I randomly saw the trailer for Season 3 and decided to give the show a shot. Ended up binging the first season in one day.
No dialogue anywhere in it, not a single word, and somehow I understood everything. I felt every single thing these characters felt. That is how you know a show is doing something right.
This post contains spoilers for Primal Season 1.
How A Massacre Turned Into A Friendship
Primal opens on a caveman named Spear, just trying to get home with food for his family. He survives a crocodile and a pterosaur on the way back, which already tells you what kind of world this is. Then he gets home and his mate and two kids are being torn apart by a pack of horned Tyrannosaurus. He is too late to save them. The alpha calls the pack off before Spear can even fight back, and he is left standing in the wreckage of his entire life.
What happens next is the part that actually sets the tone for the whole season. Spear walks to the edge of a cliff and tries to end his life. He does not go through with it, but the show does not flinch from showing him get there. The sun comes up, he sees a vision of his family in the light, and that is the thing that keeps him moving.
Not long after, he comes across a Tyrannosaurus eating fish and assumes, wrongly, that it is one of the pack that killed his family. He follows it planning to kill it, only to find out it is a hornless female with two babies. Before he can do anything, the same horned pack shows up to wipe her family out too. Spear steps in. They fight together, and for a second it looks like they have both won something back.
Then the alpha arrives and eats the babies in one bite.
Spear and the mother dinosaur, now Fang, take the alpha down together. Spear gets the killing blow, driving his spear through its brain. It is revenge for his family and hers, but revenge does not bring anyone back. Fang is left with nothing. Later, on a beach, she finds Spear again. Neither of them has anyone left. They decide to stay together, and that is the whole show in one image: two creatures who should be enemies, walking off into the unknown because they have nothing left to lose and somehow that is the thing that saves them.
Earning Trust One Fight At A Time
If episode one is the tragedy, episode two is the part where you realize this relationship is not going to be easy or sweet. Fang steals Spear's kills. Repeatedly. She eats his fruit even though she is a carnivore. She keeps Spear up at night with her breathing. He throws rocks at her face out of sheer frustration. It is funny, but it is also real: two creatures from completely different worlds trying to figure out how to exist side by side, and constantly failing at it.
It boils over during a deer hunt. Fang steals the kill one too many times and Spear finally snaps, and the two actually fight each other and draw blood. This is the moment the show needed to earn everything that comes after it. They cannot just decide to trust each other because the plot needs them to. They have to fight for it. The standoff gets interrupted by something even scarier: a flash flood carrying hundreds of snakes straight at them. They survive it by working together, and Fang ends up tending to a head injury Spear gets along the way. By the time the water clears, they have actually earned each other.
From there the show starts widening its world fast. There is the mammoth episode, where Spear and Fang kill an old, weakened mammoth separated from its herd and take its tusk as a trophy. The herd tracks them down for it, ready to kill, until Spear realizes they are not after revenge. They just want the tusk back. He hands it over, and the herd carries it to a graveyard of their own dead, where they perform a quiet, almost ceremonial goodbye. For a show this violent, it is one of the gentlest, saddest scenes in the whole season.
Then things go fully feral. A blood moon turns the sky red and a pack of raptors chases Spear and Fang across an open field. They stumble onto another group of humans being hunted by giant red bat creatures that share a den with a massive prehistoric spider. Spear gets captured and cocooned in spider silk. Fang plays dead to get smuggled into the den, fights the spider, frees Spear, and the two of them escape by luring the bats into the raptor pack and letting the two predators wipe each other out. It is chaos from start to finish, and it does not pretend to be anything else.
Every episode Trying To Break Them, And Failing
Episode five is where the season goes for the throat. Spear and Fang stumble into a peaceful oasis, and for a few minutes the show lets them just exist: fishing, eating, resting, being something close to happy. Then they are ambushed by a tribe of ape-men who run brutal gladiator fights for entertainment. Fang gets thrown into the arena against their reigning champion, who drinks some kind of black ooze that turns him into a hulking, mutated monster. He nearly kills her.
Spear climbs up, throws the shaman to their death, and drinks the entire bowl of ooze himself. He turns into something massive and nearly unrecognizable, and he does not stop until every single ape-man in that arena is dead. It is the most violent stretch of the season by a wide margin, and it works because by this point you understand exactly what Fang means to him. When he wakes up the next morning back to normal, covered in blood, and finds Fang lying motionless where the fight ended, the silence in that scene says more than dialogue ever could.
She is not dead, just badly hurt, and the next episode is the long, quiet process of Spear getting her somewhere safe. He drags her on a makeshift stretcher, fights off scavenging dogs and flesh eating insects, and basically runs himself into the ground keeping her alive. By the time she is strong enough to fight again, the two of them clear out a pack of wild dogs together, and it feels like a genuine turning point. Whatever they were to each other before, they are something else now.
The back half of the season keeps raising the stakes. There is a rotting, infected Argentinosaurus that wipes out its entire herd and chases Spear and Fang through a volcanic lava field, finally burning apart after it cannot escape the molten rock. There is a coven of witches who capture and mind-control Fang, complete with a side story about a witch named Lula mourning her own dead daughter, which gives the show a strange, sad humanity in the middle of all the monster stuff. There is an unseen, screeching predator that picks off a Smilodon and an entire Triceratops herd before Spear and Fang figure out fire is the only thing that scares it, and burn it alive in a forest clearing.
And Then Mira Happened
And then the season ends on a gut punch that has nothing to do with monsters at all. Spear and Fang come across an enslaved woman named Mira fighting off a sea creature in a lagoon. They free her from her shackles, travel with her, and slowly build something close to a found family. She teaches Spear how to make a bow. She prays to the moon every night. He starts to actually care what she is trying to say to him even though he cannot understand her language. Then a group of monkey-men ambush their camp and drag her away, and by the time Spear and Fang reach the coast, she is already being shipped off by the same people who enslaved her in the first place. The season ends with Spear saying his first word in the entire show, her name, while Fang roars in grief beside him.
Where We Left Everyone
Spear: Lost his entire first family in episode one, found something with Fang and almost lost her too, and ends the season screaming Mira's name as she disappears over the horizon.
Fang: Lost her own children the same day Spear lost his family, nearly died in the ape-men arena, and spends the finale roaring in helpless grief right alongside him.
Mira: Escaped slavery only to get recaptured in the final minutes of the season, taken away on a ship before Spear and Fang can reach her.
Final Verdict & Overall Thoughts
This is a must watch. If you love drama that is pure, intense, and a little unhinged, this is exactly that, stripped down to its rawest form. No dialogue to hide behind, no exposition to lean on, just pure visual storytelling that hits you right in the chest every single episode. I went in expecting a cool concept and came out completely wrecked by a show that never says a single word.
My Rating: 9.3
Has anyone else seen this show?
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