- Connor Temple: [running after Nick and Stephen] Professor! Professor Cutter!
- [Connor catches up to them and extends a hand to shake]
- Connor Temple: Connor Temple.
- Nick Cutter: Sorry, never heard of it. I think you want archaeology. If you go around up there to your right and keep on walking, it's on your left.
- Connor Temple: No, its not... it's not a place, it's my name. I'm one of your students.
- Nick Cutter: Really?
- Connor Temple: Uh-huh.
- Nick Cutter: Well why... why don't I recognise you?
- Connor Temple: Well... you've never actually turned up for the seminars.
- Nick Cutter: Uh-huh.
- Nick Cutter: This is Claudia Brown from the Home Office. She'll be coming with us.
- Connor Temple: [to Stephen] I knew it. It's a cover-up.
- Claudia Brown: What's he talking about?
- Nick Cutter: Connor never met a conspiracy theory he didn't like.
- Connor Temple: I'm one of your students.
- Nick Cutter: Really?
- Connor Temple: Uh-huh.
- Nick Cutter: Well why don't I recognize you?
- Connor Temple: You've never actually turned up for the seminars.
- James Lester: You spend your entire career planning for just about every crisis imaginable - up to and including alien invasion - then *this* happens. So much for thinking outside the bloody box.
- James Lester: At least the immediate crisis is over.
- Nick Cutter: Some... force out there ripped the boundaries of space and time to shreds. Maybe it's happened before, in which case every single thing we thought we knew about the universe is wrong. Or, this is the first time, in which case what changed? What happens next? Believe me: it's very, very far from over.
- Connor Temple: [Cutter throws a stack of papers into the trash] Oh... actually, that's my dissertation.
- Nick Cutter: Yeah?
- [Picks the papers back up and scans them]
- Connor Temple: See, I argued that all life on Earth derived from organisms carried here by alien spacecraft. It's pretty sexy stuff.
- [Cutter throws it back in the trash]
- Connor Temple: ... It's a work in progress, really.
- Nick Cutter: [Holds up a fossil] Tell me what this is.
- Connor Temple: A fish?
- Nick Cutter: Obviously. It's a sarcopterygian. There's no trace of them in the fossil record for 70 million years, and then suddenly one of them just pops up in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Totally inexplicable in modern evolutionary terms. See, Darwin provides most of the answers, it's the pieces that don't fit that interest me.
- Nick Cutter: Connor, you should get out more. Go to a bar. Meet a nice girl. Life will seem a lot less confusing.
- Connor Temple: I've already got a girlfriend... sort of.
- Connor Temple: There's an eyewitness, claimed to have seen it.
- Nick Cutter: People claim to have seen the Loch Ness monster, that doesn't mean it's there.
- Connor Temple: Not now, obviously, because it died years ago. The Government took the body away and covered the whole thing up.
- Abby Maitland: So about this attachment.
- Tim Parker: Yes. Uh, a six-month project studying the life cycle of parasites in elephant dung.
- Abby Maitland: Sounds unmissable.
- Connor Temple: You know, if you want my opinion, I think it's -
- [Stephen gives him a look]
- Connor Temple: ... You don't, do you?
- Claudia Brown: You're both going to have to sign the Official Secrets Act.
- Nick Cutter: Whoa, when did this become an Official Secret?
- Claudia Brown: About 10 minutes after I finally persuaded my boss not to have me sectioned.
- Connor Temple: [Watching the Scutosaurus] You know this is going to win me the Nobel Prize.
- Stephen Hart: You don't know what we're dealing with yet.
- Connor Temple: Come on. It looks like a dinosaur. It behaves like a dinosaur. It's a dinosaur. It's the missing link to the ancient past. And I discovered it.
- Nick Cutter: What could cause a magnetic field so powerful?
- Connor Temple: Maybe it's an alien spaceship.
- [Cutter gives him a look]
- Nick Cutter: The boy's experience proves that there's a concrete landscape on the other side of the anomaly. And I think it's the Earth many millions of years ago.
- James Lester: And this anomaly, as you call it, is a door between time zones in the world's history? Suppose this remarkable theory is correct, what are the immediate risks?
- Nick Cutter: Famine, war, pestilence. The end of the world as we know it. You know, the usual stuff.
- James Lester: I think I could do without the facetiousness.
- James Lester: The thought that someone was there before us is far from reassuring. And I used to think the EU Common Agricultural Policy was far-fetched.
- Claudia Brown: We get dozens of rogue animal sightings every year. You'd be doing me a great favour if you could just confirm this is all nonsense.
- Nick Cutter: I can't dismiss the evidence out of hand.
- Claudia Brown: Surely you're not giving this whole monster story credibility, Professor.
- Nick Cutter: I'm just trying to keep an open mind.
- Claudia Brown: People always say that as though it's such a good thing.
- Nick Cutter: I could do without standing in some anaemic office in Whitehall, talking to a civil service pen pusher, when I should be exploring the most significant phenomenon in the history of science.
- James Lester: Technically, I'm not actually a civil servant. More a troubleshooter without a portfolio in the PM's office.
- Nick Cutter: You mean you're a Government hatchet man.
- James Lester: Colorful, but a surprisingly accurate.