PRIMEVAL IS BACK!!!
I just saw that the first two seasons of PRIMEVAL, the British science-fiction series, is now available from Britbox, and I thought it was a good time to encourage anybody who hasn’t seen it so far to take a look at it. That is, if there’s anybody left who I haven’t already told they HAVE to watch this series–
I have recommended it so many times that it’s become a standing joke in science fiction circles (I somehow figure out a way to mention it on every single panel) and Locus has forbidden me to mention it at the Locus Awards Banquet. As if that could stop me!
I know it sounds like I’m obsessed with the series, but so was Kit Reed, one of my favorite science-fiction writers of all time (see her brilliant short stories, “The Wait” and “Great escape Tours, Ltd.”) and nearly everybody I’ve ever introduced it to has loved it. (One couple took it on a beach weekend and ended up never going outside the entire time because they were binge-watching.)
The premise sounds A) dumb and B) like a kid’s show, and in the beginning it intended to compete with the reboot of DR. WHO. The basic story is this: Rips in time called “anomalies:” are happening which allow creatures from the past to come through to modern-day England. A group consisting of a paleontology professor, his hunky assistant, a pretty blonde zoologist who works at a zoo, a geeky computer nerd, and a government bureaucrat named Claudia Brown, set out to stop them from causing mayhem and panic, all the while keeping what’s happening under wraps and not violating the Official Secrets Act.
So, basically, the A-team with dinosaurs. So far, it’s completely formula, and you think the hunky guy and the pretty blonde will obviously get together, the geeky nerd will provide the plot explication and comic relief, the professor and the bureaucrat will flirt with each other, etc. but that only lasts for an episode or two, and then things start to get really interesting. And after Episode 6 (the end of the first short season) things REALLY take off! My daughter in a different time zone was ahead of me in watching, and after I’d binge-watched the first season, I called her in the middle of the night. Instead of her mumbling a sleepy hello or saying, “Oh my God, who’s dead?” she said calmly, “I assume you’ve just finished watching Episode 6, Mother.”
“Yes,” I said. “Oh, my God!”
And as time went on there were more and more surprises–the rips in time, which at first seemed to be limited to the past, begin to expand to take in the future; it turned out what was happening on the surface isn’t what’s really going in, and no character is safe from having something happen to them. And there are plot twists I never saw coming, even though that hardly ever happens to me since I spend my life thinking about plot twists. I continued to be surprised right up to the end of the series. Oh, and the series (of 5 seasons) had a great ending, which is a requirement for me before I ever recommend a series to anybody.
One of the things that was so great about this show was the money and expertise they lavished on what started out as an action series (just like DR. WHO.) If this had been made in the States, they would have hired B-list actors, B-list screenwriters, and have spent a dollar fifty on special effects. Not with PRIMEVAL. The actors were brilliant, especially Douglas Henshall, who played Cutter, Ben Miller, who is the funniest, driest bureaucrat ever, and Andrew Lee-Potts, who was wonderful as Connor, the computer geek. (We originally found the series through him. We’d seen him on Syfy’s miniseries, ALICE, a dystopic science-fiction take on Alice in Wonderland, thought he was great, and wanted to see if he’d been in anything else.) The special effects were done by the people who created WALKING WITH DINOSAURS, and the creatures were simply amazing. My favorite was a pterodactyl which was as beautiful as it was dangerous, but I also loved the dodoes and the raptors (“Come on, how hard is it to find a raptor in a shopping mall?”) and the spinosaurus. Plus, the T-Rex, which you knew had to show up sooner or later. But the best thing about the show were the scripts, which were funny, intelligent, and so good I use examples from them of foreshadowing, good dialogue, subtext, and irony in every writing class I teach. To give one example, each season had a story arc, seasons 1 through 3 had an arc, and seasons 1 through 5 had an arc.
How could I get so excited about a show about dinosaurs in modern-day London? you may ask.
Well, one reason is because I’ve been writing–and reading–and watching movies–for a really long time, and as a result, I find it almost impossible to read a story or novel or watch something without taking it apart, editing and criticizing and anticipating every move the author or screenwriter’s going to make. It’s an occupational hazard. In LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI, Mark Twain talked about how he had gone on the river because he thought it was so beautiful. He loved the colors and the shapes, the ripples and floating logs and the sunsets, and he wanted nothing more than to be a riverboat pilot and “learn the river.”
But it came at a cost. “Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too…all the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river!…Then, if that sunset scene had been repeated, I should have looked upon it without rapture, and should have commented upon it, inwardly, in this fashion: “This sun means we are going to have wind to-morrow; that floating log means that the river is rising, small thanks to it; that slanting mark on the water refers to a bluff reef which is going to kill somebody’s steamboat one of these nights, if it keeps stretching out like that… All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat. ”
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Writing is the same way, and I have always felt that Mark Twain was talking not only about “learning the river,” but about becoming a writer, and of the loss that comes as you become more knowledgeable in the way prose works. As you learn the trade, you lose the wide-eyed wonder you had at reading books and watching movies and view them from the point of your craft. You get much more critical of what you’re reading and intolerant of bad dialogue and worse plotting. You start thinking, “If they’d done it this way, it would have been so much better,” and want to rewrite the ending–and sometimes the whole thing–for them. (Which is why nobody wants to go to the movies with a writer.) Plus, you spot plot twists way ahead of time and see the big reveal coming from miles off.
But Mark Twain didn’t tell the whole story, because although there’s definitely a loss and it becomes harder and harder to read bad books and watch mediocre movies, you sometimes happen across something so good that you can get all the pleasure you got from reading or watching as a kid as well as a delight in how skilled the author is, how expertly they did it. This doesn’t happen very often. It’s only happened to me a few times in recent years: reading Alan Bennett’s THE UNCOMMON READER and Joan Didion’s THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING and Nora Ephron’s HEARTBURN and watching the movies QUIZ SHOW and DECOY BRIDE and THE OTHERS, but when it does, it’s a double pleasure–and one you could never have experienced when you were a kid. It makes having become a writer all worthwhile.
That’s what happened to me watching PRIMEVAL–I could appreciate the clever writing and the cleverer plotting and the expert acting and at the same time lose myself completely in the story, just like when I was a kid reading and watching great stuff for the first time.
The series may not have that effect on you–reading and watching things is a very personal matter–and you probably won’t get as obsessed as my daughter and I did–we actually went to that mall where the raptor was and to the British Museum to look at the mummies and Egyptian statues they’d seen while hunting for an ancient crocodile that looks like the goddess Ammut. And we nearly died waiting for Seasons 4 and 5 to come out. But I’d give it a chance anyway. At least watch to the end of Episode 6 before you decide you don’t like it.
Trust me, it’s a great show. There are episodes set in the old Underground tunnels at Aldwych and in the late Cretaceous and on the M-25, with a rampaging mammoth stopping traffic, no less. And it’s something to do while you’re stuck at home waiting for the delta variant to go away and people to get their vaccinations (not necessarily in that order.)
(Oh, and just one thing. Before Season 4 came out, they did a bunch of webisodes to show you what happened between Seasons 3 and 4. They’re on YouTube, and you should definitely watch those before starting Season 4.)
Good viewing!
Connie Willis