Amazing CGI, yes, and by all accounts more accurate representation of dinosaur appearance and lifeways than what we know from popular culture, and narrated by an always amazed David Attenborough! But that was just the problem. Patterned on the BBC Studios Natural History Unit's gorgeous "Earth" series (which I loved), this journey to the earth 66 million years ago recapitulated every one of its visual and narrative tropes, and wound up making the earlier series seem
fake, too. The templates of courtship, predation, competition, migration and anthropomorphized familial care (with plenty of cute young 'uns, like this li'l triceratops) were so clearly recognizable it was apparent that they'd been employed in the earlier series, too, sifting through actual footage just as they were here in commissioning animators. These cretaceous critters are strikingly strange (strangest for me were the various big-headed flyers who apparently walked on the equivalent of their elbows with wings folded up, like the tethydracos above) and yet comfortingly kin. Even their soundtrack is just as you'd expect.
Watching two more episodes today - "Deserts" and "Forests" - left me dejected, perhaps because I've been in Anthropocene mode, which is always haunted by the idea of a post-human planet, a time when we, "like the dinosaurs," are nothing but fossils. But I suspect the dejection was connected also to having to teach students in China from the US, Anthropocene malefactor and failing state.
