Primeval season 3 episode 7 review

Yup, this week’s episode should have been called Medieval, as really breaking away from the old dinosaur route this week, the team tackle a rampaging knight and what seems like a ‘dark ages’ dragon.

It seems that both this week and last week’s episodes have kind of been fillers, where nothing much of note has happened continuity-wise. That’s not to say that’s a bad thing, since this week’s episode was fun, silly and a bit daft – but after four weeks or so of the whole ‘Prime-verse’ being moved forward, we stall for a second successive week. The idea behind it is great, buit it’s really a water-treading exercise when it comes to things like the artefact, future wars and Helen Cutter’s evil shenanigans.

So taking this instalment out of context of the series and reviewing it as a one-off/stand-alone episode, what’s the verdict? Well, to be honest, it was a whole lot of fun, daft and at times insane and really the kind of thing Saturday night telly should be.

Kicking things off in the Medieval times, we see a church full of refugees being terrified by what they perceive to be a dragon, but which in fact, is a dinosaur called a Dracorex, which (just coincidentally) perfectly resembles a dragon from myth, and has wandered through an anomaly.

With the locals scared out of their wits it is up to Sir William de Mornay, a wandering knight looking for redemption, to set out and slay the beast. However, not everything goes to plan, as both the Dracorex and Sir William jump through an anomaly ending up in our time, which leads to a set of chases to get both the wounded creature and Sir William back to their own time.

Once again we have the team splitting up, with one half of the field team (Abby and Becker) chasing the dragon (in the literal sense and not the drug-based sense) while the other half (consisting of Conner and Danny) track down the fully-dressed knight in central London, which would usually be not that hard to do – however, with a carnival on, its not as tricky as first thought.

Although mainly just a run-and-track-down plot, there are some tasty bits of fun added in. Whether it’s the knight thinking that the future is ‘Hell’ or that a set of weedy bikers are actually devils working for the devil, the whole ‘fish out of water’ (or time?) works really well and has a light-hearted feel.

What’s also interesting is that for the first time was also see Sarah out in the ‘field’ tracking down historical clues to assist in the proceedings. However, she does far more that just sit around and look pretty, doing what (so far) none of the cast have done by purposely going through the anomaly to the past to see what she can discover as far as a Maguffin or plot device she can find to save the day.

Although no ill-effects occur from her doing this, it will be interesting to see what connotations there will be for her having this sneaky trip. Will she come back with the Black Death, disrupt the time-line or something else? And this potential for problems, it seems, will come back and bite her on the behind if next week’s episode is anything to go by, as it seems she isn’t the only one causing problems.

After the introduction a few weeks ago of Abby’s brother Jack, he has proved nothing but a problem, and this week things also get a bit worse as, after loosing Rex in a bet to his friend, the cute flying dinosaur appears on e-Bay. And while Conner gets back Rex with the help of Becker and a few menacing sunglasses-clad sinister army mates, there is still trouble in store: the promos show that Jack gets up to a lot more next week when it comes to the ARC research and the potential of future monsters.

While not as edge-of-your-seat as the first few weeks, this was once again a neat if not overwhelming episode, with the team nicely leading William back to the anomaly after an obligatory sword fight/misunderstanding. Plot-wise this isn’t too bad, and – while silly in parts and the Dracorex a bit of a cliché – the exploration of the ‘myths and monsters’ of the world aspect of the show that Sarah was supposed to come in to develop gets a shot in the arm and could lead to bigger and better ideas such as Yeti, lake monsters and even UFO’s (from the future?).

Still next week we have giant bugs to look forward to so it can’t all be bad.

Check out Robert’s review of episode 6 here.