Dinosaur Revolution: End Game

The last episode of Dinosaur Revolution (for now) is End Game. Like the second episode, this episode focuses on a single storyline instead of multiple largely unrelated shorts. Obligatory spoiler warning!

This episode is the obligatory Maastrichtian North America story (set just a little while before the K-Pg, naturally) for this series. Although the first half of the story is about the tyrannosaurid Tyrannosaurus (again, naturally), there is one maniraptor taxon in the story, Troodon, which even gets the spotlight shifted to it during the second half of the episode after the K-Pg extinction happens (where it is depicted as being one of the last non-neornithine dinosaur species to die out).

I was very pleased with the portrayal of the Troodon. Dinosaur Revolution gets everything March of the Dinosaurs got right and more. The Troodon models are very good, very likely the best I've ever seen on screen. Paternal care, brooding, and (probably for the first time ever on TV) omnivory are shown. Also, no ridiculous hadrosaur hunting here either, they are instead shown feeding on insects, stealing eggs, and chasing juvenile pachycephalosaurs.

There's one running theme (that is present throughout the series) that bothers me, however. The familial structure of almost every single theropod taxon in the entire series is the same. Nearly all the theropods go around in mated pairs, and those that have young commonly have just one with them, even though most dinosaur clutches we know of have many eggs. This actually isn't a huge problem here because the show does depict many of the theropods as starting out with an entire clutch of eggs, most of which simply don't survive (which is fairly realistic). The monogamous pairs, however, are more curious. There's nothing (as far as I'm aware) inherently improbable about monogamous Mesozoic theropods, but there's no good evidence for such, while on the other hand there is some evidence (such as clutch size) that at least some Mesozoic theropods (such as Troodon) may have been polygamous. Not to mention many of the theropods have very pronounced sexual dimorphism, even though in modern animals extreme sexual dimorphism is generally an indicator of polygamy. In these cases it appears to me that this was for the sake of anthropomorphism and character identification. At the very least it would have been nice to see some variation in the reproductive behaviors of the theropods.

Regardless, I found that the dinosaurs in this episode in particular were on average the least anthropomorphic out of all the episodes, which was certainly a plus. In this respect (along with the general accuracy), I enjoyed this episode the most. In terms of story, however, I still prefer the second episode or even some of the shorts (notably the Protoceratops story from the third episode). I felt that the story of this episode crammed too much in and then it all had to be cut short to make room for the obligatory K-Pg extinction and its aftermath (and presumably the tacked on talking head segments). A main antagonist is set up before the opening sequence, but then he gets defeated and killed just a bit more than ten minutes into the episode. We see a juvenile Tyrannosaurus be the sole survivor of its brood and even make it past the extinction event... then he just falls off a cliff and dies anyway. We never really get to know any of the dinosaurs as characters that well, as nearly everyone dies halfway through the episode. The ending is very sad though, although its full impact and profundity is tarnished a bit by the suddenly comparatively poor CGI in the very last scenes. Also, I thought this episode suffered the most when it comes to the talking head segments, as a lot of the previews shown during those segments gave away upcoming plot points.

Still a good ending to the series though, and worth a watch. If or when this gets released in its original format, that will probably fix the spoiler and pacing problems somewhat.