"Primal," Season 2: review

[WARNING: big spoilers. Read the Season 1 review here.]

Season 2 of Genndy Tartakovsky's animated series "Primal" picks up where Season 1 left off: Spear the caveman and Fang the dinosaur had befriended an escaped prisoner who named herself Mira; Mira was then recaptured and taken aboard a ship that sped away from the shore while Spear and Fang watched helplessly. In Episode 1 of Season 2, Spear and Fang construct a raft, hoping to head out into the unknown to find Mira. It seems like a hopeless quest; the world is wide, and Mira's path on the ocean is untraceable, but Spear and Fang have proven dauntless in the face of previous challenges, so they head off after Mira, taking turns propelling their raft across the vasty deep.

The rest of the season recounts the eventual reunion with Mira; encounters with Celts, Vikings, the unbeatable giant warrior Kamau, and Egyptians; and the pair's final battle with a powerful and vengeful spirit. There's a period in which Fang and Spear get separated, and Fang meets a fellow tyrannosaur, resulting in a bit of pair-bonding (that goes horribly awry) and her pregnancy. This has implications later in the season when Fang gives birth to three offspring, one of which is killed when its egg is destroyed. 

The season includes one seemingly out-of-place interlude, "The Primal Theory," as we jump forward in time to 1890 England. In this episode, which happens about halfway through the season, Charles Darwin is at the estate of Lord Darlington, where Darwin is a guest along with two other British scientists and a French scientist. Darwin is discussing an aspect of his larger evolutionary theory; he argues that in moments of great duress, modern, civilized humans can conceivably revert to their primal state of vicious and brutal savagery. Darlington and some of the others dismiss this as utter tosh, but as the scholars are debating, a police constable enters and informs the group that an escaped murderer is on the loose. A short time later, noises are heard inside the estate; Darlington's butler goes to check out the noise and is killed by the rampaging murderer, a huge, growling, muscular brute with a taste for human flesh. The remaining men arm themselves with various weapons from Darlington's extensive collection, and the brute begins picking them off one by one until only Darwin and Darlington are left. The killer attacks the two, who become increasingly ragged in the face of this unrelenting assault. Finally, the killer pins Darwin and begins to eat him, at which moment Darlington, using a huge dinosaur femur and a spear, finally manages to kill the savage. The episode ends with Darlington heaving and gasping, covered in blood, slowly coming back to himself and realizing the horror of what he's done, while Darwin points at Darlington and triumphantly declares vindication for his theory: "There you have it!"

Season 2 of "Primal" thus offers us something of a mixed bag. The jump to 1890 England feels like a jarring rupture in the narrative, but then again, there was a bit of time travel in Season 1 as well, so perhaps this episode wasn't as discontinuous as all that. Three full episodes of the latter half of the season are devoted to the main characters' capture and slavery aboard the Colossaeus, a huge Egyptian seafaring vessel commanded by a tyrannical Egyptian queen whose right-hand man is the gargantuan slave Kamau, who does the queen's bidding because she holds Kamau's daughter in thrall. All of this makes for a gripping drama, but whether the series ought to have devoted so much time to this phase in our heroes' lives is questionable.

The theme of parents and children is a major through-line for both Seasons 1 and 2 of "Primal." The series begins with the respective losses of both Spear's and Fang's children, which is how Spear and Fang come to latch on to each other. In Season 1, Spear and Fang are captured by a clan led by mystical witches, one of whom comes to pity our heroes after she has a vision of their traumatic pasts. Having lost a child herself, this witch sacrifices herself to set Spear and Fang free. In Season 2, Fang's hookup with the red tyrannosaur, while she's apart from Spear, continues the theme of a future through progeny, and in the final episode, as Spear is dying, Mira's sex with Spear—and the eventual birth of Spear and Mira's daughter—is a way of ensuring that Spear will somehow continue on. Mira and Spear's relationship throughout most of the series is never sexual: the two care for each other, but one suspects that Spear remains loyal to the memory of his original mate and their children. Mira's bonding with Spear, at the very end, truly is primal in the sense that she is explicitly looking to continue Spear's bloodline, to guard his memory—and maybe his spirit—by giving him the gift of descendants. It seems crass to look at Mira's act as mere sperm-harvesting, but her joining with Spear is in no way romantic or passionate. She's being a pragmatist; any romance—if that term even applies here—is at the level of desiring continuation.

With Spear now dead, it's hard to see how a Season 3 might be possible. Spear and Fang were an inseparable, unstoppable pair. They were Fric and Frac, and with Fric out of the picture, what other stories can be told? I actually hope Tartakovsky stops the story here. As it stands, "Primal" is a brilliant work, a story told mostly without words, and when words do make an appearance, they're usually in a foreign tongue that is unsubtitled, leaving us anglophones with no clue as to what's being said. This isn't too different from the situation of Spear himself: Spear is an inarticulate caveman who communicates in grunts and roars. When he meets people who can talk, all he hears is gibberish, too. This makes Fang the dinosaur a perfect companion for Spear: they get other each on a level that needs no words. And yet, without Spear, where can "Primal" go next?

The metaphysics and history of the world of "Primal" is something of a jumble. As with the world of Game of Thrones (old gods, the Seven, the Red God) or the Indiana Jones movies (Judaism, Hinduism, Christianity, aliens), the world of "Primal" makes room for religious pluralism. We see several afterlife moments that obviously stem from totally incommensurate religious traditions, and yet the narrative quietly urges us to accept that each of these versions of the afterlife exists. For example, when Spear and Fang destroy a village of Viking slavers, the one remaining Viking descends into the Norse underworld and finds himself before a fiery figure who is probably Surtr. Surtr turns this Viking into a smoldering spirit of vengeance who then returns to the surface world to seek out Spear and Fang. The Season 1 witch who sacrifices herself for Spear and Fang enjoys her own afterlife experience, reuniting with her lost daughter. But "Primal" is also a jumble in how it combines cavemen with dinosaurs (who actually existed millions of years apart) as well as with various mythical creatures. Civilizations from different periods of human history are also shown to coexist in the series, so I think the idea is that we should think of "Primal" as a fantasy and not anything else. The one episode that throws a monkey wrench into things is "The Primal Theory" which, because it takes place in "our" history, ties "our" world into this fantasy world.

And what a heady, delirious fantasy it is. True to the series name, "Primal" is primitive, atavistic, and visceral. It doesn't shy away from blood and gore. It deals with issues that evoke ancient emotions in all of us, from the urge to survive to concepts like loyalty, friendship, parental love, and sacrifice. And it somehow manages to explore all of this with few to no words. Although I haven't read any of Robert E. Howard's stories, I think it's safe to say that "Primal" owes a huge debt of gratitude to Howard's Conan the Barbarian stories from the 1930s. Spear is a cruder Conan in many ways. Voice actor Aaron LaPlante voices Spear, and while it seems as if he doesn't have much to work with, LaPlante somehow manages the task of making all the grunting and cooing and roaring meaningful. Meanwhile, Tartakovsky, who gave us "Samurai Jack" and "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" among other works, proves that 2D animation is still a thing in today's Pixar-dominated 3D world. His visuals are lush and gorgeous, with lighting varying from subtle to garish. He and his team have put together a masterwork of visual storytelling that can be seen as a shining example of how to propel a narrative. "Primal" is the ultimate incarnation of that old storyteller's maxim: show, don't tell. And if this is truly the final season of "Primal," well, I'm happy it ended as it did.