Nuketown

Television Reviews

Get Primeval with the BBC's weekly creature feature TV series

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Sat, 12/27/2008 - 6:30am

I'm a creature feature kind of guy. There are few things I enjoy more than a bowl of popcorn, a cold beer and a monster-of-the-week movie. So it goes without saying that BBC's Primeval - in which portals to the past unleash horrors upon modern Britan -- is my kind of show.

The pilot episode of the 13-episode Season 1 sees a variety of dinosaurs wander through into the Forest of Dean, including one particularly nasty carnivore that's taken to hunting the woods for prey (and the occasional tractor trailer). Episode #2 features giant bugs infesting the London Underground, while Episode #3 has a giant aquatic dinosaur prowling the nation's waterways.

Each has traveled through a rip in space/time connecting our present with eras millions of years in the past. And the portal's aren't one way; creatures (and humans) can pass back and forth between the two time periods. They have to be quick though; the portals are unstable, and time travelers can easily find themselves trapped in the past when one of the wormholes evaporates.

LOST Jumps Back

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Fri, 05/30/2008 - 12:10pm

I remember when LOST jumped the shark. It was the episode dedicated to the mystery of Jack’s tattoo. It was an inane episode, one that existed entirely to buy time for the writers, while simultaneously keeping a popular character on screen for the majority of an episode. The episode could have been good – after all, LOST is all about those weird coincidences and strange meanings of every day occurrences. By this point in LOST’s evolution though, we had enough mysteries. We wanted answers. We got a tattoo.

With Season 4, LOST jumped back.

Days of Future Heroes

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Tue, 05/01/2007 - 11:30am

Heroes has continued to impress since returning from its December/January hiatus, consistently delivering episodes that have answered important questions while ratcheting up the serialized tension.

For any other series, last night would have been a season-ending clifhanger of epic proportions. But in an example of why Heroes is such a damn good show, they don't play for the cheap, easy shows that end up stretching out the story's continuum for years on end (like say, LOST). Instead, they take us to the future -- five years into the future -- and show us the consequences of not saving the world.

Heroes Will Rise

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Sun, 10/08/2006 - 4:29pm

With the exception to LOST, broadcast TV hasn't been kind to speculative fiction. Science fiction series died by the bunch last year, with only Invasion surviving long enough to have a full season run … and not being renewed. Before LOST, Fox killed off Firefly, the most promising SF series in years without even trying to find it an audience.

And now we have Heroes, a superhero series that inherits almost a decades worth of superhero momentum, and tries to do something amazing with it. There are two big questions: is it any good … and will NBC let it survive long enough to thrive?