Western Animation / Primal (2019)

Hunt. Kill. Survive.

"All Earth was but one thought — and that was death."

— Darkness, Lord Byron. Used as a tagline in the Season 1 trailer.

Genndy Tartakovsky's Primal, also known simply as Primal, is an Action Adventure animated series produced by Cartoon Network Studios and animated by Studio La Cachette for [adult swim]. It is the fifth animated series that Tartakovsky has created with the studio, and his second project with Adult Swim following the 2017 revival of Samurai Jack.

Originally billed as a limited series, the first two seasons of Primal follow Spear, a caveman at "the dawn of evolution," and Fang, a tyrannosaur on the brink of extinction. Bonded by similar tragedy, the duo form an unlikely friendship that becomes their only mutual hope of survival in a violent, primordial world.

While Tartakovsky has previously experimented with stories light on dialogue in his previous shows, this series notably does not have any dialogue whatsoever, the only human vocalizations being animalistic grunts and yells (this changes in the second season, however, which introduces actual dialogue, although mostly in un-subtitled non-English). At the time of its debut, it was also notable for being one of the few adult animated dramas produced in the United States, and is currently the only one being produced for linear television as opposed to streaming.

The series was announced on May 14th, 2019. The first half of Season 1 ran from October 7th to October 11th, 2019 (the first four episodes later being repackaged into a theatrical film entitled Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal — Tales of Savagery), while the second half aired from October 4th to November 1st, 2020. Season 2 began airing on July 21st, 2022 and wrapped up in September 15th the same year. The trailer for the second season can be viewed here. A third season is currently in production, with Tartakovsky stating that the series would be shifting to an anthology format going forward. On June 16th, 2023, Adult Swim confirmed that season 3 is in production.

Not to be confused with the video game of the same name. Or the 2019 Action Thriller film.

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Tropes:

• Absurdly Sharp Blade:
  • Spear's weapon, which is seemingly just a regular chiseled rock tied to a normal stick, but always cuts cleanly through all meat and bone with little effort (in the first episode it pierces straight through an entire tyrannosaur) and even after all its use, apparently never dulls, although it is possible that Spear regularly replaces them as he loses one when he and Fang are captured in the episode "Rage of the Ape-Men" only to fashion a new one by the following episode “Scent of Prey“ which takes place immediately after the former.
  • Fang's teeth are also astonishingly sharp, enabling her to bite clean through snakes as thick as tree trunks, cleave through heads of bats bigger than she is, or even just tear chunks out of a mammoth's leg with zero resistance. If she can get her jaws around it, it will come loose. Although it probably has more to do with her incredible jaw strength as a T. rex rather than the sharpness of her teeth.
• Absurdly Sharp Claws: The Night Feeder's talons are sharp enough to reduce a ceratopsian dinosaur to Ludicrous Gibs with a single strike and slice through the trunk of a gigantic tree like butter.
• Action Film, Quiet Drama Scene: Between the gory fight scenes, the show has several quiet and somber moments. The first episode has one where Spear stands on the edge of a cliff, contemplating suicide, and one where Fang, after losing her family, follows Spear on a beach for comfort.
• All Cavemen Were Neanderthals: Spear, the show's protagonist is a stereotypical neanderthal-like caveman with a bulky physique, hunched posture, thick arms and enormous fists, as well as thick brows and a flat forehead. He also seems to have Super-Strength, considering that he fights animals far larger than him with his bare hands.
• All for Nothing: After the chieftain is depowered he is promptly grabbed back into the underworld by the horned demon to await an unknown but gruesome fate. It's most likely he and his son will remain in Hel never to see Valhalla.
• All There in the Manual: Since the show has almost no English dialogue, the names of the characters are frequently only known from the episode titles and supplementary materials. This goes for various species represented, too—the sauropods featured in "Plague of Madness" are obviously never identified by any scientific name on-screen but are supposed to be Argentinosaurus; many other species featured are similarly identified out-of-universe as very specific animals rather than just being ambiguous cartoon dinosaurs.
• Always a Bigger Fish: Quite literally in "Sea of Despair": a Tropeognathus-like pterosaur is flapping around Spear and Fang's raft and screeching at them, and is about as big as Fang. And then a colossal megalodon, probably the biggest thing they've faced since the Argentinosaurus in "Plague of Madness", chomps down the pterosaur in one bite.
• Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: The giant bats Spear fights in "Terror Under the Blood Moon" are blood-red.
  • Any creature infected by the Plague of Madness eventually turns bright yellow, among more gruesome changes.
• Amplified Animal Aptitude: Many animals, such as Fang and the mammoths, are clearly sentient, capable of empathy, mourning, and simplistic interspecies communication. Although in the mammoths' case, their modern-day relatives are known to mourn their dead, meaning the creators might have been directly inspired by that for the episode.
• Anachronism Stew: Beyond the obvious "cavemen and dinosaurs coexisting", the Season 1 finale and Season 2 add Vikings, Egyptians, Huns, Knights Templar, and Romans to the temporal mix. In "The Primal Theory", which seems to take place during the Victorian Era, the Historical Society has a taxidermied Smilodon, though it's unclear if it's the genuine article or a replica.
• An Aesop: The titular "Primal Theory" of the fifth episode of season 2. If confronted with a life-or-death situation, even the most non violent person will ultimately resort to savagery to survive.
• An Offer You Can't Refuse: In "The Collosaeus", Ima threatens to destroy Fang's remaining eggs to coerce Spear and Fang to fight as slave warriors. The Chieftain similarly received one from The Scorpion, continue your revenge and free your son’s soul.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: In a rare non-video game example, "The Primal Theory" revolves around a group of upper class gentlemen (including a Charles Darwin stand-in) in 19th century England facing off against an inhumanly strong asylum escapee who breaks into their manor. Its only link to the main story is thematic.
• Androcles' Lion: In "Terror of the Blood Moon", an ape man carrying food breaks his leg and is vulnerable to the giant bats that prey on them. Spear runs out and manages to carry the ape man and his food back to the safety of the rocks, albeit forgetting his spear. At the end of the episode, the rescued ape man had taken in the weapon and gives it back to Spear while he and Fang flee from the bats.
• Animals Lack Attributes: Mostly played straight with Fang and the other fauna, but averted hard when Fang lays her clutch by Red; she's very clearly shown to have a universal orifice or "vent" the same as reptiles and modern birds have.
• Animals Not to Scale: The show features some animals far larger than in real-life, including woolly mammoths twice the size of African elephants, a moose-sized Syndyoceras (the real animal was about the size of a large goat), bats larger than humans and a Giant Spider that can toss a Tyrannosaurus aside like a ragdoll. Zig-Zagged with the large snake in the second episode which is about the correct length for the extinct species Titanoboa, but its width makes it much bigger than the ancient snake, considering Fang bites onto it and only seems able to grab about a third of its neck. Averted with the Horned Tyrannosaurs in the first episode which are accurately sized, but played straight with the alpha who is about the size of a sauropod; it's so big you would be forgiven if you thought the smaller T. rex were its children. Justified with the King Kong-sized ape monster in the 5th episode as he is under the effect of a magic potion that increases his size and strength. Without the potion, he's more or less the correct size for a Gigantopithecus. Also averted with the marine reptile (Liopleurodon or Tylosaurus depending on different sources), which is a realistic 7 m in length rather than the humongous size often seen in modern media.
• Anti-Hero: The main hero, Spear, brutally kills his opponents, but considering that this is a dog-eat-dog world where our moral standards don't exist yet, it's justified for his situation. Spear is even shown preparing to attack Fang and her family (mistaking them for the dinosaurs that murdered his wife and children) before being interrupted by the horned tyrannosaurs (the actual guilty party).
• Anti-Villain: The mammoths in episode three attack Spear and Fang remorselessly, but its only because they ate one of their own and took away its tusk. Once they're given it, they retreat to ceremonial grounds.
• Armor Is Useless: Zigzagged: When Spear duels a Viking, he can't cut through the Viking's armor at all, but in a later episode, the unarmored Spear and the equally unarmored Kamau can slaughter three fully armored civilized armies en masse.
• Artistic License – Biology:
  • The show depicts many overly aggressive animals fighting to the death when in reality the opposite is true. Animals in real life will actively avoid fights because even if they win any major injury will almost certainly kill them later.
  • Even if you ignore the fact that a Giant Spider would be impossible due to the Square-Cube Law (the long, spindly, spread-out legs wouldn't be able to carry such a bulky body), the spider has a toothy lower jaw under its chelicerae, and its silk glands in its mouth rather than at the end of its abdomen.
• Artistic License – Paleontology: From the outset Primal makes no bones about it being fantasy, not fact:
  • Mesozoic reptiles are shown living alongside Cenozoic mammals.
  • Although Spear and his family seem to be neanderthals, his wife is slender and has the general body proportions of a modern Homo sapiens. Neanderthals and humans did interbreed though. In her brief appearance she also seems to be a meek and stay at home type, when hunter-gatherer societies are known to be more egalitarian.
  • The generic monstrous pterosaur in Episode 1 is a weirdly mixed bag. It launches bipedally, lacks a fuzzy covering of pycnofibers, has four digits excluding the wing finger and seems to have a good sense of smell ^note The few pterosaur endocasts we have show that, like most modern birds and bats, they had a poor sense of smell. However its entirely possible we might come across some species that did have better olphaction, given things like turkey vultures and flying foxes, not to mention resembling a mix-match of different genera. That said, it is a quadrupedal walker, is hunting terrestrially as many larger pterosaurs did and has correct non-columnar forelimbs.
  • Dinosaurs have pronated hands.
  • The raptors are featherless, although the creators confirmed they wanted to put feathers, but had difficulty with it.
  • Woolly mammoths, a species which was smaller than the modern African elephant, dwarf Fang.
  • Three of the enemy Tyrannosaurus rex in the first episode have enlarged horns similar to rhinoceroses or Ceratosaurus. The last one, however, looks more like a real tyrannosaur (specifically Alioramus) with smaller hornlets on the snout.
  • The snakes in Episode 2 appear to be Titanoboa due to their size, but they have fangs similar to a venomous snake. And yet, they seem to be non-venomous like the real Titanoboa.
  • The bats featured in Episode 4 are orders of magnitude larger than the biggest species in the fossil record.
  • The large bug that Spear eats in Episode 2 resembles a trilobite in size and general body shape (including the large number of legs), but trilobites were strictly marine creatures with no terrestrial species known (not to mention they went extinct long before either dinosaurs or cavemen walked the Earth), though to be fair there are terrestrial trackways of trilobites indicating they might have come ashore occasionally like crabs. However, it could also have been an unrelated arthropod that merely happened to resemble a trilobite (which is Truth in Television for some land-living arthropods even today, notably the aptly-named "trilobite beetles").
  • The Argentinosaurus in "Plague of Madness" are shown chewing their food, which sauropods can't in real life. They are also seen galloping and leaping like horses. Even elephants are unable to do either of those due to their massive weight, and sauropods of the size seen in the show must weigh about 15 times as much as elephants (Argentinosaurus have an estimated weight of 90 tons). Granted, the most extreme of these feats are done by the one infected by the titular disease, which seems to have pushed it beyond its usual biological limits (the creature quickly and easily runs down a fleeing healthy Argentinosaurus that had a head-start).
  • The placoderms seen in "Sea of Despair" are mostly accurate, but have a perfectly lobed tail like that of ray-finned fishes like Mahi Mahi, when in reality placoderm tails were more shark-like.
  • What appears to be Volaticotherium in "Shadow of Fate" gains altitude by gliding, and covers much larger distances than any gliding mammal. In general it is shown hunting aerial insects, when gliding mammals are usually either herbivorous or target terrestrial prey with limited mobility.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: Both Spear and the various animals tend to keep attacking and fighting even when they suffer serious injuries and it would make sense for them to back down.
• Bad Moon Rising: If the moon is in view and has a Sickly Green Glow, there's a high chance the next antagonist will show up through supernatural means.
• Badass Normal: Spear, who is just a caveman who can fight and win battles against prehistoric beasts several times his size. If he isn't using a stone spear, he is bashing them to death with a rock or just his fists.
• Barbarian Longhair: Spear sports shoulder-long black hair, and he's a powerful, savage hunter struggling to survive in a primordial world.
• Barbarian Tribe : Season 2 Episode 2 "Shadow of Fate" sees Spear waking up inside a Celtic tribal village. All the men have orange or brown hair, wear blue woad paint and have Braids of Barbarism.
• Bat Out of Hell: Spear fights a flock of gigantic red bats led by a Giant Spider in "Terror Under the Blood Moon".
• Bears Are Bad News: "Dawn of Man" sees Spear and Fang having to fight off two Scorpion scouts who are riding on giant war bears that are almost as large as Fang herself.
• Beastly Bloodsports: The ape-men release Fang into an arena to fight their champion one-on-one as the other ape-men cheer him on, which is reminiscent of gladiatorial games.
• Beat Them at Their Own Game: Spear beats the ape-men's champion Krog by drinking a huge dose of the same potion that made Krog supersized, turning Spear into an even bigger Hulk-like monstrosity who then makes short work of Krog and the rest of the ape-men.
• Behemoth Battle: The series features brutal fights between giant beasts at least Once an Episode, with Fang usually being one of the battlers. In the first five episodes, Fang gets to fight a horned tyrannosaur, a giant snake, a few mammoths, a Giant Spider and a giant Killer Gorilla. "Rage of the Ape Men" Spear turning into a monstrous giant and fighting said Killer Gorilla. Subverted in the seventh episode, where neither Fang nor Spear can combat the zombie sauropod — the only thing they can do is Run or Die. A healthy sauropod tried to do this against its infected brethren earlier, but quickly found itself on the wrong end of its teeth around its neck.
• Bilingual Bonus: From the end of the first season on, the show features dialogue in Arabic, Irish and Swedish, with none of it being subtitled. While visual storytelling makes it easy for everyone to get the gist of what’s going on, speakers of these languages will be privy to a few more bonus details (such as the fact that Mira was being taken to a slave market when she escaped, or that the Chief of the Celts offered Spear the chance to live among his people).
• Big Bad: The Viking Chieftain.
• Bittersweet Ending: Spear and Fang's story ends with Spear sustaining mortal wounds fighting an empowered Viking Chieftain. However, by doing so, he saves Fang, Mira, and their new family. Years later, it's revealed that Fang's new children have survived into adulthood alongside their mother and that Spear and Mira had conceived a child of their own after Spear's battle.
• The Blade Always Lands Pointy End In: it's not a sword or anything like one, but the effect is the same when Spear knocks off the triceratops skull helmet of Krog (the Ape-Man champion in "Rage of the Ape Men") and it lands upright with the beak stuck in the ground.
• Bloodier and Gorier: Compared to Genndy's other works. It builds on the greater violence allowed for Samurai Jack season 5 and then some.
• Body Horror: The plague in "Plague of Madness" is horrifying and disgusting. Symptoms include eyes turning blood-red and filling with yellow veins, Blood from the Mouth, large, pustule-covered chunks of sickly-green skin either missing or rotting and sloughing off, and violent madness — essentially turning the infected into living zombies. There's even a Gross-Up Close-Up of the infected Argentinosaurus' skin when Spear and Fang have to quietly sneak behind it.
• Bonding over Missing Parents: Inverted. The thing that bonded Spear (a caveman) and Fang (a tyrannosaur) was that they both lost their families. One day while hunting for food for his family, Spear hears screaming and runs to see his wife and children being eaten alive by a pack of Horned Tyrannosaurs. Then after some time has past, he sees the same Horned Tyrannosaurs attacking Fang and her babies. Spear steps in and teams up with Fang to fight them. When it appears that they have slain all the Horned Tyrannosaurs, Fang's babies come and gently play with Spear's hair. Then the Horned Tyrannosaurus alpha appears and before Spear or Fang can do anything, it eat Fang's babies alive, to their shock and horror. Spear and Fang fight together and kill the alpha. Nether of them are satisfied, having both failed to protect their families. Fang just lays down while Spear sadly walks away. Later, while walking on a beach, Spear sees Fang following him, and after a moment of consideration, Spear accepts Fang, and the two head off into the night as a new family.
  • In "Coven of the Damned", the witch Lula who ends up helping Spear and Fang escape from the other witches turns out to have had a similar tragedy, her daughter having fallen off a cliff to her death; this motivated her to save them at the cost of her own life.
• Breather Episode: Most of Season 2 Episode 1 "Sea of Despair" is spent with Fang and Spear just trying to survive in the middle of a calm sea. Some action happens near the end when a storm kicks up. "Shadow of Fate" is a Breather Episode, too, as Spear and Fang become separated and Spear is injured but neither is in real danger until the climax when their respective plots intersect and it suddenly becomes much more violent.
• Central Theme:
  • Savagery is inherent in all living things, no matter how intelligent or noble they may be and it will be brought out when one is pushed far enough.
  • No matter how brutal the world may be, life is still worth living because there is beauty and wonder to be found in the most unlikely of places.
  • The loss of one's child is another recurring theme in the show. The series starts with Spear and Fang both using their families to the same predators, and this loss still haunts Spear in later episodes, but also becomes the basis of their bond. We then meet three different antagonists over the course of the story who are or were parents: Lula the witch, who saves Spear and Fang from her fellow witches after realizing they lost their children the same way she did; the Viking chief whose wife and children are killed by Spear and Fang, leading him to a revenge-driven frenzy and ultimately a Deal with the Devil; and Kamau, the giant slave, whose daughter is held hostage by the Egyptian Queen, and is willing to commit horrifying acts so that the Queen keeps her alive.
• Charles Atlas Superpower:
  • Spear demonstrates almost superhuman-level feats of strength at times. Probably the most prominent example in the very first episode is when he throws his spear straight through a fully-grown T. rex like a bullet.
  • Spear's wife, who looks more human-like than Spear, for the briefest moment she's seen is shown throwing small boulders at the T. rex so strongly it shatters on impact.
  • The Night Feeder seems to possess exceptional strength and speed in a show full of powerful predators, being able to easily bisect a ceratopsian skull and completely topple a giant sequoia tree trunk in a single blow.
• Cliffhanger:
  • "Rage of the Ape-Men" ends with Fang grievously wounded and on the verge of death, leaving her fate ambiguous. The second half of the season starts off with Spear building a makeshift sled and carrying her to a remote location to let her heal.
  • "Slave of the Scorpion" ends with Spear and Fang's new Homo sapiens friend, Mira, being captured by pirates and carried back into slavery while all they can do is watch impotently from the beach.
  • "Sea of Despair", the second season premier, ends with Spear and Fang separated in an unknown land. The following episode has them still apart as the A and B plots of "Shadow of Fate".
• Conlang: Most of the first season has no dialogue, with Spear only ever communicating with inarticulate grunts and shouting. In the final episode of the season we meet Mira, who does speak in a genuine language (Arabic). As of Season 2, more humans are encountered, including a tribe of Celts that speak Gaelic. Other humans seen speak in fictitious languages, though there are no subtitles, and the viewer must guess what is being said based on context and gestures.
• Convection, Schmonvection: While running across a lava field in episode seven, Fang and Spear seem to suffer no ill effects unless directly touched by the lava or its sparks. Spear even almost falls into a smaller pool and is pulled out by Fang, without so much as a smear of soot or patch of pink skin on his feet.
• Cosmic Horror Reveal: After alluding to this with the Witch's Coven and their inhuman leaders, the Demi-God of Hell demonstrates that not only are there indeed supernatural forces at play behind the scenes, but they are also incredibly hostile.
• Cue the Sun: "Terror Under the Blood Moon", appropriately, ends this way, with Spear and Fang running towards the sunrise after surviving the night.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • Fang's fight against the Giant Spider in Episode 4 plays out like this. The dinosaur has little chance against the monstrous arachnid until Spear interferes, driving a Triceratops horn through the spider's head.
  • Fang becomes the victim of this again in Episode 5, against the ape-man champion who has been physically enhanced by the black serum. She seemingly dies from the fight, but manages to recover by episode 6.
  • The tables then get turned on the gorilla champion in his fight against Spear, who has also been physically enhanced. It's so one-sided in Spear's favor it comes across as darkly humorous.
  • The infected sauropod commits one against its own herd after it succumbs to the titular disease in "Plague of Madness", brutally killing all of them with the only one that really tried to put up a fight getting its throat ripped out for its trouble.
  • All of the victims of the Night Feeder are capable beasts—but until it chooses Spear and Fang, none of them stood a ghost of a chance, not even an entire herd of battle-hardened ceratopsians, tearing through their bodies like they were made of paper.
• Darker and Edgier: Compared to many previous works from Genndy.^note One exception would be Season 5 of Samurai Jack. Primal is the darkest of his projects to date, taking place in a primordial Death World, being excessively gory, and centering around the tragedy of a man losing his family (including his children).
• Dark Is Not Evil: The gangly, albino cave-dwellers seen in episode 4 are very much team players, giving Spear back his spear in return for him saving one of their own when he and Fang evade the furious bats.
• Darkness Equals Death: The Night Feeder, as its name suggests, is an insatiable monster which only hunts after the sun sets because it's extremely sensitive to light. Fang and Spear unknowingly manage to avoid being attacked by the creature the first two nights because they kept their campfire lit through the night. Only when their campfire goes out on the third night does the Night Feeder launch the attack.
• Death by Origin Story: Spear's wife and children get eaten by dinosaurs in the first episode, and Fang's children are killed not long after.
• Death of a Child: Spear's children get devoured along with his wife in the first episode. Fang's children don't fare much better. And in the eighth episode,it's revealed that Lula (the witch who helps Spear and Fang) had lost her own daughter when the child had carelessly chased a butterfly over the edge of a cliff, falling to her death.
  • Happens again to Fang when one of her eggs is destroyed inadvertently in the fight against Kamau.
• Death World: Each episode begins with a quote from Lord Byron, saying that this is a time of death, where all living things are struggling to survive and will do so at almost any cost. Mercy to the enemy can mean suicide.
  • The land on the other side of the ocean actually downplays this. While it's still a hostile, dangerous world, where one has to be sharp and vigilant in order to survive, it's shown not to be the constant, day-to-day struggle that Spear's world is shown being. Perhaps not incidentally, human civilization is on the rise here. That being said, the danger in this land instead comes from warmongering civilizations and individuals, who have no qualms killing and enslaving en-masse.
• Despair Event Horizon: Happens to Spear in the first half of episode 1; His wife and two children are devoured by a group of tyrannosaurs. He climbs a large rock and stands at the edge, clearly about to commit suicide because he has lost everything. He manages to bounce back after seeing a vision of his wife and children in the rising sun, motivating him to continue living.
  • The Chieftain hits one upon Eldar’s death, exchanging his soul for the power to defeat Spear and Fang.
• Disney Villain Death: The Ape Shaman in Episode 5 is defeated soundly after being tossed aside by Spear from the top of a spire.
• Dire Beast: Many animals in the series, such as the crocodile or the snakes, fit this trope, being larger and more monstrous than their modern-day equivalent. The ones that absolutely take the cake are the bats from "Terror Under The Blood Moon", being similar in size to the largest pterosaurs. Also, the horned tyrannosaurs (especially their leader) can be considered "dire" versions of a T. rex.
• Dragged Off to Hell: The Chieftain is met with Valkyries when he dies, but is dragged to the underworld just as he begins to ascend. He swears loyalty to a demon and is transformed into a fiery juggernaut to get his revenge on Spear. When he finally battles with Spear, apparently he didn't do a good enough job to kill Spear fast enough — or, because he failed to kill Fang as well. Whatever the case, he is dragged off by a giant fist one last time before he has a chance to continue his attack.
• Driven to Suicide: After losing his wife and kids to a pack of horned T. rex, Spear climbs a tall cliff and ponders whether or not he should just step off of it. He ultimately doesn't go through, but he did spend many hours at the edge of the cliff thinking if he should.
• *Drool* Hello: Of the most nightmarish kind imaginable. The 'drool' is toxic effluvia from an infected Argentinosaurus announcing its presence to Spear and Fang.
• Dwindling Party: Halfway through Episode 9 is a scene in which the Night Feeder fights an entire herd of ceratopsids. It quickly kills them, one by one. Even when they assume a Spartan-like formation, face-shields outward, they are torn apart one at a time. There are enough of them in the herd that the battle is rather drawn out, and it catches Spear's attention. By morning, the entire herd has been wiped out and left to the scavenging animals.
• Dying Deal Upgrade: After losing a battle with Spear and Fang, including losing his son, the chieftain is brought to a large horned creature deep underground, and given a chance for revenge, being turned into a huge fire creature.
• Egomaniac Hunter: The Night Feeder attacks only creatures with great strength, speed, or cunning, and kills far in excess of what a predator its size would eat, suggesting that it's a hunter of some sort who kills for pure entertainment.
• Elephant Graveyard: One appears in the third episode. The mammoths take the tusk of their fallen herd member there and perform a funeral-like ritual for him.
• Establishing Series Moment: Spear coming home to witness his family being devoured by tyrannosaurs sets up the kind of setting the series takes place in.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: Technically a case of everything trying to kill everything. The world of Primal can't be a nice place to live if even the predators hunt each other.
• Evil Is Bigger:
  • Fang, the sympathetic Tyrannosaurus, is visibly smaller than the horned tyrannosaurs that killed Spear’s family and tiny compared to the kaiju sized alpha.
  • The elite warriors of the villainous ape-men are huge gorilla-like people a lot larger than the heroic caveman Spear. The black potion their champion drinks turns him even bigger and even more evil.
• Evil Tower of Ominousness: In the 4th episode, the bats carry Spear to the prehistoric equivalent of this trope, a cave on top of a tall stone spire. It is the home of a Giant Spider who seems to control the bats.
• Eye Scream: In "A Cold Death," Spear uses a rock to smash the eye of a woolly mammoth into a bloody pulp. Subverted in the show proper where it turns out the eye was left intact.
  • In "Wrath of the Ape-Men", he similarly plunges his fist into the eye socket of the Ape champion's skull helmet. Despite the spray of blood, moments later we see he still has both eyes.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: The second season introduces several tribes of humans that are more technologically advanced than those encountered in the first season, and each of them seem to be based on a real historical civilization. Despite the resemblance, it's unlikely that they're supposed to actually be those civilizations, unless the setting of Primal really is supposed to be an Earth where dinosaurs never died out.
  • The tribe in "Shadow of Fate" are clearly modeled on generalized Celts, particularly having a strong resemblance to the Picts. They also speak a few lines in Gaelic.
  • The next episode, "Dawn of Man", has an appearance by a very Norse-looking people who ride gigantic bears and use a scorpion symbol in their coat of arms, and are revealed to be Mira's enslavers. The few lines of dialogue they have are in Norse.
  • "The Colossaeus" arc introduces several others: the most prominent one is based on Egyptians, who are battling against what appear to be Mesopotamians (particularly the Babylonians if that equivalent to the Ishtar Gate under siege is anything to go by), then also Romans, Chinese (or Huns), medieval-esque Knights Templar, and South Indians. However, we get very little dialogue from these characters so their language is hard to pin down.
  • In "Echoes of Eternity", Mira's own tribe is introduced, largely based on North Africans (explaining her Arabic language).
• Fantastic Racism: Briefly. Spear is willing to kill Fang and her family, not because she's a threat but because she's a similar dinosaur to the ones that took his loved ones away.
• Foreshadowing:
  • More than once, a new character who will be important in the rest of the episode is given a bit of a focus in a calm moment, making them stand out among an otherwise interchangeable group: Krog in "Rage of the Ape-Men" is the only one of the combatants who is really followed, and wins the fight before moving on to nearly kill Fang, and Lula in "Coven of the Damned" is shown expressing a feeling other than total submission to the witches' matriarch when she arrives, hinting that she'll help Spear and Fang.
  • "River of Snakes" has its scene transitions showing steadily growing dark clouds in the distance, hinting not only at the dramatic rain that will begin when Spear and Fang push each other to their breaking point but also the flash flood that washes them into the river where the episode's climax takes place.
  • At the end of "Shadows of Fate", the scenes pans to a bird making a nest.
• Frazetta Man: Beside Spear's species, who looks like a neanderthal, there are at least two other, more primitive type of hominids that both fit this trope. One is a tribe of sparsely haired, pale, cave-dwelling people (listed as "monkeys" in the end credits) that show up in the 4th episode, the other is a tribe of hairier, even more ape-like people that are the main antagonists of Episode 5.
• Genre Shift:
  • The first three episodes, despite all the Artistic License – Paleontology (creatures from vastly different time periods living together and having inaccurate size or features), are relatively grounded in reality. The fourth episode introduces absolutely unrealistic animals such as monstrous bats and a Giant Spider who seems to rule over the bats, and "Rage of the Ape Men" features explicit magic (or mutagenic science) in the form of a Super Serum that increases size and aggression.
  • Episode 7 is like a mix between a zombie film and a monster movie as Fang and Spear are chased by an unrelenting sauropod that's been infected by a disease that rots its flesh and sends it into a murderous frenzy.
  • Episode 9 is essentially a monster movie and horror film as Spear and Fang are dealing with a mysterious, possibly-even supernatural predator that hunts with the zeal of a serial killer at night, complete with them coming across its kills during the day, hearing the screams of it and its victims at night before it goes after them next, and much of the episode shot from the monster's perspective.
• Genre Throwback: The series as a whole is a throwback to Pulp Fiction of the purest, most Rated M for Manly Edgar Rice Burroughs-as-illustrated-by-Frank Frazetta kind, featuring a caveman and dinosaur duo getting into extremely bloody and pulse-pounding fights with monsters and entire armies almost every episode.
• Giant Flyer: Both the pterosaur in episode 1 and the monster bats from episode 4 fall under this trope, with the latter being strong enough to carry off full grown dinosaurs in pairs. (The former's case is justified as real-life pterosaurs really did get that big). "Vidarr" features an appearance by giant condor-like birds.
• Giant Spider: The monster of the week of Episode 4 is a spider that's similar in size to a sauropod, towering over Fang.
• Gorn:
  • While every episode has lots of blood and graphic injuries, the last act of "Rage of the Ape-Men" really takes it up to eleven, when Spear takes a Psycho Serum, turning into a hulking beast that reduces dozens of monkey-men into Ludicrous Gibs with his bare hands onscreen.
  • The victims of the Night Feeder are absolutely shredded to bits instantaneously. A sabre-tooth cat and several ceratopsids are reduced to widely splattered Ludicrous Gibs, each in one strike, while another ceratopsid is cleanly sliced in half, lengthwise.
• Half the Man He Used to Be:
  • Spear does this to several of the ape-men in different ways, up to punching them or throwing some against a rock hard enough.
  • One of the titular Night Feeder's ceratopsian victims gets sliced in half lengthwise.
  • Fang usually does this to her victims once she has them in her maws.
• Heel Realization:
  • After losing his family to three T. rex, Spear is ready to go in for the kill when he spots Fang near a river. Following her to her home, he sees her children and after a moments pause is driven into a seeming infanticidal rage. Before he can act, the dinosaurs that killed his family attack Fang. Spear very quickly sees the parallels.
  • Similarly, when Spear and Fang are attacked by the mammoths, Spear realizes that they are after the tusk of their fallen herd member that he has taken with him. Once Spear returns the tusk, the mammoths leave in peace.
• Hell Is That Noise:
  • The Coven leader in Episode 8 along with another screech at Spear and Fang upon seeing them.
  • The Night Feeder unleashes a hellish screech that causes Spear and Fang to be stunned.
• Hidden Depths: Spear is a powerful warrior with a tenacious will to survive. In quiet moments, he tends to enjoy cave painting and shadow puppetry.
• Hollywood Healing: Spear and Fang often get severe cuts and bruises when fighting savage beasts. Despite this, their bodies never stay too scarred for long and any open wounds they have will instantly disappear.
• Hollywood Prehistory: The show's setting is "the dawn of evolution". Cenozoic creatures like cavemen, ape-men and a woolly mammoths exists alongside Mesozoic animals such as non-avian dinosaurs and pterosaurs, as well as fantasy creatures like giant spiders. However, the end of the Season 1-finale confirms the existence of civilized humans in the setting, suggesting that other tropes like Lost World or Medieval Prehistory are in play here...
• Honorable Elephant: The mammoths are presented as particularly intelligent prehistoric beasts who mourn for their dead.
• Hope Spot: After a long and perilous journey, Spear and Fang find a seemingly safe oasis in Episode 5, where there's plenty of fish to eat and no dangerous predators. Then the ape-men show up and kidnap them.
• Horns of Villainy:
  • The Tyrannosaurus that kill Spear's family have Ceratosaurus-like horns, which the more sympathetic Tyrannosaurus Fang lacks.
  • Krog, the ape-man champion, wears a Triceratops skull as helmet.
  • The Scorpion in "Slave of the Scorpion" - a brutal tyrant and slaver, by all accounts - is also drawn with horns, though since a non-detailed drawing is all we see it isn't clear if they're a Horned Humanoid or just wearing a horned helmet.
• Horny Vikings: a Norse-like people appear in "Dawn of Man" and, predictably, they wear the stereotypical horned helmets of Vikings.
• Horrifying the Horror: When Spear and Fang are cornered by a large pack of raptors in the fourth episode, the rise of the blood moon causes the raptors to scatter, as it means the giant bats are out to hunt.
• Hulking Out: The Super Serum used by the ape-man tribe turns the person drinking it into super-strong, mindlessly aggressive giant. First, their champion Krog drinks a single drop from it, turning into a King Kong-like monster that easily defeats Fang. Then Spear drinks the whole bowl, becoming a prehistoric version of The Incredible Hulk, curb-stomping Krog and the entire ape-man tribe.
• Humans Are Flawed: The show does not shy away from how humans (or even humanoids, like the Ape Men) can be absolute savages toward one another, gleefully slaughtering one another for gain. At the same time, Spear, the Albinos, Mira, her people, the Celtic Tribe, and Kamau and his people all show that humans can also be gentle, respectful, and majestic.
• Human Subspecies: There are several human or humanoid primate species in this world. The main one is of course Spear, a neanderthal-like human. There is also a group of witches which appear to be a distinct species, much shorter, all appearing aged with black eyes. Heading towards the more ape-like end of the spectrum, we have a species of skinny, white haired humanoids with ape like proportions, a society of highly intelligent ape-men and seeming human-ape hybrids who wield tools. The first season finale introduces a female Homo sapiens, Mira. She is taller than Spear and speaks a form of Arabic. In the second season, most new human characters are Homo sapiens, but Kamau and his tribe are a race of giants twice as tall and a lot bulkier than regular humans.
• Improvised Weapon: In episode 6, Spear notices some arthropods that were trying to swarm over the injured Fang. Spear fends them off, kills and eats them, and then later uses their spiked shells as makeshift cestii to fend off a pack of hyenas.
• Inevitable Waterfall: While struggling against a flood filled with horde of snakes in the second episode, Spear quickly sees a waterfall with much sharp rocks at the bottom.
• Informed Species:
  • The Ceratosaurus-like theropods from the first episode are identified as "Horned Tyrannosaurs" by the animatic. Somewhat downplayed in that they do possess the general body size, proportions, and two-fingered hands of Tyrannosaurus - and their alpha easily dwarfs Giganotosaurus and Spinosaurus.
  • The sauropods that feature in "Plague of Madness" are supposed to be Argentinosaurus, but they possess traits of a few other sauropods as well, especially Camarasaurus. This may well be justified since Argentinosaurus is only known from incomplete remains—just the hind legs, the hipbones, and a few vertebrae—but the end result is essentially that they're basically just generic "biggest dinosaur ever" sauropods.
• Instant Illness: It takes mere seconds for the Argentinosaurus to start showing signs of the zombie plague after being bitten by an infected hadrosaur. In Spear's Nightmare Sequence where he and Fang are bitten by said zombie Argentinosaurus, they immediately start turning as soon as they're bitten.
• Interspecies Friendship: Between Spear, a neanderthal-like caveman and Fang, a tyrannosaur.
• It's a Small World, After All: While it's a hard-earned success what with traversing storms, battling brigands, and fending off monsters, Spear and Fang's rather directionless quest to find and rescue Mira ends with only a mild amount of wandering in the new world.
• Kill It with Fire: When Fang and Spear figure out that the Night Feeder has an extreme aversion to light, they trap it in a ring of fire and burn it to cinder with a flaming spear to the heart.
• Kill Steal: A major plot point in the second episode. Spear and Fang try to hunt together, but each time they find prey, the Tyrannosaurus takes all of it, leaving nothing for the caveman. For example, when Spear successfully kills a warthog by throwing his spear, the dinosaur gets there first and eats the warthog whole before the caveman can get a piece of it. Initially it's Played for Laughs, but soon it turns more serious and almost drives the duo apart.
• Kill the Cutie: Fang's offspring are adorable little critters. This being the kind of show it is, they're devoured moments after they're introduced.
• Killer Gorilla: The strongest warriors of the ape-man tribe resemble enormous gorillas. The Super Serum that their champion drinks makes him bigger and more aggressive, turning him into a King Kong-like monster.
• Lady Land: The witches in Episode 8 capture men and sacrifice them in order to create children from their harvested life force. Since all the infants are implied to be female and no male witches are to be seen, it's safe to assume that this is an all-female society that doesn't allow men to casually wander into their borders and walk back out alive. The official description of Episode 8 plays with this idea, even though witches are actually a group of elderly women who can't have children biologically:
  "A tribe of mysterious, primitive women seek to further their coven by using dark magic on Spear and Fang."
• Lava Is Boiling Kool-Aid: Fang and Spear get chased into a crusted over, but still definitely active, volcanic caldera by a zombie titanosaur in the seventh episode, and the spraying lava acts more like boiling water than molten rock, with high fluidity, only steam coming out, no convection, and only singing the characters when it sprays on them. The titanosaur is even able to swim in the lava when it falls in.
• Lava Pit: The zombie titanosaur is defeated by falling into one of these, though it still takes a long time for it to finally die.
• Light Is Good: In a rather beautiful sequence Spear sees his wife and children in the rising sun, inspiring him to not commit suicide.
• Line Boil: The line work for the show’s animation has a slight wobbly quality to it, especially for the eyes of many characters.
• Loincloth: The only piece of clothing Spear wears (except in the third episode where he crafts a vest out of mammoth fur to avoid getting Exposed to the Elements). The hairless cave-dwellers also wear loincloths, but the ape-men don't, as they are covered by their own fur.
• Lonely Together: The crux of Spear and Fang's relationship in the beginning. They've both lost all their remaining family to the pack of horned tyrannosaurs and have no other loved ones left. As seen in the second episode a bond built solely around mutual loss is tenuous at best with the two almost coming to blows over their differences. It takes time and multiple instances of having to work together for their mutual survival, for the two to come to genuinely care for each other.
• Ludicrous Gibs: Most of the Night Feeder's ceratopsian victims explode in showers of blood and gore, while a few are bisected lengthwise or decapitated instead.
• Made of Iron: Spear and Fang both qualify for this. Each of them endure ungodly amounts of punishment over the course of the series
  • Season 1 episode 4, the Giant Spider throws Fang around like a rag doll yet she doesn't seem to suffer any long term effects afterwards.
  • Averted after her savage beating at the hands of Krog, the ape-man champion. He visibly breaks her leg, and it's left up in the air if she's even alive at the end of the episode.
  • Season 2 episode 4: Both Spear and Fang take a fair number of slices and stabs from spears, arrows, and axes, yet are no worse for wear — not even showing battle wounds — just mere scenes later during the very same battle. "Vidarr" starts off with Spear and Fang having their wounds treated in the aftermath.
  • Both Spear and Fang are hit by the flames of the possessed Chieftain. Spear is grievously wounded but is able to still charge his foe. Fang is left screaming but (presumably because of her thicker hide) escapes permanent injury.
• Made of Plasticine: As typical for a gory series, making the mooks into paste seems very easy. The crowning example is Spear throwing a spear through a horned tyrannosaur torso like a bullet.
• Male Sun, Female Moon: The incredibly masculine Spear is shown to be affiliated with the sun, particularly when his first act upon delivering his second child is to take him out of the cave and present him to the sun. Meanwhile, "The Slave of the Scorpion" presents Mira as a woman who is more aligned with the moon. She ritualistically prays to it every night, and when Spear inquires what the moon is to her, she clasps her hands over her heart, implying the moon to be deeply tied to her soul.
• Mama Bear: Fang fights tooth and claw to save her children. When both she and Spear ultimately fail, she launches herself at a monster ten times her size without hesitation.
• Medieval Prehistory: The Season 1 finale revealed the existence of other civilizations in the world which fit this description. Season 2 heavily features a mixture of various Bronze Age, Iron Age, and medieval cultures.
• Metronomic Man Mashing:
  • Or rather dinosaur-mashing. The Giant Spider grabs Fang by the tail and bashes her to the wall of its lair several times.
  • Season 2 episode 4 "Red Mist": A Norsewoman named Rika leaps at Fang, stabbing her in the snout with a spear. Fang chomps her legs and slams her torso into the ground a few times until she's finally dead.
• Might Makes Right: Since the series takes place at the very dawn of human sapience, everything living follows the instinctual imperative of survival of the fittest. And then this gets Subverted when we see the first instance of an interspecies bond that transcends the rule of "eat or be eaten".
• Mile-Long Ship: The almost absurdly huge Colossaeus in season 2.
• Mime and Music-Only Cartoon: Despite its overall Darker and Edgier feel, it fits the bill. The show features no dialogue from either the caveman or the animals, only grunts, roars and other animalistic sounds. All emotions are conveyed through the characters' expressions and body language as well as the background music. Mira, a Homo sapiens introduced in the last episode, is the first character to speak in a complete language (Arabic).
• Mirror Character: Ultimately why Spear helps Fang. Just like him, she just wants to protect her children. Also like him, she is ultimately unable to.
• Mix-and-Match Critter:
  • The first episode feature a pack of T. rex with horns like rhinoceroses, Ceratosaurus, or Alioramus.
  • The pterosaur from the first episode looks like a cross between Pteranodon, Pterodactylus, and Quetzalcoatlus.
  • The third episode features wolves with Smilodon-like saber teeth.
  • The sixth episode has predatory carnivorans that resembles a cross between a spotted hyena and an African wild dog, but with lion-like tufted tails.
• Monster Is a Mommy: Spear thinks Fang is a predatory dinosaur similar to the ones that killed his family. Then he discovers she has two nestlings which she also tries to protect from predators.
• Monster of the Week: On their travel, Spear and Fang would encounter a rogue creature or species each episode.
• Monstrous Cannibalism: The horned tyrannosaurs are either the same species as Fang, or at least a closely related species. This does not stop them from seeing Fang's offspring as prey.
• Mood Whiplash: The show can quickly switch from a quiet and calm moment to a brutal, violent one and back.
• Mook Horror Show:
  • The climax of "Rage of the Ape-Men". Spear gulps down the mystical elixir that the ape-men created, which turns him into a giant monstrosity comparable to the Incredible Hulk. The ape-men attempt to Zerg Rush Spear, but he is not affected the slightest, and slaughters the ape-men left and right, tearing them in half and crushing their heads with his bare hands. The scene ends with the surviving ape-men running for their lives, with Spear ruthlessly chasing down and killing those that attempt to flee.
  • In "The Red Mist", Spear and Fang's massacre of the slavers' village is played like this once the titular mist descends.
• More Predators Than Prey: In "Terror Under the Blood Moon", the only living creatures Spear and Fang encounter (the raptors, the primitive men, the bats and the Giant Spider) are all carnivores, and the only prey are the boar carried by one of the primitive men and the piles of corpses in the spider's lair. The trope may be justified by the bats overhunting the savannah to feed the spider, which also explains why the raptors are so desperately ravenous and why the primitive men are so thin and sickly.
• Nature Is Not Nice: Most of the antagonists in the series aren't evil monsters, but animals just trying to survive in a harsh and merciless world. To that end, they have to be just as violent to Spear and Fang as Spear and Fang have to be toward them.
• Never Smile at a Crocodile: A gigantic crocodile, possibly a Deinosuchus, attacks Spear in the beginning of the first episode.
• Nightmare Sequence: Spear has one in "Plague of Madness", where he's running from the infected sauropod just as it bites him in the stomach and has his flesh melting off his body.
• Noisy Nature: All the characters and animals roar and screech very often, up to and including the human character Spear, often just because. In an early scene in the first episode, Spear is menaced by a large pterosaur, and just as it takes off it screams loudly at nothing in particular before it does so.
• No Name Given: In contrast to Krog and Lula in the previous season, the leader of the Celt-like tribe featured in "Shadow of Fate" obviously isn't named on-screen (just like nearly all the other characters) but is only identified as "Chief" in the credits. The same goes for all of the Vikings thus far, with the exception of Rikka, wife of the Vikings' apparent leader, and their son Eldar.
• Non-Malicious Monster:
  • As usual, predatory animals are just that. However, the T. rex Spear injures does bear a grudge against him.
  • Averted with the Ape-Men and the Night Feeder, both of whom apparently kill for sport and/or entertainment.
• No-Sell: Spear and Fang against The Coven in Episode 8 has them being unable to physically attack them as the witches immediately dispersed with any attack thrown at them.
  • In Colossaeus Part II the Egyptian Queen/High Priestess No Sells Spear without any magic at all - just martial arts skills!
• Nostalgia Heaven: In Episode 8 when Lula dies after helping Spear and Fang escape, she is reunited with her daughter in an afterlife identical to the field of flowers they used to play in together.
• Nothing Is Scarier: "The Night Feeder" plays this up for all its worth, relying mostly on Impending Doom P.O.V. to portray the titular beast, only revealing the titular monster at the end as its immolated by Spear and Fang; it appears to be some kind of theropod dinosaur with huge claws. Its "motivation" (so to speak) is also left unclear, since (despite its name) it doesn't actually seem to eat its victims, and just seems to live to kill.
  • To a lesser extent, the Plague of Madness. We get a good look at what it does to living creatures in its respective episode, but the infected hadrosaur that instigated the plot of the episode essentially just comes out of nowhere and we have no idea where the disease came from.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Both Spear and Fang sport a look that personifies this when they see a wall of giant snakes right next to where they are fighting in the second episode.
  • The monkey-men in the fifth episode all have this expression at once when they see how brutally a mutated Spear is tearing through all of them.
  • Both Spear and Fang sport this expression several times in their encounter with the plague-infected Argentinosaurus.
  • They share another one when faced with the empowered Chieftain.
• Only a Flesh Wound: Spear bashes one of the horned tyrannosaurs' legs in with a rock, resulting in a compound fracture, but after a few seconds of screaming it just snaps the leg back into place and keeps attacking like nothing happened, though it does seem to have a limp for the short period it survives after fixing its leg.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Even in the face of overwhelming odds and insanely powerful enemies, Spear and Fang never back down, never give up, and never stop fighting unless they've outright been knocked unconscious. But then they come face to face with the Plague of Madness and the Argentinosaurus — e.g., possibly the largest dinosaur in the entire fossil record — which has been infected with it. Spear and Fang don't even try to fight it and spend the entire episode running away from the colossal zombie dinosaur, that is how dangerous an insurmountable this thing is. They only survive this encounter because the sauropod falls into lava and is burned to ash by it. Two more moments like this occur in each of the next two episodes: when discovered by the Coven of the Damned, they try to break and run for it; and when they hear the Night Feeder massacring a herd of ceratopsians, Spear tries to run out and kill it only for Fang to stop him, refusing to even consider engaging with the thing if she can help it.
• Outliving One's Offspring: The first episode has Spear return from fishing to find his whole family—his wife/mate and two children—being attacked and eaten alive by a group of theropods; the same happens to Fang later in the same episode. "Plague of Madness" has the rampage by the infected sauropod start as it smashes every one of its herds nests and all the eggs in them. And "Coven of the Damned" shows us a flashback to the past of a witch who helps Spear and Fang escape in the end, showing that her adoptive daughter fell off a ledge to her death while they were playing in a field of flowers.
• Outside-Context Problem:
  • While many creatures are somewhat plausible, given the somewhat fantastical prehistoric setting the show takes place in, beings like the infected dinosaurs or the Coven are just outright otherworldly and supernatural. Appropriately, Spear and Fang have zero idea of how to deal with these sorts of opponents. The one time they actually do fight such a supernatural opponent, in the Season 2 finale, it apparently costs Spear his life.
  • The final episode of Season 1 introduces human civilizations with at least Bronze-Age technology. Spear and Fang are ultimately helpless in their attempt to rescue Mira from the pirates that have carried her off in a longship.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: The various monsters that cross Spear and Fang's path usually end up brutally slaughtered. The crowning example of this is in Episode 5, where, upon seeing the ape-men seemingly kill Fang, Spear drinks their Psycho Serum and goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge, tearing them to pieces.
• Plague Zombie: The monster of the week in "Plague of Madness" is a sauropod that has been infected and driven mad by a zombie plague.
• Playing Possum: In Episode 4, after Fang is unable to climb up to the rock spire where the bats took Spear, she pretends to be dead so that the bats carry her up onto the spire as well.
• Possession Implies Mastery: Downplayed. In the second season, when Spear starts encountering more human enemies, he often uses their own weapons against them. The first time he picks up a sword, he clearly has no idea how to use it, and wields it more like a club, savagely beating his foes to death with any successful cuts being more like happy accidents, but he learns quickly and is dishing out perfect clean strikes before long.
• Prehistoric Monster: Most animals appearing in the show are exaggerated in size and are given monstrous features. The first episode alone gives us a giant crocodile, a large and toothy pterosaur and a pack of Tyrannosaurus rex with Ceratosaurus-like horns. The show also contains mammoths twice the size of African elephants, human-sized bats, saber-toothed wolves, vicious ape-men, and a Giant Spider as large as a sauropod dinosaur. The seventh episode gives us what are essentially zombie dinosaurs.
• Predation Is Natural: Spear is a hunter and Fang is a carnivorous dinosaur, so both of them kill a lot of animals to survive. Some of the animals they slay, such as the mammoths, show some signs of sapience. However, it is shown that Spear shows respect towards at least some of the animals he kills, looking the mammoth and the Syndyoceras in the eye as they bleed out. There are plenty of antagonistic predators, but that is because many of them see Spear and Fang as potential prey. Only the ape-men and the Night Feeder are shown to kill for sport.
• Pretty Butterflies: Spear and Fang encounter a swarm of butterflies in Episode 5. They are among the few animals in the show that are not monstrous, and their presence indicates the peaceful nature of the oasis.
• Primal Chest-Pound: Pun not intended. In episode 4, an ape-man pounds his chest while screaming as he charges to the rescue of a tribe-mate. Episode 5 has two chest-pounding moments: first, one of the gorilla-like ape-man warriors does it before clashing with the other combatants, then Krog, the champion does it directly after transforming into a King Kong Copy.
• Primal Stance: Pun, again, not intended. Spear has a somewhat hunched posture stereotypically associated with neanderthals, and occasionally uses his hands during locomotion when charging into a fight. The more primitive hominids appearing in episode 4 move pretty much constantly like this.
• Primate Versus Reptile: Episode 5 has a fight between the ape-man warrior Krog who is under the effect of a strength-inducing serum and the tyrannosaur Fang. The usual roles are inverted, as Fang is sympathetic and one of the protagonists while Krog is the cruel champion of the evil ape-men.
• Primitive Clubs: The caveman Spear uses a club in close-quarters combat.
• Psycho Serum: The Ape-men in Episode 5 keep a black goo they use to ritually enhance the strength and ferocity to incredible levels. The Ape Champion drinks a single drop and gains enough strength to easily beat Fang in a fight. Spear in turn downs the whole bowl and he turns into a murderous prehistoric version of the Incredible Hulk who can literally rip the apes limb from limb.
• Raptor Attack: A pack of Jurassic Park-styled dromaeosaurids appear in the fourth episode.
• Rated M for Manly: This is a Bloodier and Gorier show about a muscular caveman and his Tyrannosaurus friend fighting Prehistoric Monsters.
• Recurring Element: Survival. Having lost their families, Spear and Fang travel together across the land, encountering a variety of threats that certifies they aren't the only ones fighting to survive.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: The horned tyrannosaurs that eat Spear's family and later Fang's are a dark shade of red with prominent black stripes. Of course, they're just predators targeting what they think are prey.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning:
  • After someone drinks the Psycho Serum in Episode 5, their eyes become completely red (among other changes), signifying that they are now filled with unrelenting bloodlust.
  • One of the effects of the zombie virus in episode seven is blood red eyes.
  • Spear’s father sports these when he is fighting the Saber-tooth’s.
• Reused Character Design: Spear looks almost identical to the caveman in the Dexter's Laboratory episode "Old Flame", which was also directed by Genndy Tartakovsky.
• Roar Before Beating: Happens a lot, and it often ends up being a fatal mistake for the Monster of the Week as it gives Spear or Fang an opportunity to get a hit in.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: With the "roaring" often being literal.
  • In the first episode, after Spear's family is devoured by the horned tyrannosaurs, the caveman follows Fang with the intent to avenge their deaths (despite Fang not being involved in his family's death). Then the horned tyrannosaurs attack Fang and her offspring, and Spear joins the fight slaying two of the tyrannosaurs.
  • In the third episode Spear and Fang end up on the receiving end of this after they kill an elderly mammoth for food. The mammoths almost crush Fang to death, but when Spear gives back the old mammoth's tusk to their matriarch, they stop attacking.
  • In the fourth episode, after the giant bats see that their Giant Spider leader has been killed by Spear and Fang, the entire horde immediately sets off after them.
  • In "Rage of the Ape Men," after the ape-man champion appears to kill Fang, Spear drinks the ape-man shaman's potion, turns into a Hulk-like monstrosity and slaughters not only the champion, but dozens of the smaller ape-men as well, even when they turn around and start fleeing.
• Run or Die: Although Fang and Spear are formidable fighters both individually and as a team, they know that sometimes it is better to run when creatures are clearly too powerful for them to fight. Case in point, the diseased sauropod in "A Plague of Madness" is so massive and rapid that Spear and Fang both know they can't fight it and spend the episode running and hiding in places it can't reach them.
• Scavengers Are Scum: The sixth episode has Spear helping Fang recover from being beat to near-death, an effort made more difficult by the antagonistic and bloodthirsty hordes of vultures and hyena-dogs which are waiting for Spear to drop his guard.
• Scenery Porn: The oasis that Spear and Fang find themselves in at the beginning of the fifth episode is absolutely beautiful.
• Second Love: Spear and Mira become this to each other—Spear had lost his mate (along with their children) in the very first episode of the series while "Echoes of Eternity" reveals that Mira had lost her lover in the Viking-attack that initially enslaved her (which is also what ultimately led to her meeting Spear in the first place). The epilogue of "Echoes or Eternity" reveals that Mira ends up bearing Spear at least one child.
• Seeing Through Another's Eyes: The Coven can take control of animals and can see through their eyes.
• Set a Mook to Kill a Mook: Chased by a horde of bloodthirsty giant bats in Episode 4, Spear and Fang lead them into the tall grass where they are set upon by the raptor pack that had been menacing them in the beginning of the episode.
• Shadow Discretion Shot: While the show seldom censors any violence, the horned tyrannosaurs eating Spear's wife and children is only shown in shadows.
• Shout-Out:
  • In episode 4, Fang and Spear are chased by a group of raptors through a field of tall grass, just like in The Lost World: Jurassic Park.
  • Spear and Fang finding the slaughtered herd of sauropods during "Plague of Madness" brings to mind the aftermath of the Indominus rex massacre in Jurassic World.
  • The titular plague in "Plague of Madness" clearly takes several cues from the Rage Virus in regards to its effects and how rapidly it infects its hosts.
  • The true form of the Night Feeder bears a resemblance to the Indoraptor from Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, and its Impending Doom P.O.V. shots are similar in style to the Shaky P.O.V. Cam from the Evil Dead films.
  • Parts of "Sea of Despair" resemble several scenes from Life of Pi, especially the passage of several types of jellyfish and whales at night, as well as the sudden appearance of a school of flying fish as an unexpected source of food for Spear and Fang much like they were for Pi and Richard Parker.
    • The final showdown with the megalodon, however, resembles how Jason Statham's character in The Meg finally killed the megalodon there, by attacking the eye.
    • Furthermore, the full entrance of the megalodon hearkens to one of the closing shots from Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, emerging from a rolling wave much like the escaped mosasaur did.
• Show, Don't Tell: Enforced Trope, since the show has almost no dialogue; most communication is grunts and roars, and on the rare occasions that characters actually speak it's almost consistently in untranslated foreign languages and still kept to a minimum. The longest string of dialogue in the first season is accompanied by the character Mira drawing simple pictures in the dirt while talking to Spear, who obviously can't understand the words themselves, and by the end Spear (and the audience) have a good idea of what they're trying to get across. This is averted in "The Primal Theory", though, a Formula-Breaking Episode which is set in England in 1890, and all of the characters, with the exception of the antagonistic madman and an off-screen extra, speak full dialogue in modern, fully-intelligible English.
• Shown Their Work:
  • With all the Artistic License – Paleontology around, the series gets at least some details right. For example, the pterodactyl, while a mish-mash of different genera, has the correct quadrupedal stance, the brontosaurs have only a single claw on their forelimbs, and the Smilodon has a short tail and muscular build. Some fully feathered dinosaurs also make short appearances in the season one finale.
  • The Vikings in Season 2 mostly wear the stereotypical (and ahistorical) horned helmets, but the chief's son in "The Red Mist" eventually dons a very accurate one with no horns and a 'spectacle' guard over his nose and cheekbones. It looks very like the historical Gjermundbu helmet.
  • In "Vidarr", Fang is revealed to be pregnant by Red from "Shadow of Fate" and she subsequently lays three eggs. While the sequence will be Squick to a lot of people, it very much reflects how modern birds lay eggs, including her posture and amount of strain the laying puts on her - far less than a mammal giving birth. She also lays her entire clutch in one go, something that reptiles commonly do, a subtle nod to the fact that she has reptilian features in the series. Fang is also depicted with a single exit orifice (the "vent") just like reptiles and birds, and there's recent evidence that late-Cretaceous dinosaurs had the same "plumbing" as modern birds do.
• Silence is Golden: Tartakovsky has described it as being his first completely dialogue-free series. Through the series, there is no dialogue, only feral shrieks, grunts, and roars. Makes sense, since there's only one human character of note and the series takes place in a time before human languages were developed. "Slave of the Scorpion" does introduce a human character who speaks, albeit untranslated Arabic. In the second season, we're introduced to another language used by humans, this time what sounds like Irish used by a pseudo-Celtic tribe and still untranslated. The entirety of the episode “The Primal Theory” sticks out from the rest of the series by featuring characters speaking English throughout the entire episode due to focusing on English scientists from the 1890s.
• Skeleton Motif: In the 4th episode, Spear and Fang come across a stone pillar with carvings resembling human skulls. They were presumably made by the primitive albino hominids that dwell in the area.
• Slave Brand: Mira, a slave who has escaped from the viking village, has the brand of a scorpion on the back of her shaved head.
• Sliding Scale Of Silliness Vs Seriousness: While some of Tartakovsky's signature humor and slapstick is present, this is for the most part a bleak, deadly serious show.
• Snakes Are Sinister: Giant snakes, likely Titanoboa, are the main antagonists of Episode 2.
• Someone to Remember Him By: Possibly. Mira and Spear conceive a child while the latter is suffering hideous burn injuries and looking likely to die. It's left ambiguous whether he actually does, but this trope was clearly the plan. Fang's clutch by Red also serves as this.
• Super-Persistent Predator: Every predator that menaces the duo will put their bloodlust over self-preservation every time. Those that attack in groups (such as the raptors and giant bats in Episode 4) will keep on attacking no matter how many of their horde is slaughtered.
  • Special mention goes to the sauropod in "Plague of Madness", which after being infected by something spends most of its appearance chasing Spear and Fang, not even stopping falling off a cliff, having most of its skin ripped off, or falling into lava several times seems to affect it much until Spear and Fang are no longer within reach.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • Spear and Fang seem to be on good terms, but as mentioned in Kill Steal above, Fang is still a much larger dinosaur and would definitely need to eat more, even if that meant Spear wouldn't get any share of a kill.
  • In the second episode, Spear's attempts at using a snake's body to hold him and Fang atop a waterfall quickly fails due to Fang's heavy weight pulling Spear's grip off the body.
  • In "Rage of the Ape-Men", Spear massacres the ape-men to a one after they seemingly kill Fang. In "Scent of Prey", the episode immediately after it, tons of vultures show up to scavenge from the carnage and would certainly go after the critically-injured Fang as well, making a whole new problem for Spear to deal with while he tries to heal her.
  • While both Spear and Fang are smart and strong, they are still just a normal caveman and a normal dinosaur—they stand zero chance against more supernatural threats like the witches or the infected dinosaurs, leaving them with no other option but to Run or Die.
  • Spear and Fang are in a bad way while trying to cross the ocean in "Sea of Despair", only getting in better shape after they kill and eat an Archelon. Predictably, trying to raft across an unknown length of ocean without any supplies isn't a good idea.
• Terror-dactyl:
  • A pterosaur (called a "Pterodactyl" in the animatic) appears in the first episode. It's a gigantic mish-mash of different pterodactyloid species that can stand bipedally and is five-fingered (it has an additional thumb along with the wing finger and three small fingers), and acts like a hostile predator, trying to sniff out Spear and/or the fish he's carrying, before screeching at some unseen threat and flying off.
  • A second pterosaur species is seen being used by the matriarch of the witch coven in episode 8 as a mount. It looks like a stereotypical oversized, toothy Pteranodon, although close-up shots show it has pycnofibres (or very sparse ones, at least). It act hostile to Spear and Fang, though it is most likely mind-controlled by the matriarch.
  • Averted in episode 10, where the pterosaurs are not only non-hostile (serving as food for Fang) but are much more accurate-looking (they still appear to lack pycnofibres and have pointed wings, but both of those could be on account of the art style).
  • The ornithocheirid pterosaurs from the Season 2 premiere are very accurate in their design, not only clearly possessing pycnofibres, but also plunge-diving for fish like real-like piscivorous pterosaurs. They mostly spend their time hunting for fish, but one of them attacks Fang, screaming at her for a moment before getting swallowed by the megalodon.
• Together in Death: When Lula dies saving Spear and Fang, she is reunited with her daughter in the afterlife.
• Token Good Teammate: Lula is this to the rest of her Ambiguously Evil witches coven. Once she sees that what Spear and Fang have gone through in life closely mirrors what happened with her own family, she turns against the matriarch and helps the pair to escape.
• Toothy Bird: giant condor-like birds with jagged teeth coming out of their beaks appear in "Vidarr".
• Trailers Always Spoil: Since Spear and Fang are the main duo of the show, it was outright impossible to not spoil the fact that Fang survives from nearly being killed at the end of episode 5 when Adult Swim started airing commercials for new episodes. The commercials even show Spear tending to Fang's wounds in the aftermath.
  • The trailer for Season 2 also eliminates any ambiguity about the Scorpion. When Mira drew a picture of him in the dirt while trying to explain what happened to her to Spear, it wasn't clear if he was some kind of Horned Humanoid or just a man wearing a horned helmet. The Season 2 teasers show that he really is some kind of demon, and a huge one at that.
• Theme Naming: Spear and Fang are both named after their primary weapons.
• Thick-Line Animation: The animation has thick black outlines.
• The Movie: Primal: Tales of Savagery was a Theatrical re-release of the first four episodes of Primal.
• Threatening Shark: In "Sea of Despair", Spear and Fang's raft is destroyed by a Megalodon.
• Through His Stomach: In "Slave of the Scorpion", Mira is able to gain Fang's approval using a stewed and seasoned tuber which the tyrannosaur chomps with great gusto (but Spear finds unpalatable by contrast).
• Twisted Ankle: In "Terror Under the Blood Moon", a caveman carrying a boar trips on a rock and at the same time gives himself a broken ankle.
• Vengeance Feels Empty: After Spear and Fang successfully kill the theropods who ate Spear's family in the first episode, Spear falls to the ground, still distraught; his mate and children are still dead and this hollow victory won't bring them back.
• The Virus: The plague in "Plague of Madness" turns living things into zombie-like versions of themselves, and it spreads via bites.
• Walking the Earth: After losing their respective families, Spear and Fang have no home to return to. They end up travelling the prehistoric world together and ending up in a different place in each episode.
• Weak, but Skilled: Spear is an ordinary human and is able to take on dinosaurs, mammoths, and other dangerous creatures due to his tool making and cunning. When he encounters the human cultures he quickly becomes Strong and Skilled.
• Weaksauce Weakness: The Night Feeder would have easily finished off both Spear and Fang with enough time were it not for its extreme sensitivity to light. When Spear accidentally creates spark by hitting the tip of his blade against a flint-like rock, it causes the Night Feeder to instantly run away for a moment, resuming chase only once the spark goes away. Spear realizes he could easily defeat it by creating a perimeter of fire, which it cannot cross. It also explains why Spear and Fang were not attacked the previous nights despite it being in close proximity to them: They slept around a campfire, which didn't go out until morning the first two nights. It's only on the third night, when the fire goes out when it's still dark out, that the Night Feeder targets them.
• Wham Episode: the Season 1 finale, "Slave of the Scorpion," reveals that there's a more advanced, Bronze Age-type civilization somewhere across the sea which seems to mostly be unaware of the main setting of Primal, and is populated by Anatomically Modern Humans in contrast to the Neanderthal-like cavemen which have featured up to this point. They have metal tools and weapons, religion, ships, a genuine language rather than whoops and grunts, and hints at a proper Big Bad. Just when you thought this was a simple Hollywood Prehistory setting....
• Wham Shot: in "Dawn of Man", the third episode of the second season, we learn that Spear and Fang aren't the only human animal duo in this world as they're attacked by two Viking-esque men riding giant bears. And they're working for the Scorpion.
• What Measure Is a Mook?: Subverted in Red Mist where the village's defenders had children and wives, one of whom having a child strapped to her chest much to Spear's horror until he went back into rampage after being attacked. Even then, he tried his best not to kill a single child and show distraught when he was accidentally killed. The entire episode ended with the returning Chief and his son mourning the death—especially a single child who turned out to be his youngest son—and swearing vengeance against Spear and Fang.
• The Worf Effect:
  • Fang is established in the first few episodes as a formidable fighter who can kill beasts larger than herself. So when she's easily beaten by the mammoths in "A Cold Death", the spider in "Terror Under the Blood Moon", and the ape champion in "Rage of the Ape-Men", it demonstrates how powerful and dangerous these opponents are.
  • "Plague of Madness" takes this to a new level. The infected Argentinosaurus is so gigantic and such an obvious threat that neither of our heroes even try to fight it and spend the entire episode running away from it. They basically survive by chance when the sauropod falls into an active volcano and is burnt to ash.
  • Similarly, the witches in "Coven of the Damned" have supernatural powers that neither Spear nor Fang can hope to overcome and they immediately make a break for it when the witches discover them, but both are captured anyway. In the end, they don't defeat the Coven—they only manage to get away because one of the witches becomes sympathetic to them and does a Heroic Sacrifice that allows them to escape.
  • The ape-men (at least another tribe of them) return in the Season 1 finale, "Slave of the Scorpion", and are just as dangerous as before with their strength of numbers and even wielding weapons, abducting Spear and Fang's new friend Mira for God knows what purpose. And then our heroes find the ape-men who'd taken her dead, full of arrows, and footprints from what can only be men with shoes at the scene, and all we get of them before the episode ends is them sailing off across the sea in a trireme-like ship. The series' biggest Outside-Context Problem has just revealed itself.
• World of Badass: The show is set in a Death World where every creature has to fight for survival. The two protagonists, Spear and Fang, are a muscle-bound caveman and a Tyrannosaurus rex who constantly battle with various Prehistoric Monsters in the first season, Barbarian Tribes and warmongering civilizations in the second season. Even the more unassuming-looking characters, such as Mira, Eldar or the Egyptian Queen, are shown to be competent fighters.
• Would Hurt a Child: As the viking tribe found out, raising a weapon against Fang and Spear is a death sentence, regardless of how young you are.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Almost drowning and being eaten by snakes in "River of Snakes" has left Fang with a pathological fear of anything that even resembles a snake. Even a worm, to Spear's bemusement.
• Xenophobic Herbivore: A few herbivores make terrifying antagonists for Spear and Fang like the mammoths seeking retribution for their fallen kin and a crazed sauropod.
• Your Size May Vary: There are some inconsistencies about the size of a characters. Fang, in particular, can sometimes appear only 5-6 meters long, while sometimes she's as big as a fully-grown Tyrannosaurus rex. At least some of these inconsistencies are done on purpose for dramatic effect, which is very common in animation.

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"Of course, we have multiple layers masking our true inner selves: the uniforms of society, education in its highest form, lavish indulgences. We have evolved beyond creation's expectations. But under the right circumstances...facing a primeval threat...I assure you, gentlemen, that our evolution will revert back to its PRIMAL savage form: fighting for survival at the very cost of humanity."