Per FTC obligations: Warner Bros. Home Entertainment provided me with a free copy of the Blu-ray I reviewed in this post. The opinions I share are my own.
PREVIOUSLY ON…
Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal launched in October of 2019, airing its first five episodes before taking nearly a year-long break (after a devastating cliffhanger), to bring us the back half of Season One. Tartakovsky’s story of a primitive man called Spear (Aaron LaPlante) and his best friend, a female tyrannosaur called Fang, fighting and brutally killing anybody or anything that crossed them, while at the same time dealing with their shared grief over the losses of their families (which occurred in the very first episode).
The first episode set the tone for what would, by the end of Season Two in September 2022, become an amazing epic tale of friendship, and eventually love, as Fang eventually hatches two new offspring and Spear fell for a Nubian woman named Mira (Laëtitia Eïdo), after freeing her from Viking slavery. Those twenty episodes wrapped up their story with Spear sacrificing himself to defeat the Viking Chieftain (Fred Tatasciore), reborn from some sort of hell as a gigantic, shapeshifting fire monster. But before a badly burnt Spear passes, he and Mira make love and the series ended with a flash forward to the future, where Mira, Fang, Fang’s grown offspring, and Spear’s unnamed daughter (voiced in that episode by Lilah Tartakovsky), ride onward to more adventures.
At the time, Tartakovsky had intended for Primal to continue as an anthology series (after testing the waters with the Fifth Episode of Season Two, “The Primal Theory” which took place in 1890 England), but according to the interview on this two-disc Blu-ray set, he was unable to really come up with a concept that grabbed him. Realizing that he’d maybe made a storytelling mistake in killing off Spear, he was struck with the idea for how to bring him back from the dead for more adventures.
And that brings us to the 2026, ten-episode Third Season of Primal, which got the band back together with art direction from Scott Wills (The Ren & Stimpy Show, Samurai Jack) and music composition from Tyler Bates (Guardians of the Galaxy, Samurai Jack, Unicorn: Warriors Eternal) and Joanne Higginbottom (Salem, Samurai Jack, Unicorn: Warriors Eternal) and sound effects design from Joel Valentine (Samurai Jack, Big City Greens, Unicorn: Warriors Eternal). And, as the promotional materials put it:
The third season of Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal opens with a shocking twist that resurrects Spear in a new form—stripped of memory and humanity—and forces him to roam a brutal, untamed world as a shadow of his former self. As Spear battles savage landscapes and deadly foes, faint echoes of his past begin to stir, leading him toward an emotional and explosive reunion that will test the limits of survival.
SEASON THREE…
It was a bold move to bring Spear back as an unkillable zombie, no doubt about it. Reanimated by the shaman of Mira’s village after a deadly attack by skull-headed Ape-Men, Spear is used as a weapon of revenge, until the shaman is killed, releasing Spear from his control, but not sending him back to the grave. Thus begins a new epic journey, as a virtually mindless Spear, motivated by brief fragments of barely understandable memories, tries to reunite with Fang and Mira.
What has always been a bloody and violent show, lives up to its reputation after a four-year break, first during Spear’s mindless wanderings and brutal animal and creature attacks (Episodes One-Three), then with the arrival of Mira who is trying to track down and rescue villagers who have been taken by a pack of Andrewsarchus (monstrous prehistoric dog-like creatures) and kept as food for their Queen (Episodes Four-Six), to Spear’s outcast journey as an unstoppable pit gladiator for a volcanic tribe of savages (Episodes Seven-Ten). Without the limitations of potential death, Spear is more animalistic and, shall we say, primal, destroying every opponent that is unfortunate enough to cross his path.
However, what really makes Season Three work for me, is that despite that never-ending wave of gore and viscera, despite Spear’s own decay and deterioration, there is still an emotional core to every episode’s adventures that becomes more and more heartbreaking as Spear slowly regains his memory and his consciousness. Fang’s rejection of the undead monstrosity that is Spear is doubly heartbreaking. And once he discovers that Mira has given birth to his daughter, his mental stability is drastically undermined until they are finally reunited in a final scene that reframes the flash-forward from Season Two’s finale, to include Spear in the decidedly well-earned happily-ever-after.
As with the first two seasons, Primal Season Three is glorious to look at, with each episode directed by Tartakovsky and leaning into his trademark fluid pacing and explosions of violence. The score by Bates and Higginbottom is just as important to the emotional storytelling as any of the visuals and is simply perfect. I literally have no notes. This series is the natural culmination of everything Tartakovsky has done, going back to the whimsical anarchy of Dexter’s Laboratory and The Powderpuff Girls, to the idiosyncratic action and adventure of Samurai Jack, Star Wars: Clone Wars, and the radically underappreciated Sym-Bionic Titan and Unicorn: Warriors Eternal.
Actually, culmination is the wrong word, because I have a feeling that Tartakovsky’s going to move into even greater works as he was just announced as the Director and Producer of the upcoming Conan the Barbarian animated series.
THE EXTRAS…
So far as extras go, this two-disc Blu-ray set only has two: a walkthrough of the storyboards for the first half of the first episode with Genndy Tartakovsky basically just describing what we see happening, with added roars and sound effects as he goes. Included with this is a very short interview about the return of Primal and Spear’s undead revival. The second feature is another short interview as Tartakovsky discusses his favorite episode of the season, “Feast of Flesh” where Spear befriends a cricket and the story goes from childlike wonder to the brutal slaughter of an entire underground tribe of mole-men.
It’s easy to understand how that narrative flow would be his favorite. It perfectly encapsulates everything possible with the world of Primal. This world filled with dinosaurs, monsters, Ape-Men, tribes of humans, magic, and mythological events is a perfect story engine to tell any type of story imaginable. I highly recommend buying and watching Primal Season Three.
Hell, buy and watch them all. And track down all of Genndy Tartakovsky’s previous work and get them too. You won’t be disappointed.