Stream It Or Skip It?

Spear won’t be stopped by anything as trivial as death. The hulking Neanderthal at the center of creator Genndy Tartakovsky’s largely silent animated sojourn through prehistory and fantasy resurfaces in Season 3 of Primal, which streams on Adult Swim and HBO Max. This might be surprising, considering Spear died at the end of Season 2. But Primal has never been bound by mortal coils or evolutionary fact. Tartakovsky’s vision is grander than all that, and with the rich, evocative approach of the animation in this series, part of the fun in watching it is the anticipation of where it will go next. Let’s rejoin the scene at the central African village of Spear’s friend and eventual lover Mira, where he had seemed to meet his end.  

Opening Shot: An inferno rages. From inside the flames, a Nubian shaman rips arrows from his flesh, and uses them to kill the last remaining attackers. In the flickering firelight, he makes a potion from the blood and organs of his enemies. 

The Gist: In Season 2 of Primal, Spear (voiced by Aaron LaPlante) devoted some of his last heroic actions to the safety of this village. Which must be why this man figures to summon our departed guy from his tomb in a mountain cave. Spear, his eyes glowing green like the enemy heart placed atop the shaman’s staff, proceeds to lay waste to the village’s remaining foes. But he’s soon on his own again, wandering the landscape, silent but for grunts and roars and the quizzical look behind his zombied eyes. What does this new form of life mean? 

In the near term, Zombie Spear is still noble. Since one of the village’s bone headdress interlopers did manage to slice a hunk of Spear’s skull away, and he’s technically a corpse, a halo of flies follows his every lope into the dark, hilly landscape. But he’s soon coming to the aid of a member of the local leper colony, who was almost sucked away in a flood. Spear’s meeting with the colony is another great example of how Primal uses a lack of spoken dialogue to its advantage – we understand where everybody’s coming from, even through an improvised language of murmurs and gestures. 

The world Primal imagines is full of recognizable animal species, and the scores of human cultures that have risen and fallen in the course of geologic time. But it’s all jumbled up in an exciting, furiously creative way, meaning a Neanderthal might encounter the marauding tribes of Arabia as much as he might tussle with a passing prehistoric crocodile that’s as big as a bus. You never know where this show is gonna go next. But for us, as Season 3 begins, we wonder if this currently zombied Spear has a way back to the life and world he knew, and the friends – like his beloved dino buddy Fang – who his death left behind. 

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Fixed, a long-gestating animated project from Primal creator Genndy Tartatovsky, has finally found a home at Netflix, and the result is “Gross and hyper-sexual.” Primal heads should thrill to the historic battle action that permeates Predator: Killer of Killers, an animated entry in Dan Tratchtenberg’s expanding Predator universe. And speaking of Netflix, Tartatovsky will bring a series spinoff from his popular Hotel Transylvania films to the streamer in 2027.   

Our Take: Keep in mind that over the course of in-universe Primal history, one obstacle Spear and his friends have encountered is an undead viking chieftain controlled by underworld forces. So our dude being technically a zombie in Season 3 doesn’t feel like anything to worry about. It might even be a whole new jumping-off point for an animated series that loves left turns and the sudden arrival of unexpected assailants as much as it loves tumbling bits of history out of a box and dragging its storytelling through the resulting jumble.

We’re intrigued with where this will lead him, though. Feints are made toward camaraderie in the early moments of Season 2, but just as often, Spear finds himself alone and pausing to consider. What is he meant to do? Where is he meant to go? Primal even strengthens this kind of indecision by letting its already pervading silence linger. It’s as if we can see Spear’s wound-exposed brain trying to sort it out. We think this not-quite-dead place the hero of Primal has found himself provides a ton of potential for a series that was already riotously impatient with where it wants to go itself. We’ll follow Spear anywhere, as he determines what this forced second chance at existence means.

Performance Worth Watching: There’s a wonderful fluidity to the animation in Primal, expressed in a particularly awesome way during one sequence in Season 3 when we view Spear from beneath the rapids of a churning river.

Sex and Skin: Not much besides Spear’s post-burial birthday suit, but Primal is adult-animation through and through. 

Parting Shot: The people Spear has met would be powerless against a band of scimitar-wielding horsemen, were it not for their new Neanderthal friend, whose instinctual drive to crush skulls starts to kick in.

Sleeper Star: The music in Primal, from composing collaborators Tyler Bates and Joanne Higginbottom, continues to offer meaningful emphasis to the action. It doesn’t quite fill the space left behind by a lack of dialogue; rather, it accentuates and heightens established tone.

Most Pilot-y Line: No lines at all in Primal, pilot-y or otherwise, so we’ll highlight here that Spear, in the dark absences of his exposed zombie brain, still recognizes an emotional echo from the individuals he once knew. 

Our Call: STREAM IT! Primal is full of adventure, blood and limbs flying, and the uncertainty of the human heart, even though its main characters aren’t necessarily human at all. Season 3 finds Spear, dead but not down, on a journey he doesn’t know the shape of, which only means more opportunity for this series’ already impressive animation and storytelling.

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How To Watch Primal

If you’re new to HBO Max, you can sign up for as low as $10.99/month with ads, but an ad-free subscription will cost $18.49/month.

If you want to stream even more and save a few bucks a month while you’re at it, we recommend subscribing to one of the discounted Disney+ Bundles with Hulu and HBO Max. With ads, the bundle costs $19.99/month and without ads, $32.99/month.

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Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.