4x21 Primeval (2)

This episode is again an uneven admixture of good and bad, only this time the good is better, and the bad is really, really bad, and I use the word admixture with intent, since it's so uneven that the good and bad elements exist within the same scenes. It's kind of like watching Revenge of the Sith. I hold to my previous assertion that George Herzberg was wasted in the Initiative plot, because he had a great delivery, and Adam was actually a fairly compelling villain, only he didn't have time to develop, and was surrounded by incompetent execution. To whit, it's resoundingly clear that a bunch of comic book and theatre nerds made this, as the military and weapons and technology aspects are all pretty terribly executed. The epilogue was actually pretty neat, though.

Things I liked: Adam's line referencing Walsh and her deadness. He's such a uniquely and bizarrely alien character, and his perspective shown by his choice of words and the delivery are so unsettlingly strange that it made me laugh. It felt kind of like reading Stranger in a Strange Land, and it makes me wonder if that was used as inspiration for the character's perspective/mindset, only made to be stoically Machievellianly demonic.

Super Buffy. Gave me chills from the first shot. Whereas the demon-human chimera cyborgs were terrible cringe, Buffy was legitimately awe-inspiring, and you could hear the subtle dawning fear in Adam's voice with his second utterance of ,,Interesting..." as he realized that he might actually be the one to die there.

ps. The whole "demon fight in a subterranean institutional complex" makes me wonder if this idea wasn't the prototype for Cabin In The Woods, which actually made great use of the concept. It may be the one truly high concept horror film I've seen. Damn, that was a properly epic and daring ending.