The future predator is a fictional future apex predator in the British science fiction television programme Primeval. The future predator was conceived by producers Tim Haines and Adrian Hodges and were designed by Daren Horley. Giant and flightless future descendants of bats, the predators are ruthless creatures that appear several times throughout the series. They were positively received and have been termed by some commentators as the "Daleks of Primeval" owing to their repeated appearances and how difficult they are to stop.
Description and design
The central story of Primeval revolves around time portals (called "anomalies") opening up and letting through various prehistoric creatures into the present. While making the programme, the producers concluded that anomalies should logically be able to connect the present to the future as well. The future predators are flightless macropredatory future descendants of bats about the size of lions. They walk on their knuckles and are quadrupedal, though are also able to run and rear up bipedally at times. With their elongated arms, evolved from the wings of their ancestors, they are also able to leap and climb. Since the predators rely on advanced echolocation to hunt, their eyes have atrophied away.
The design of the future predator was created by Daren Horley, the Digital Textures Lead on the series. The description Horley received to work with was that the future predator was to be a sinister-looking (but not too fanciful) quadrupedal creature which could also rear up on two legs. Horley decided that the creature would be eyeless since this would make it more strange. The predator was initially going to be a reptile, with a dinosaur-inspired head design, but Horley changed this to the later used more unusual design after feedback from Tim Haines, the executive producer. It is possible that the concept of the future predator being a bat-descendant was inspired by the night stalker, a future giant predatory flightless bat featured in Dougal Dixon's 1981 speculative evolution book After Man; Dixon himself believes the night stalker to have been the inspiration. Other presumed sources of inspiration for the creature include the creatures of the Alien (aspects of the design and for inspiration for various shots in the episodes) and Predator (particularly for the echolocation) film series.
Though they were maintained to have been bat descendants throughout Primeval, the design of the future predators, particularly their body plan also strongly evokes primates. Whether the future predators are natural future descendants of bats or were bioengineered is never fully made clear in the programme; some commentators have suggested that they are, alongside bats, also perhaps intended to be linked to humans. Their origin story might also change throughout the programme as no matter what changes are made in the present, the future predators continue to appear.
Appearances
The future predators make their debut in episode six (the finale) of the first series of Primeval when a family of future predators were first transported by an anomaly into the Permian period and then to the Forest of Dean in the present. The father future predator is killed in the present by Nick Cutter (Douglas Henshall) and the mother is killed in the Permian in a fight with a Inostrancevia, which also eats most of the young predators. The future predators made their return in series two, appearing in both episode six and seven (the finale). This time, future predators have been captured by Helen Cutter (Juliet Aubrey) and brought to the present, where Oliver Leek (Karl Theobald) uses neural clamps to control them. In episode six, one of the controlled future predators nearly kills James Lester (Ben Miller), the head of the ARC (Anomaly Research Center). In episode seven, Nick Cutter disabled the neural clamps, causing the predators to first attack and kill Leek, then kill Stephen Hart (James Murray) and then turn on each other and wipe themselves out.