^We're writers. We're poor. 
Will SYFY Air Primeval's 3rd Season?
- Thread starter The Master of Tarquin Hill
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i would suggest you not go any further. the series was ended abruptly so ending for season 3 is a big clifhanger that is very annoying. if you're not a fan of unresolved clifhangers then i suggest you go no further. >_< i wish i hadn't watched more...
Cool, I hope that happens. I hate when they end a series on a cliffhanger, then never return to it.
^The movie and the US show are two different projects. According to what I've read, the US project would be, not a remake, but a spinoff TV series set in the same continuity.
Which makes sense, since these anomalies can't all be appearing in England, right? Realistically, the ARC should be an international project. Although "realistic" has never exactly described how the ARC does things (for instance, having all these resources and soldiers at their disposal, but sending in a professor, a grad student, and a zookeeper against deadly monsters without any military backup).
Which makes sense, since these anomalies can't all be appearing in England, right? Realistically, the ARC should be an international project. Although "realistic" has never exactly described how the ARC does things (for instance, having all these resources and soldiers at their disposal, but sending in a professor, a grad student, and a zookeeper against deadly monsters without any military backup).
Actually, the professor is on a permanent sabatical. I hate when a network ends a show without resolving at least some of the storylines. I hate NBC for how they left "Journeyman" just when it was getting good. Yes Primeval took care of the major storyline but they left our team in a very difficult situation. Maybe the American team will help them out.
Does anyone know what network will be airing the US show?
Does anyone know what network will be airing the US show?
I know, I've seen the whole series. My example was not intended to be exhaustive, merely indicative of the gross failures of logic that characterized the show from the start of the second season onward. In the first season, they were a small operation out of the Home Office, yet had extensive military backup every time they confronted an anomaly or creature. In the second and third seasons, they were part of a huge organization dedicated to anomaly study, and the ARC was filled with soldiers and other personnel as background extras, yet suddenly, inexplicably, the main team was routinely going in alone. It was just dumb. I assume it was done to save money, and perhaps to tighten the focus on the lead characters, but it was just totally silly.
I'm past caring, really. This season just got worse and worse, most of the core cast is gone anyway, and I'm just glad it's over.
Getting way ahead of yourself there. We don't even know for sure that there will be a US show. It's been alleged, not even confirmed, that the producers are "making plans" to develop a spinoff set somewhere other than the UK, possibly the US. At this point it's little more than a rumor. Even if the rumor that they're making plans is true, those plans are nowhere near fruition.
A) I'm also a writer.
B) I own a DVR.
C) I also own a region-hacked DVD player, hence having Primeval series 3 on DVD on order from the UK right now.
D) I'm also apparently the only one around here who thought the changes in season 3 worked really well.
I just don't comprehend the "oh, so-and-so character got killed off so I'm never watching the show again!" people. That's a major pet peeve of mine. Watching the show, or watching one character and the show happens to be a convenient delivery device for your drug of choice? Yes, there are logic holes. I'd like to see them for once actually think like archaeologists, for instance. Yes, there are character changeovers. In a place like the ARC, people are going to die/quit/burnout and move on. That's just the way operations like that go. And, like, hello? You're dealing with ancient creatures, some of which could swallow you in one gulp and barely belch here. The turnover was actually quite believable, IMO.
And the third season takes an interesting direction, with the input of Sarah Page. The anomalies can't have been a current event. How long have they been happening for, and what did those cultures do with them? That's an interesting thought.
Yes, I know, people are just going to whinge on my affinity for Connor, but I'm very much there for the entire crew, even Sarah Page and Becker. Lester is brilliant. Danny was just coming into his own in a "Cutter-meets-Han Solo" kind of way. "Amusing mayhem" was how I describe it to people. And it was.
Be glad to see it come back, but hopefully they won't royally screw the pooch like most American remakes of British shows do.
B) I own a DVR.
C) I also own a region-hacked DVD player, hence having Primeval series 3 on DVD on order from the UK right now.
D) I'm also apparently the only one around here who thought the changes in season 3 worked really well.
I just don't comprehend the "oh, so-and-so character got killed off so I'm never watching the show again!" people. That's a major pet peeve of mine. Watching the show, or watching one character and the show happens to be a convenient delivery device for your drug of choice? Yes, there are logic holes. I'd like to see them for once actually think like archaeologists, for instance. Yes, there are character changeovers. In a place like the ARC, people are going to die/quit/burnout and move on. That's just the way operations like that go. And, like, hello? You're dealing with ancient creatures, some of which could swallow you in one gulp and barely belch here. The turnover was actually quite believable, IMO.
And the third season takes an interesting direction, with the input of Sarah Page. The anomalies can't have been a current event. How long have they been happening for, and what did those cultures do with them? That's an interesting thought.
Yes, I know, people are just going to whinge on my affinity for Connor, but I'm very much there for the entire crew, even Sarah Page and Becker. Lester is brilliant. Danny was just coming into his own in a "Cutter-meets-Han Solo" kind of way. "Amusing mayhem" was how I describe it to people. And it was.
Be glad to see it come back, but hopefully they won't royally screw the pooch like most American remakes of British shows do.
I've got no problem with cast changes or character deaths as a general practice. However, in this case,
killing off Nick Cutter and writing out Jenny Lewis left the show without any characters who were connected to Helen Cutter on any personal level. As a result, Helen completely disappeared for most of the season, along with the core mythology arc of the series, and when it came back, it just felt disconnected. Without that emotional stake, it just wasn't as interesting.
And my main objections aren't to the cast changes, but to the deterioration in the intelligence of the series. The creatures started out being scientifically credible, or at least grounded in real biology, allowing for some poetic license. And I can't tell you how refreshing it was to see a show built around extinct animals other than the usual dinosaurs or Pleistocene megafauna. But the third season ignored the science more and more, introducing more fanciful future creatures and giving less explanation about the prehistoric creatures (for instance, in the episode with the phorusrhacid "terror birds," the birds were never even identified by name onscreen). The lowest ebb was the episode with the fungus men.
And that's just one of the ways in which the storytelling became less intelligent in S3. Absurd plot contrivances, nonsensical character actions, gross failures of logic, you name it.
Which is all entirely true, and which is why it was totally unbelievable that, in S2-3, the main four or five characters always went into danger without any significant military backup.
I agree completely. Which is why it's a shame that said concept was never significantly followed up on after Sarah was introduced. Aside from the episode with the medieval knight and the "dragon," the whole idea of anomalies and creatures being the basis of ancient mythology was ignored after Sarah's debut episode.
I like the characters fine, though I can take or leave Connor and Abby. They just didn't have good material to work with. Lester became a favorite of mine about the time he fought off Leek's attack at the end of S2, but saddling him with an Odd Couple routine with Connor as his roommate was just a waste of his character.
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Okay, what? I can give you the first, but how, exactly, was Jenny connected to Helen on a personal level moreso than Connor or Abby?
I mean, Helen was partly responsible for Steven's death. Cutter was a mentor to Connor and a friend to Abby, and Helen took that away from them. Cutter was barely a flirtation to Jenny until she saw the picture of Claudia Brown. Claudia Brown was more connected to Helen on a personal level than Jenny, and that's a non-issue.
There doesn't have to be a name for every creature, does there? I mean, it's not an educational documentary. It's an adventure drama.
And the fungus men had to be straight out of at least one comic book. Usually, when they're scraping comic book territory I run away very fast. That? Not so much. Life on Earth can and has taken some truly bizarre shapes. Can you say for sure that there was never, in the history of time, a fungus capable of manipulating the DNA of a host to reproduce? And when you start intersecting past creatures with modern times, who's to say that the pollution in the air isn't going to kill them immediately?
This was never a hard science show. If it were, nobody would have left anything in the past. But, that kind of got blown out in the first episode.
I'm going to take a guess that this is where your hard SF background and my distaste for hard SF is showing. I have the feeling you were looking for things that were never there to begin with.
"Nonsensical character actions"? Don't have to go further than episode 1 for that. People do things that don't make sense sometimes. That's part of human nature.
IMO, the storytelling expanded in S3. It began to take in elements that weren't there before, and were logical extrapolations from what had gone before it. Yes, there were some absurd plot contrivances, but does a dramatic series exist without any of those at all? Really?
She was connected to Nick. She was growing to care for him, and so was emotionally affected by Cutter's loss. I suppose Connor was affected as well, since Cutter was his mentor, but the series spent so much time focusing on Connor's relationship issues that I didn't really feel his connection with Cutter as strongly.
There's also the fact that Helen was the only person other than Nick who knew about the whole Claudia Brown thing, so there was a link in terms of story arc and show mythology.
There's also the fact that Helen was the only person other than Nick who knew about the whole Claudia Brown thing, so there was a link in terms of story arc and show mythology.
And that's just it. There was less connection. Little enough that Helen basically disappeared from the show for half a season because the new main characters' stories weren't really about her, and Connor and Abby's stories had never been more than peripherally connected to hers.
Personal preference. I liked the first two seasons because, unlike most SFTV, they were grounded in real, solid science, and actually had a bit of an educational component (as long as you recognized that poetic license was being taken). It was the sort of show where you could actually learn something by watching, as opposed to the usual SFTV where the worst thing you could possibly do is take the technobabble seriously. By giving the actual names of the creatures and their originating epochs and eras, the show enabled the inquisitive viewer to know where to look for more information.
But fungus that can somehow simulate the behavior of muscles, sensory organs, even voice? If it had just been human bodies coopted by the fungus, I could buy that; there are precedents such as the wasp larvae that can tap into a spider's nervous system and alter its behavior in a way that facilitates the larvae's life cycle. But we were shown pretty clearly that all human tissue was completely replaced with fungus that was somehow walking around in bipedal form and making growly noises (and that replacement happened ludicrously fast). I'm sure fungus can do plenty of remarkable things, but functioning like muscle tissue, eyes, ears, and vocal cords? No way.
I was hoping that episode would be a change-of-pace story where the danger was a disease from another epoch that had to be contained to prevent an outbreak. Instead, it was another monster-of-the-week show, and by far the weakest monster of them all.
It's relative. As I said, yes, it took poetic license, but initially it was grounded enough in real science to allow suspension of disbelief. After all, the show was a spinoff from a series of science programs, the Walking With... series that recreated the lives of extinct animals. Almost all the prehistoric creatures from the show were reuses of creatures from those specials, animals that really lived in Earth's past. They were exaggerated for dramatic effect, sure, but they were based in reality and didn't go absurdly far beyond it. There's a huge difference between informed poetic license and just not caring. And with the third season, they stopped caring.
No, I found things that were there to begin with, and then they went away.
But they didn't have backup at a reasonable distance. They didn't have any backup at all.
And even if you do send in a small team, shouldn't it be a team that's highly trained at dealing with danger? Shouldn't it be something like SG-1, a team that's primarily military? We're talking about a fortyish professor, a 5'4" zookeeper, and a dangerously clumsy grad student. At least in the third season they added Becker as a regular; that's one of the few changes I consider an improvement. But they still had too little backup in situations where it made sense -- like
when they went into the insanely dangerous future in the final episode and only Danny, Connor, and Abby went.
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I have to agree with Christopher about them needing the military aspect more. When they would charge into danger without it it took me out of the story. I think it was lazy storytelling-the writers acted like having to develop plausible dangers with the military present was too much of a hassle. Annoying, IMO, and degrading the quality of the show. At least the first 2 seasons they took a stab at it, like the ep about the beastie in the Thames where the military was most assuredly present.
I just watched the finale that I had recorded on my DVR (after being away for a week)... I do hope season 3 eventually airs of on SciFi/SyFy.
The series has three things going for it: (having seen S1 + S2 only):
- Timetravel
- wacky fun
- The hotness that is Lucy Brown! (perhaps most important)
The series has three things going for it: (having seen S1 + S2 only):
- Timetravel
- wacky fun
- The hotness that is Lucy Brown! (perhaps most important)
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