I tried watching this old BBC series with an interesting premise: strange, random anomalies keep popping up around Great Britain, providing temporary two-way passages to and from the distant past. It’s a great set up for a monster-of-the-week series, as ancient creatures pop up and terrify the locals and give the scientist protagonists opportunities to travel to the past. I like the idea!
But then, in the very first episode, Cutter, who is searching for his wife lost in the past, finds a human skeleton in the dirt, he quickly runs his fingers over the rib cage, and announces, “It’s not her. It’s a male.” Say what? Do the writers have the bad idea that men and women differ in the number of ribs? That would be embarrassingly bad.
I braved the second episode, which features giant ancient spiders! Way to sidle past my doubts, writers. These spiders have massive chelicerae which seem to be orthognathous, much like those found in tarantulas (the Aranea are labidognathous, and can pinch their pointy little fangs together.) Some people are bitten and envenomed, and some dork suggests that they can’t be spiders, they must be scorpions, which is silly, since scorpions have relative small chelicerae. I had to stop there, because the credibility of the scientific contributions of the writing team is about nil at this point.
For those of you familiar with the show, is it worth it for me to continue? I’m here for relaxing entertainment, not exercising my arm shaking my fist at the TV.
Now I’m ruining it further for myself. An open portal that allows the free passage of dinosaurs and people is going to be a massive meteorological catastrophe, buecause it’s a small point with a gigantic temperature, oxygen, and pressure differential across it. Damn it.
Whoa! Confusion.
Based on the title I was gonna say great show! Watch it all!
But then you described something other than a 1 season Western.
Had to go searching.
Aaah. American Primeval is on Netflix.
It’s a good one if you like westerns. And it’s only 6 episodes.
I’m still a bit torn about the ending…
Even better is Godless on Netflix. If you haven’t see it, don’t take anything from the title. The town is godless because they don’t have a pastor for their church. And that fact doesn’t really inform the story at all. It’s just a damn good western with a great shootout at the end.
No it’s not. I watched it when released and if you can let go of your critical facilities you might enjoy it. But I couldn’t and fell off watching it as it’s story got more involved and less interesting.
Yeah, I saw that article.
Scientists Discover a Hidden Supervolcano Buried Beneath England
At the time, i thought it would be interesting – the graphics were done by the same team that had made the very successful original Walking With Dinosaurs ( / Beasts / Monsters) series from the 90s. Yeah the science in those wasn’t perfect but it was still a really good presentation.
Alas as the show got underway they took each of the models of generally calm, self-interested, but realistic creatures…and turned them all into ‘monsters’, adding traits for the scare and thrill…but lost me on the lack of science of any type in this science-fiction.
The ‘Walking With’ people did better when they went back to simulated science with the BBC a little later on (Prehistoric Park), but this had promise but turned into a low point.
I liked it. It does require a modicum of suspension of disbelief, but it was pretty well-written, considering how bonkers the concept is. Also, it is a British show in the truest sense – it is not interested in churning out the same repetitive nonsense, over and over, for over a dozen episodes a season. It takes risks, kills popular characters, and takes some fascinating detours as you get to season (series?) 2 and 3. So to my North American brain, it was a nice bit of novelty, although I expect British people are not impressed to the same degree I was.
Note that it is science FICTION though, in the tradition of “what would happen if X crazy thing happened in Y modern place? How would Z people adapt to their zany new world?” Also…I found it quite funny, like…deliberately comedic in a way that doesn’t beat the audience over the head with the joke (also a trait of British television, I’ve noticed). But I watched it like…over 10 years ago, so it may or may not hold up.
The theme song is tremendous, IMHO. The rest is, uh, a bit mixed, as you’ve seen, although I doubt that scene was meant to be counting the ribs. (I don’t remember the scene, but the show is certainly not creationist.) Anyway… I liked it. There’s not that much of it, either way — 36 episodes.
The way team members were chosen, and how far they drifted from their supposed specialties, was probably the worst of it, for me.
It features several actors who later became prominent in other shows, so if you watch much British TV, you can annoy people by saying “Oh, I know him from Primeval.”
Nemo:
I found it in YouTube.
It most certainly is just that; the hips are still interred.
Literally running his fingers along.
Here:
https://youtu.be/WE-PUUN65ME?t=206
See? I didn’t make it up. He was counting ribs to make a determination of sex. Absolute nonsense.
I vaguely remember watching several episodes of this, most likely from the first series because I remember the reason why I stopped watching it. If I’ve got the right programme it was reasonably captivating at first, chasing dinosaurs down tunnels, but at some point somebody ends up with a pet dragon. I don’t think it breathed fire but it had four legs and two wings, so I thought the writers could stuff their hexapod stupidity up their non-evolutionary arseholes.
These days I find myself losing patience pretty quickly with shows that feature “strange, random anomalies” popping up all the time. Maybe entertaining at first, but it quickly turns into a Lost type of thing where there is nothing coherent underlying the strangeness, no mystery to be pieced together, just some writers making up stuff as they go along. I start to feel like there will never be anything that ties it all together, just more strange, random anomalies.
There have been quite a few of those shows over the last 15-20 years, and I can never stick with them for long. And yeah, bad science is never a good sign. I find that writers who disregard science unnecessarily have a general disregard for working out underlying causes for their plot points, and in the end, there will be no “there” there.
FWIW. I’ve seen excerpts of Primeaval on some youtube clips and fb and reckon the dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures seen in them look pretty good.
Dunno about the plot or characters or any of that and clearly its SF-fantasy but if the point is impressive fun recreatiosn of what we think dinosaurs wer elike (& I think it may well be) then I think it probly works.
@1. PZ Myers : Presumably that’s addressed by some techno-magic in the same way as the Heisenberg compensators operate in Star Trek. How do they work? Very well, thankyou!
StevoR, not at all. I checked the Wikipedia page and the canon, and they are most certainly not techno-magic.
They are natural phenomena in-canon, which is the opposite of technology.
feralboy12 was spot-on, I think.
—
PS if you want technomagic, try the “Ring of Fire” series; the temporal displacement was literally caused by a cosmic sculpture project where an Assiti (weakly godlike entities*) artist was using a localized time-space manipulation tool to create a piece of art for an exhibition, and oopsies, there were side-effects in our local spacetime.
–
* a designation of post-singularity technological physical prowess, not divinity. Term of the art.
I remember Primeval and remember enjoying it even if the science was sketchy at best.
But then most popular science-fiction depends heavily on the fiction part to work. Without warp-drive, subspace, hyperdrives, stargates or jump-gates there’s no space operas. And they only work by completely ignoring the relativistic effects. Just like the time travel stories generally ignore the paradoxes involved.
And way before Jurassic Park you had the classic Them with James Arness and Edmund Gwynn battling giant, mutant ants which still holds up today as far as I’m concerned.
You can see the partially exposed pelvis @~2:55 when they first approach. I’m no expert, but it does seem to have the narrow angle of a male.
But then when asked how he knows, he says “I don’t know.” And even if the rib myth were true, there are only 5 ribs visible, so not enough to determine by count anyway. Which leads me to conclude that she was so skinny that he was intimately familiar with her ribs and could recognize them by touch. They just didn’t “feel” like her ribs. lol
like all science fiction it is not a science documentary.
I saw it and could not stop watching it. What was the challenge this week part of the story. there is the conflict with the government agency paying for all the stuff. Then there is the mysteries of how is this happening and what happened to the wife? many questions along the way, some are never answered some answers change over time all in all pretty involving and twists and turns. and most of the lose ends are tied up in the end.
I watched another time travel type science fiction serial a romantic adventure from Korea called
Sisyphus: The Myth that also very good, great look action, drama and funny bits. trying to prevent the end of the world
a further observation serials as a posed to series have a beginning middle and end.
Primeval and Sisyphus the myth are serials and not series They also owe a little to Rod Serling
If that were true, I’d cause a major catastrophe every time I open my windows. The differential really isn’t big enough to cause any problems.
On the other hand, introducing spores of mushrooms that can break down lignin into the Carboniferous would cause some major upheavals I’d guess.
Reminds me of an episode of CSI Miami in which the forensic investigators made a big deal about a car parked under a Brazilian pepper tree as if it would be rare enough occurrence to be used as evidence. Stopped watching the show.
If he was indeed counting the ribs then yes, that’s ridiculous. However, the adult male rib cage is on average larger relative to the body, due to the effects of testosterone during puberty. You wouldn’t need to touch it to observe that however, and it isn’t likely that someone would make a definite pronouncement after a quick glance. On the other hand an extra rib occasionally occurs, but almost always in women, ironically enough. So you could demonstrate that it’s a female by counting the ribs, but not that it’s a male.
I find all TeeVee…and most movies…to be dreck. I would suggest not watching any of it. You’ve got better things to do, like catching spiders. I quit watching TV during the reality series titled “Gulf War (The First)” when the Iraqis kept trying to blow up Wolf Blitzer but missed every time. Improbable!
@2: Seconded for Godless. And we don’t normally go in for Westerns. It was just a damn good show.
You will have to explain the novelty of parking under a Brazilian pepper tree for those of us in more northerly climes, where your exotic tropical vegetation does not grow.
I liked the first season of Primeval when I saw it on Netflix many many years ago (back when Netflix was just a clearinghouse of old TV shows and the phrase “Netflix original series” did not exist), but I felt like it got increasingly bad as things went on with killing off interesting characters and replacing them with much less interesting ones and as previously mentioned the show’s habit of making prehistoric animals larger, more aggressive, and more monstrous than they really were.
Also, if you think the scene with the skeleton was bad, wait till you get to the episode where someone determines that a Pteranodon hasn’t been eating people by tasting its feces. That happens in the show.
PZ,
Beforeingers is a Norwegian series, on HBO i think. I watched it during the pandemic. I think there is a second season now.
People from the Vikings era start showing up through weird portals. There is a murder investigation and all the social interactions/clashes between people from the 793-1066 CE and the current age.
The show takes place in the current day, and has flashbacks to the past lives of the people that have been temporally displaced.
There is a trailer available.
“For those of you familiar with the show, is it worth it for me to continue?”
No!
I really hated it.
It had a neat premise but… it catered to freaky monster of a week that could just kill and be scary and nasty. And there was no intellectual curiosity of “wow, we’re seeing things from the past” which really even if they are running amok on a subway cutting people in half there should still be some sense of awe. It was all scary,scary, kill it, kill it, it’s dead, sigh of relief.
I didn’t think they we’re counting ribs in that scene but… hell, maybe.
Here:
https://youtu.be/WE-PUUN65ME?t=206
Wow. When I first watched it I assumed he was doing some looking at pelvis width and limb length but… yeah, that is counting ribs! A more common misconception then one would think. It has it origins, of course, in creationism but being ignorant of it doesn’t mean one is a creationist.
In case Hemi D. doesn’t make it back here, the Brazilian Pepper Tree contains urushiol, in other words it’s like poison ivy. But I don’t know that people wouldn’t park under it for that reason.
Woozy @28: “It has it[s] origins, of course, in creationism but being ignorant of it doesn’t mean one is a creationist.”
While your statement might be true, the proponents are still being influenced by religious fables, since there is no other source.
Every religionist that I have actually known and asked, Catholic, Baptist, Pentecostalist, Jewish, (never asked the Mormon) has insisted that men have one less rib than women. Showing photos of male and female human skeletons never fails to bring up all kinds of humorous responses, but never admitting that they are completely FOS.
One factual error. It is not a BBC series.
It was made by ITV, one of the main commercial channels in the UK.
It was most likely made as an attempt to cash in on the successful Reboot of Dr Who (by the BBC) two years previously.
Sci Fi on mainstream broadcast TV in the UK was hip for a while.
I keep repeating this over and over.
.
A potentially good film or TV series needs to hire a group of teenage science nerds to locate the plot holes, and then come up with repairing or bypassing them.
Interstellar could have been saved. Lost could have been saved.
I am not very creative, but even I can sometimes come up with resolving plotholes in a film or TV episode.
From what you have written, the time gate needs to link to a parallel time line, otherwise the butterfly effect will be disastrous.
If the idiot had looked at the hip bones and the opening in the pelvis it is indeed possible to tell if it is a man or a woman.
Space 1999 was fixed in the book version by having the Moon drop into hyperspace, but it was too late. The TV version is canon.
-I am not sure I can fix “Lucy”, maybe if the injection/addictive stuff was developed using alien relic tech (‘Murderbot’ hates alien relic tech. It is even worse than spending time with humans).
It does have an awesome scene of a mammoth killing a velociraptor. But it’s probably going to be ragebait to anyone with any knowledge of paleontology.
A substantial number of people are born with an extra pair of ribs because the human embryonic process is messy.
For a similar reason a compare-able frequency of humans are born with gender dysphoria.
People do not choose to be born with extra ribs, or with gender dysphoria.
.
Fact: men and women have minimal skeletal differences.
Additional fact: Lemmings do not commit mass suicude. The disney “documentary” was faked, based on a myth passed on by Linnaeus.
Rodent populations in boreal and subarctic regions fluctuate wildly for complex reasons that were only understood in the nineties. Something to do with food webs
I do not what the reason that they focused on the Brazilian Pepper Tree having distaste for the program but in southern Cal and I would assume Florida and other frost free places that tree is in no way rare and in fact is an over-planted semi-invasive very messy atrocity.
as for the skeleton ID that is one of the details that is withheld by the scientist. He does a lot of that not telling all that he thinks he knows
I would have to classify Primeval much more of a mystery science fiction story with focus on the mystery
but not really a film noir sci-FY mystery like blade runner
I agree with several others here. The premise of the show seemed interesting at first to this non-scientific Latin teacher.
My husband was all in for the show, but I lost interest after a while.
There was a feeble attempt to bring the action to the US, which he also watched, but I avoided.
@30 “Woozy @28: “It has it[s] origins, of course, in creationism but being ignorant of it doesn’t mean one is a creationist.”
While your statement might be true, the proponents are still being influenced by religious fables, since there is no other source.”
Well, of course!
I was just trying to figure out how I show, that I admittedly found stupid but not particularly “creationist” or religious and if anything, er, “materalistic” in outlook?– it’s about a portal to dinosaurs and 8 foot centipedes and carnivorous sea lions of 60 million years in the future and nothing particularly “creationist” would also have “It’s a man” by counting ribs scene.
(Although perhaps that was the actors interpretation. The script has the man look at the skeleton and determine is sciency-tropy-way “It’s a man” because… forensics… and the actor assumed it was because of the ribs? I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not. On the one hand I don’t have any real need to defend a show I didn’t like, and which sure never had good science, but… honestly, it really didn’t seem like its science was quite that bad…)
“Every religionist that I have actually known and asked, Catholic, Baptist, Pentecostalist, Jewish, (never asked the Mormon) has insisted that men have one less rib than women.”
Well, okay. I’ve never met anyone who thought that. But then I again I know a lot fewer religionists than most people. I’ve known very few fundamentalists (I’m actually not sure if I’ve known any) and I don’t think I know any young-earth creationists. I know many believers and I guess many of them believe creationism over science but it’s more from ignorance/apathy than from any adamant fundamentalism. But the people I know aren’t very representative and, I tend not to talk about this so I don’t know what anyone actually believes
PZ @24 and unclefrogy @35
Today after all these years I finally traced down the CSI Miami episode. It was Season 2 Episode 11 “Complications”. I forced myself to watch it. Seeing David Caruso’s mug multiple times like that is very unpleasant. He’d come a long way since chasing Rambo through the Pacific Northwest alongside Switek from Miami Vice in First Blood.
Anyway a plastic surgery anesthesiologist is found dead. Long story short they find sappy residue at the crime scene. They analyze it and determine it is honeydew produced by aphids feasting on a Brazilian pepper tree. Here’s the relevant part of the script:
Ummm…no! Nobody high end is bringing in something invasive that can be easily found anywhere in Florida or just happen to have grown at the plastic surgery clinic without deliberate help from a high end landscaper. I knew people who were on removal projects futilely trying to get rid of this crap. You really have to make this shit up, because it is pretentious television crime procedural bafflegab.
An investigator then confronts a suspect at the clinic:
Or maybe any number of places in Miami where aphids spew Brazilian pepper derived honeydew all over the ground if that is even a thing. Maybe someone else at the clinic with a motive to kill the victim walked by his car, which was parked under the Brazilian pepper tree as I recalled, and stepped in the magical plot device honeydew. Maybe the victim did.
To an extent that the car was under a Brazilian pepper tree could be indicative, but the writers for this show made a huge deal of this whole thing! Ridiculous.
Only high end landscapers bring dog shit to dog parks. Hey you take your dog to a dog park don’t you? We happened to find dog shit tracked through the victim’s apartment. Nobody else in Miami could have stepped in dog shit.
Script source:
https://subslikescript.com/series/CSI_Miami-313043/season-2/episode-11-Complications
At least I got to see Khandi Alexander who had been in NewsRadio and ER. She’s quite ok.
I found this thanks to Google AI but the summary instead mentioned another episode set in Rio in Brazil which was a bum steer. I watched enough to see one character explain to another what favelas are as exposition as I guess the audience is assumed too ignorant to know otherwise.
Makes me miss good crime dramas like Miami Vice.
@29 cervantes
Yeah it’s related to poison ivy, cashews, and pistachios. I have reacted to poison ivy, but I recently cut back a Brazilian pepper in my yard and didn’t react. I was mindful to not touch my face. I guess I should have worn gloves. I washed my hands thoroughly.
woozy,
Not ‘of course!’.
Excluded middle is not a good thing, heuristics aside.
Could be the writer(s)/director said to the actor to pretend to examine the bones and make a determination, no more.
So he ‘examined’ the bones and made his informed pronouncement accordingly.
(The magic of informed attributes)
Just finishing up the episode. They revisit the aphid spew as we get the dramatic CSI style reenactment visions near the climactic conclusion showing the one suspect stepping onto the victim’s floor and leaving a puddle of rare honeydew. I cannot even recall they ever positively identified the honeydew as coming from the hard to find in Miami Brazilian pepper. Seems more of a plot hand wave to ooh and awe audience members.
Does David Caruso’s character Horatio Own Hornblower always make some cutesy biting remark at a suspect and then silently back out of the frame as if saying “This right here is why they pay me the big bucks!”. I must admit he’s far less obnoxious to look at than Mark Harmon on his own overblown crime procedural shock and awe garbage. That character habitually head slapped employees. Ummm…HR!!!
Give me Dexter Morgan and his visqueen kill room any day. Or the Burn Notice guy with his stout jawed buddy played by Bruce Campbell for shows set in Miami. Or Vice with Castillo the OG!
“woozy,
Well, of course!
Not ‘of course!’.”
….
My “of course!” was in response to “the proponents are still being influenced by religious fables, since there is no other source”
(Today seems to be my day for everything I say to be misunderstood. I’m with you in that I have no idea why it appears the actor is counting ribs, but I really doubt it was in the script.)
As do I. Point being, it’s possible.
e.g. ‘Cutter briefly examines the skeleton and sees it is male’ in the script, then left up to the actor/director.
Ahem.
That is to what my ‘excluded middle’ referred, so no misunderstanding on my part.
Same outcome, different basis. Heuristics are not entailment.
What I wrote does not require any influence by religious fables, just an actor/director acting out being ‘cluey’ about anatomy, and the scene would look the same.
(Handwaving in more than one sense :)
I watched Primeval when it was first released in 2007, and found that Hannah Spearritt was enough reason to like it.
@42
“What I wrote does not require any influence by religious fables, just an actor/director acting out being ‘cluey’ about anatomy, and the scene would look the same.”
But what you wrote doesn’t refer to “the proponents” at all then.
zetopan’s comment was “While your statement might be true, the proponents are still being influenced by religious fables, since there is no other source.”
I was not in any way attempting to deny this. It was simply not relevant to my original point that the writers of the show may not included it. That was what my rhetorical “Of course” was referring to.
I have no idea what your “No ‘of course'” was referring to anymore.
woozy @44
Trying to get at why John posts as he does with the superficial word chopping is a waste of time. You were better off with the far more interesting back and forth with zetopan.
I never saw the show but the snippet you showed in @28 was him counting ribs.
Robbo @26: I loved Beforeigners, but I don’t think there’s any legal way to watch it now. It was an HBO Nordic production, only available streaming here on HBO Max, and after the second season, Zaslav (cursed be his name) cancelled it and pulled the old episodes off streaming, as Zaslav does. Despite all that, there are persistent rumors of a third season coming sometime, some way.