Review: 'Primeval' Season 5 Premiere

With the latest season of Primeval (Nov. 12, 2011 on BBC America), all the hints and warnings that made the seven-episode fourth season so much set-up have finally manifested in secret missions, dark conspiracies, and visions of Armageddon.

Primeval has raised the prospect of a ruined future before, but the season 2 storyline involving Helen Cutter's frightening future predators was always a lopsided fight between Nick Cutter's resolute team and a crazy woman whose mole at the ARC was the sore-thumb lackey Leek.

But in season 5, Nick Cutter's galvanizing presence is long gone, and new front man Matt's evasive, soft-spoken leadership, previously open to being considered a potential liability to the team's (and the show's) effectiveness, now contributes handily to the tension developing within the increasingly divided team.

Connor Temple, as played by Andrew-Lee Potts, has always been at the center of Primeval: the pilot established Nick (Douglas Henshall) as the stalwart leader and Stephen Hart (James Murray) as the lion-hearted action man, leaving Connor to be the audience-identification figure: bright but unsure of himself, prone to social awkwardness, jokes at the wrong moment, and occasional gaffes that wrong-foot the team. The writers have had a tough job keeping Connor a comic figure without turning him into a ridiculous caricature -- not always, it should be said, with complete success.

Today, Nick and Stephen are dead; season 3 leader Danny (Jason Flemyng) is wandering the past; Matt has been left purposefully an enigma; and Becker (Ben Mansfield) has taken on the hero remit. So Connor is more than ever the heart of the team and the viewers' way in (at least for the boys in the audience). Yet the experiences of the last several years -- not only fighting monsters in modern-day London, but a year marooned in the Cretaceous fighting a daily battle for survival -- forces a separation from his early days as a bumbling greenhorn.

Fortunately the producers, writers, and Potts himself seem to know exactly the line to take with Connor: show him as seasoned and capable, yet still awkward and self-deprecating. In this demanding task they actually have a kind of model in Lester (Ben Miller), the home office minister whose comic qualities -- sardonic narcissism, mainly -- have to be rigorously balanced against the nerve he's capable of showing in a crisis and his commitment to the teams' mission. For "sardonic narcissism" read "boyish naïveté," and you have a baseline for the current take on Connor.

The catalyst for dividing the season 5 team is Philip Burton (Alexander Siddig), who puts a suaver spin on the villain-who-thinks-he's-a-hero role than Helen (Juliet Aubrey) did earlier in the series. The most powerful dilemma available to the series, barely broached by the weekly monster-threat plots, is the possibilities opened up by using the time-jumping anomalies, not just reacting to them. Helen, then, and Philip, now, are angling to make use of access to the entire timeline of the earth in order to solve the problems they see in today's world. The fact that in the end Helen turned out to see the problems of today's world as being Homo sapiens, full stop, emphasizes the horror the show intrinsically associates with using the anomalies to play god.

Philip, at least, is more effective in co-opting the ARC and its principals to his own ends. His presence in the story, providing private funding to keep the ARC going, neatly parallels the show's behind-the-scenes cancellations and resurrection via new investors, but it also makes him indispensable to Lester, who otherwise would not trust an outsider. Most importantly he plays on Connor's idealism, drawing him into his circle and in turn, thanks to his new extra work and secretiveness, polarizing him from Abby (Hannah Spearritt).

This development in season 5 is most welcome for Abby fans, because her consequently being drawn into Matt's agenda gives her more to do than just falling into the role of Connor's worried girlfriend. Abby, as a character, has always run the risk of being dangerously underwritten: her strengths as a zoologist don't always come into play, and her normally reliable gumption is sometimes (including in the season 5 premiere) displaced by anxious-girlfriend handwringing. The gumption works a lot better for her -- in this case, her resolve to get to the bottom of what's been drawing Connor away from her and the rest of the team.

The main attraction of Primeval remains, of course, the monstrous threats that the ARC team faces every week, and in this regard season 5 offers more and better. The first episode features a cadre of giant, creepy burrowing insects that constitute a most credible threat. In the second episode Primeval breaks new ground, as it were, with an anomaly out in the North Sea -- necessitating a submarine trip that gets derailed by an aggressive pod of deep-sea Liopleurodons. Primeval, interestingly enough, works extremely well in tight confines with a vibrant guest artist: in this case the team's interpersonals play out well in the sub, with a nice guest turn by Allen Leech (Rome, Downton Abbey) as an inexperienced midshipman.

Future monster antagonists look promising -- raptors, a tyrannosaur, and the return of the chilling future predators are all on the slate for season 5, even as the new team deals with a conflict of ideals and vision. In providing all the foundation of the developing crisis season 4 didn't always come across as powerfully as the show did during the Nick Carter era, but as things come to a head Primeval is as good as it's been in a long time, and -- with the tempering of the show's veteran characters -- in some ways better.

Disclosure: Access to a review copy was provided by the network. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.