prison?
SPEAKER_02Find a cure for heart disease?
SPEAKER_04Oh boy. Oh boy. No, he's not the biggest dinosaur ever, like the Mosasaurus or the Quetzalcoatlas. He's not the biggest dinosaur, so he's not got the heart for it.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, maybe maybe if Rex was like that singing frog from Looney Jones, then he'd be of some value to Laking Caroline.
SPEAKER_06Hello, my baby! Hello, my honey, hello my rack, I'm yeah.
SPEAKER_05It's an odd cartoons reference.
SPEAKER_02I think the only way that it would work logically is if he was trying to keep Rex as potential leverage. That's the only way I can see Rex being of any real use to his plan situation.
SPEAKER_04Don't do it or the lizard gets it.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. I mean, admittedly, going back to Caroline, she does redeem herself when she rescues Rex from Leek's creature prison at the end. But that redemption isn't what sticks out in your mind when you think of her.
SPEAKER_04Does she really does she really redeem herself? Do we do we feel redeemed? Do we feel glad that Caroline's okay?
SPEAKER_05Do we care about Caroline? Well, no, we don't, but they had two villains to work with, and they were not gonna kill off the black woman. So, you know, we had to do something with that. Incidentally, this wasn't the last time Naomi Bentley would play the ethnic third wheel in a love triangle. She also did it again in Miranda. Difference being there, she was actually a legit nice character who just happened to be an unwitting rival for the female protagonist.
SPEAKER_04It's weird that's happened twice.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. Anywho, onto the creatures now. Yes. Oh yes, the good stuff. And we will be right back with that on part two of this episode, dear listeners. Up next on the Dinosaur Box. See you there.