therewillbeblus wrote: ↑Thu Aug 04, 2022 7:08 pm
colinr0380 wrote: ↑Wed Oct 28, 2020 4:28 am
I am very excited to see that E4's Adult Swim block is beginning to show the latest animation series from the creator of Samurai Jack, Genndy Tartakovsky,
Primal
I’m catching up with this now that the new season just started- After remaining on the fence during its slow-burn beginnings, I’ve acclimated to its nonverbal structural modalities, and it’s really powerful and intricate visual storytelling. The best episodes I’ve seen resemble the blueprint of
BoJack’s “Fish Out of Water” in its creative forward momentum through surprising setpieces and unexpected narrative devices, only rooted in reality.. kind-of.. sometimes.. not to be conflated with “familiar” at least! The fourth episode of the series is one of the more inventive adventures I've seen in a while, and the fifth descends into some neanderthal-
Kill Bill-catapulted-into-horror fare, or more like
Riki-Oh, only, you know, with a heart
This was one of my favourite shows of 2020, and it deserved so much better for its UK premiere than to be tucked away on a sub-digital channel in the early hours of a weekday morning. It certainly deserved a Rick & Morty primetime slot at the very least. Hopefully E4 will get to showing the second season soon, although if they do it may be in the same timeslot, so I am keeping an eye out for it!
My favourite episodes of that first season come in the middle of the run with episodes 6, 7 and 8. Episode 6 is probably the best of the whole series as in the aftermath of the enormous fight against the Ape-Men in episode 5 (which is the big action episode of the series), Scent of Prey is a kind of tiny post-battle procedural episode about Spear trying to keep the injured Fang safe from predators, which leads to a cross country dragging of the dinosaur and escalating fending off of foes until the
wonderfully cathartic final sequence that triumphantly affirms the bond between the pair and Fang's survival against the odds in such a brutal and violent world (which of course takes the form of a bonding blood bath). More than any of the narrative and subtextual plot stuff about manufactured family dynamics that is going on, if there were just one episode of the same calibre dealing with small minutiae of moment-to-moment survival in a hostile environment each season, I would be more than happy to watch the show for as long as it lasted.
Episode 7, Plague of Madness, is the most horrific of the series, as we see a disease spreading through various animals until it reaches a seemingly placid dinosaur,
which turns it homicidally insane (didn't this happen in one of those dozens of Land Before Time films?
). Spear and Fang run across its path and it becomes a giant chase sequence with the added fear of our heroes getting infected if they themselves are bitten (which our main characters themselves may not entirely realise the danger of), tinged with the surprisingly painfully emotional manner that the irreversibly disease riddled dinosaur (who, compared to our main characters who watched their families be killed, instead was responsible for killing their own clan in their insanity) is almost being puppeted by its delirium into its single minded need to hunt and kill until the
lava climax ends its misery and brings it to an appropriately tragic T2-esque extinction ending.
And episode 8, Coven of the Damned, is the one in which Spear and Fang are captured by a mysterious cult of women and unable to escape Spear is going to be used as their sacrifice until one member of the coven reads their minds and takes pity on the man. It is both a great way to recap events of Spear and Fang's loss of their respective families for viewers coming in late to the series and also a way of kind of saying "not all men" to the idea that they are all just violence fixated and can be callously sacrificed with impunity (as shown through the female Fang's infatuation with Spear; and maybe the suggestion that Spear is the future direction of the human animal, especially as compared to the Ape-men from earlier in the series). I found that rather moving too, especially in the way that Spear and Fang are completely helpless and at the mercy of a foe they cannot fight against, and instead it falls upon others to understand and be merciful to them, which is similar to the plague episode in showing characters just trying to survive in a cruel world where survival cannot be taken for granted at any point, and maybe all that can be managed is a certain level of understanding and empathy for the plight of others.