In an exclusive interview with Total Sci-Fi, Primeval co-creator Adrian Hodges talks about the major changes in the new season including the death of Douglas Henshall's Nick Cutter and the arrival of new team members Danny Quinn and Sarah Page... Words: Paul Simpson
The new season takes a sidestep into mythology was that to keep the show fresh?
I don't know we would see it as a sidestep. Because we had 10 episodes, we felt we had more time to go off in different directions. We were more ambitious. The mythology has always been inherent in the possibilities of the show. Once we had the storyline of a creature coming out in the British Museum, it seemed a very natural time to introduce this notion of mythology and knit it into the storyline.
Primeval is not an easy formula to keep refreshing. Merely having a creature come through, roaring and eating people, was going to have a limited shelf life. We had to bring more to the show than that, or we would have died halfway through the second season. It's always been about bringing in human storylines that support the structure, that allows the creatures to come through.
In a six episode run, you are hovering in an area that sits between miniseries and a full series. I think that six episodes of anything pushes you to a miniseries kind of approach, with a much stronger serial link between episodes. When you get to 10, which is approaching a half US season, you can keep your serial stories floating but you don't have to use up quite so much material quite so quickly.
It's harder, because you've got to keep more balls in the air, but with a 10 episode run, you can have two or three episode stories that have a beginning, a middle and an end. We've done a bit of that episode four climaxes the story with the journalist from three and four which is a story in its own right.
There are certainly some shocks along the way...
When we knew Dougie [Henshall] was leaving we were presented with a dilemma. It was always my intention to finish the Cutter/Helen story at the end of the third series, and give Dougie an out then, if he wanted it. I never thought he'd do more than three series.
But when he decided to go earlier than we'd expected, we had to come up with an ending that fitted the Cutter/Helen arc, one which we could also carry forward into the rest of the series. That left us with very few options; unlike a certain other fantasy series we can't regenerate our leading men, so whatever we did had to be realistic and credible and also we had to make it unexpected. I think a lot of people would have said (and in fact many of them did), "Oh, he's just going to get lost in an anomaly or something," so I felt we had to do something more than that, and really, if you look at the way things have been going with Helen, it had to end badly one way or the other.
So we came up with the end you've now seen, which I hope is both shocking and moving and realistic, which is in line with the feel of our show. What an emphatic ending for the character also does is make sure that we don't spend the rest of the series looking back and saying "Is he coming back this week?" because we wanted to give the show a completely new start and even a slightly new feel with Jason in the lead. That's the thinking, anyway but needless to say the Helen story isn't finished and will now follow an arc slightly different to the one I originally had in mind but reaching roughly the same conclusion at the end of this series.
Why do the Arc team bring Sarah Page on board?
The problem they have with Sarah is she's very aware of the anomalies, the creatures, the team. She's very smart, so when Cutter hits on this notion of tracking back through mythology to get a closer idea of the anomalies in history, he needs somebody to do that with him, and it seems natural that Sarah with her expertise would be that person. Merely having her looking at history books for 10 episodes would be a little difficult, so she will gradually expand her role as the series goes on.
We felt a different balance in the team would be a good idea: we were thinking of subsequent series as well as this one. We do finish a couple of storylines in this series that we started early on, and I was keen that people had satisfying answers to those questions, but then having done that, we have been preparing other stuff so we can move on. You don't want it to feel like the end!
There's not been a key military figure since Ryan died at the end of the first series. Why did you wait to introduce Becker until now?
In the second series, we made a conscious decision to see if we could go without having too much military intervention. One dreads that Star Trek thing of having someone in uniform around purely to be killed. Could we do this with our core team without another military guy? Also, we really liked Ryan and what Mark [Wakeling] had done with him, and we felt we should respect him and not replace him instantly.
As the series went on, it just wasn't credible that they would go into these situations without back up. Given they are a quasi-government set up, it made no sense. When we planned the third series, we created Becker, another military character, particularly as they had just lost Stephen arguably through not having proper military support.
Episode two sees the introduction of Danny, played by Jason Flemyng, who's become the new leading man of the show. What were you looking for?
We wanted a leading man who would be very different to Cutter. Dougie patented a kind of passionate intensity and I think was pretty convincing as an academic and a driven loner, who certainly thawed a bit in the company of his team, but was basically always his own man. Jason, as a personality, is naturally very warm and outgoing and we wanted to catch that in Danny, who is really nothing like Cutter in that he's not an academic but a policeman by training, and he's not really an expert. But he's a natural leader with a great ability to look at the big picture and make good decisions.
After Cutter's death, the team need someone to pull them together and Danny, as an outsider, is just the man to do it. He has enormous relish for what he does and even in adversity has a kind of James Bond-ish glee in the danger and mayhem (that would be the old James Bond rather than the glum Quantum one). But that said, he has his own demons: he lost his brother to an anomaly creature, and his determination to find out what really happened led him to join the police and eventually the Arc team.
That story may not be entirely finished (look out for season four) and does play a role in the make up of his personality but he's basically a friendly, open guy with a great taste for the physical side of things and real leadership qualities. If Cutter was the stern patriarch, Danny is more of the firm but fair big brother. And he's funny with it.
Are you writing any of the episodes yourself?
I haven't written any first drafts in this series, but I have written the final version of every single script. Broadly I do a polish or a rewrite depending on the situation. I have a substantial involvement in each episode. Each writer has done a brilliant job nobody is going to get a credit who doesn't deserve it.
Primeval is a tough job you go through a lot of drafts. You often find yourself doing a third draft which is almost completely different to your first draft because what your first draft often reveals is better opportunities for better stories.
Were constantly on the hunt for good creatures from the past that really will help us. The trouble with a lot of predators in prehistory is they are pretty raptor-ish, so it's hard to say "This is a different sort of raptor to the one you saw last week" because it does look rather similar. Tim [Haines] thinks up creatures that are different enough, fun and lively but not just straining for novelty. There's a lot of creatures you can't use because they're a bit boring: they just sit there chewing grass. Late in the series, we have a creature that isn't in and of itself particularly dangerous, but only dangerous because it's huge and goes around in herds.
What are the highlights of the season for you?
I think it is our most ambitious season it goes through changes and surprises, which we had to deal with at quite short notice in certain cases. There is no doubt that episode three has an impact. We have a very strong run in the middle of the season episodes three through seven are remarkable. The giganotosaurus in episode four is a fun filled episode, and it's good to see a huge creature. Episode five has a genuinely unusual creature it's so crazy and unusual. Much of it is set in the Arc, and the threat comes from within.
I'm bound to say that Framestore have taken the effects to a new level this series the work they've done is really remarkable. We were justifiably proud of the effects in the first series, but seeing it now, we've moved on. It's just astonishing.
Total Scifi April 17th 2009