Primeval Series 4 Episode 7 Finale Review

What a great finale!  Well, if you watched series 3.  If not, all of the impact of Danny's return and Ethan's identity was lost on you and, well, I'm sorry.  It was brave, or at least an interesting choice, of the showrunners to take that tack - did they not care about new viewers, or was this a lovely gift for the faithful?  As a faithful who was fairly disappointed with series 3, I was nevertheless taken completely by surprise and was delighted to see Danny return through the anomaly.  And WOW what a great twist to have Ethan be his long lost brother!  I frankly don't remember how often it came up in the third series that Danny's missing brother was the reason he joined the police force, beyond the introductory episode, but hopefully I wasn't the only one to have an great "OMG!" moment when Ethan's identity was revealed.

So, Helen is definitely dead, according to Danny.  Given his reappearance, it's nice to have her literally and figuratively laid to rest.  But the memory of her character will apparently live on, since she had several documents in her hand (excuse me?) and Phillip's name was on every one… Okay, that could be interesting.  Phillip was wonderfully creepy with his "Danny seemed erratic to me" line.  It was very reminiscent of Doctor Who's "Doesn't she look tired" line about Harriet Jones, eventually causing her downfall.  Danny was lucky, if you can call it that, that he decided to follow and protect his brother, and protect others from him, thereby sparing himself from whatever devious plans Phillip may have had for him.  If Primeval gets picked up again, Danny and Ethan/Patrick could certainly return, but if it doesn't, it was nice to have that storyline tied up so nicely.

Interesting setting, the retired prison.  So convenient that the anomalies seem to always appear in remote locations.  Regardless, it was a nice and creepy, multilevel classic-for-hunt/chase site.  As for the anomalies themselves, Connor's toy was a solid upgrade to the ARC's anomaly tracking abilities.  Loved his line when he found that an anomaly had a date from the 1800s and that they therefore shouldn't be worried -  expecting no creatures except maybe an "Oliver Twistasaurus."  The anomalies occurring more frequently and developing twins was a neat effect, especially as it made some of them undetectable, another cool revision.  More to build on is always good news for this type of show.

Was anyone really surprised that Matt is from the future?  No more than I was surprised, meaning not, that the mystery man was Matt's father.  Honestly, we've seen this already, not only in movies like "Terminator 2" but in this very show, with the extremely scary creatures from the future that we saw during the last series.  Yes, yes, the future will be horrible, all because of one man, blah blah blah.  Could be Phillip, could be Connor, we'll just have to see.

Or not.  The strength of the Danny/Ethan reveal and the changes in the anomalies outweighed the "meh" response I had to the Matt part of the story, and I therefore hope that we will see a return of this show.  Overall, a very well done series finale, and a return to the level of series 1.  Here's hoping for more of the same.

First published by Simply Television on 2/5/11