Primal: Season 2

 

Created & directed by: Genndy Tartakovsky

Executive producers: Genndy Tartakovsky, Brian A. Miller, Jennifer Pelphrey, Rob Sorcher, Sam Register, Mike Lazzo, Keith Crofford

Starring: Aaron LaPlante (Spear) & Laëtitia Eïdo (Mira)

Although I enjoyed the first season quite a bit, this second season lost my interest a lot toward the end. 

It's still a remarkable series, though, the whole way through. It makes a name for itself for consistency in one major overarching element: voicelessness. 95% of the series has no dialogue, managing to capture great stories and impressive emotional depth through visuals and sounds alone. Spear's voice actor had the honor of grunting his way through all of it, though the character did learn his love interest, Mira's, name. Mira's character had a bit more dynamic, she spoke a language that Wikipedia deems as Arabic. 

Fang and Spear bonding

Even as Mira and other language-speaking characters (like Vikings) appear in the second season, the show manages to keep its dialogue-free atmosphere by keeping itself free of English. Neither Mira or her clan's Arabic nor the Viking language are translated and much of their dialogue is also kept to short exclamatory phrases that can be interpreted by context. In this way, the voice acting in the whole series is kept remarkably low. 

For those unaware of Primal as a series, it follows the unlikely bond between Spear, a Neanderthal, and Fang, a T-rex as their respective families are both killed by another dinosaur and they come together as a team to seek vengeance.  That vengeance is accomplished within the first couple episodes, but the pair stick together when they find it advantageous for general survival. The first season follows their generally plotless exploits as they fight for survival in a brutal prehistoric world. 

Mira enters in the season finale as the first human character Spear encounters after losing his family. They quickly form a strong bond. In the season finale, they're raided by foreigners from across the ocean, and the second season has Mira captured and kidnapped by them. Spear and Fang follow in a makeshift raft across the ocean to rescue her. 

Mira is introduced as a slave

The season remains fun and interesting, a lot of new cultural clans come into the picture and shake things up a bit. The season unfortunately began to lose me about midway through the season as Spear becomes excessively savage and brutal for reasons I never understood. In one scene, he has to attack a village of Vikings to rescue Mira. He successfully rescues her, but then he continues on a rampage of violence, slaughtering the entire village of Vikings, civilians and children included. The show didn't seem to explain that as far as I understood, and I lost my ability to sympathize and support Spear in that moment. I kept watching (if passively), and there was another interesting arc of kidnapping involving a massive ship-dwelling civilization that sailed the open ocean. This seemed interesting, but I no longer felt invested in the series, so I didn't pay close attention to it. 

The season finale included a demon-possessed Viking they had to fight, Fang giving birth to cute dinosaur babies, and a major character death. 

Genndy Tartakovsky has announced that this has ended Spear and Fang's narrative and that the upcoming season 3 will have a more anthology-focused tone, keeping only the primal atmosphere and dialogue-free storytelling. Those are the things that initially got my attention, so I'm interested to see what they do next.