Primeval Season 2 (12)

Some things change, some stay the same. As series two of ITV’s Doctor Who challenger starts, shifts in history have turned Home Offlcer Claudia into a PR woman and geeky creature-chaser Connor into a babe magnet, much to zoo-chick Abby’s annoyance. Soon, however, Dougie Henshall’s zoologist Cutter is motorbike-racing against ’raptors, Connor is gobbled by a big worm, Abby is abducted by sea monsters.... Some changes, then, but more would help Primeval outgrow its beast-of-the-week formulaics. Once you’ve seen one predator slip through an anomaly in time, where’s the novelty? Sporadically fun as it is, Tim Haines and Adrian Hodges’ creation creaks beneath repetitive plotting, so it hardly surprises that they sound bored on their commentary. Only sometime Who scribe Paul Cornell gives the lead cast something to chew on with his mammoth-sized, twist-heavy but funny episode. A few evolutionary shifts like that and Primeval might just survive.

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