But there appears to be nothing new here.  

It's never a good sign when you can identify every episode of a new show by the movie they are ripping... er, borrowing from.  I miss tivoing the pilot, but since the premise is pretty obvious it wasn't hard to just start watching.  

Episode two was an "homage" to Hitchcock's The Birds.  At least they did have a clever solution to the problem, and the crusty military commander didn't just order them to start shooting and wipe out an entire dinosaur species.  On the personal front there is the wife of the cop's former boyfriend showing up, and trying to smooze back in.  There are teenagers with dating issues, and an "adorable urchin".  *sigh*.

What I don't understand is why there is _one_ cop for the entire compound?  And why do they have cops at all when there are all these military guys with really big guns who seem to be in charge of the compound?  There also appears to be no civilian governance of the joint.  Okay, I'm thinking about this way too deeply.

Episode Three was Andromeda Strain, and boy were the clues REALLY OBVIOUS.  Adorable urchin gets sent home from school with A COLD.  Daddy CATCHES THE COLD.  Mommy and crazy military commander go check out a remote base that has broken off contact.  There is a mysterious virus that destroys your memory and then puts you in a catatonic state.  More shenanigans with former boyfriend, and then -- Oh Gosh, the cold has made the cop resistant to the virus.  Slapping self on forehead.  Didn't see that coming.  Oh, wait.  Yes, I did.

I have two more episodes to watch.  Question is do I want to spare those minutes out of the rest of my life just to see which movies they mine next?  Probably not.

And one final plaintive question.  If you are trying to save the human race from certain doom why do you go back to a time _before_ a giant asteroid hits the Earth, and makes life very uncomfortable for living things for quite some time?  Maybe that was explained in the pilot, but it still seems a short sighted choice.  Me, I'd vote for long view ships, and heading out to the stars.  I guess space ships aren't as sexy as dinosaurs.

Bottom line.  Primeval gave me cool dinos and more interesting people.

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My friend, Connie Willis, gave me the first season of PRIMEVAL for my birthday last year, and since then she has become my pusher.   I started watching the show because I have enormous respect for Connie and her abilities as a story teller, and if she liked the show this much there had to be something there.  I immediately liked a number of the characters, especially Cutter, Conner and Lester so I ordered up seasons two and three from Netflix and kept watching.

Only to discover that Primeval was the television version of GRRM's Song of Ice and Fire.  The writer/producers would do anything to any character, and very soon you realized that _No One Was Safe!_.  They killed major characters without compunction.  At that point I was hooked.

Now I know all the boys are going to harp at me about how it was stupid to send this small team up against the dinosaurs, and how in the real world they'd send in a platoon armed with really big guns.  The show did try to address that.  They make the point that they had to stop killing the creatures because it had unintended consequences for the timeline.  They wiped out a major character -- she just ceases to exist because they were killing the creatures.  They also indicate that the government is trying to keep this quiet so they don't want a huge military presence.   And finally, it's television, Jack, we want to watch the heroes having adventures, not numnuts.  

This reminds me of the time I was running a Scotland Yard game for the gang, and there was a hostage in a warehouse with a lot of bad guys.  One of my players suggested calling in the SWAT team to which Victor Milan replied "well, we can sit here and watch Melinda roll dice and tell us how it comes our or we could play."  He was right; in the real world you wait for SWAT in my game you play.  The same thing applies to this show.

Back to the point.  Yes, all of these explanations are fig leaves (not the changing timelines thing), but none of that matters because the show isn't about the creatures.  It's about the characters and their relationships.  And it has a huge meta theme -- that individuals matter.  That they should take precedence over The Greater Good, or The Big Picture, or Eggs and Omelets.

Each season increases the stakes and ramps up the tension and meanwhile you're wondering if Conner and Abby will ever get together, and suddenly you realize that Lester, the bureaucrat with a heart of gold, has become the father figure to this team, and is constantly protecting them in his funny, snarky way, and there's the bittersweet story of the man and woman out of time who find each other.  They take the stereotypical soldier character and make him so interesting and so appealing and so guilt ridden that he is no longer a stereotype.

They allow the characters to represent facets of the human condition.  Pure intellect, pure heart and emotion.  How either of those two polar opposites leads to bad results.  The plotting is very good for a television show.  They echo back to things set in motion in season one.  The psychological drives of the people dictate how they behave, and they learn from their mistakes and their actions.  They grow and change unlike many American shows where everything has to reset to neutral at the end of each episode.

I liked the show.  Check it out if you're curious and remember it's a morality play and a damn good one.

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