[7.9/10] Holy hell, that took a turn quickly! I loved the first two segments we got here, and was impressed by the sequences that followed, though with a certain amount of shock at how fast the show has seemingly shifted.
I’ve been reading Dante’s Inferno recently, so the scene where the Chieftain looks up at angels beckoning him to Heaven, only to be dragged down by demons through the center of the Earth to Hell was especially gripping to me. The imagery of the show’s creative team is captivating and haunting, with a black and red palette of human suffering in rocky confines that turns the stomach and inspires awe. The simple composition of a gigantic, all black, horned ruler of this realm, lording over the Chieftain with his burning eyes and unmoving expression, strikes fear into the heart. Seeing the Chieftain witness his son’s arrival into this grim locale, and willingness to make himself a vessel of the dmon’s rage and punishment for Fang and Spear, is horrifying. The chieftain is turned into a miserable flame creature, one seemingly poised to exact damned vengeance upon our heroes.
Those heroes, one the other hand, get one more moment of cuteness and fun before things turn remarkably sour remarkably quickly. Watching Mera and Spear lure Fang onto their boat by basically playing some combination of keepaway and tag with her eggs is downright adorable. The fun of Fang’s understandable defensiveness, the roughhousing spirit when she’s leery of the humans wanting to move her soon-to-be offspring, and the comfort when she sees the nest they made for ehr on the boat and plops down there, are all just aces.
But good lord, from there we nigh-literally drift into a harrowing story of seaborn assault, an evil queen, gladiatorial slavery, and the clash of civilizations. I’ll admit, after the last episode, I began to wonder if season 2 might be the end of Primal. This had long been a story about Fang and SPear recovering from the loss of their families, but they seemed poised to settle into new ones. I thought that maybe the balance of the season would be the trials and travails of setting up those new families on this new shore, possibly fending off the Chieftain one more time, before rounding things out with a happily ever after.
Well, they quickly disabused me of that notion. To be frank, I wasn’t sure why Mera and Spear wanted to leave in the first place, but presumably they were trying to get back to Mera’s people, or maybe returning to Fang and Spear’s homeland? Either way, it leads to them running into a quasi-Egyptian battleship, and good lord, what ensues is a nightmare.
For one thing, I cannot remember the last time I gasped as much as I did when a skirmish with the titular gigantic man results in one of Fang’s eggs being destroyed in the tumult. As I said about last week’s episode, we know what those eggs mean to Fang and Spear after what they’ve both lost, so it gives them renewed anger and fury. The fight itself is good, as the massive man is more than cannon fodder like his invading compatriots, and the challenge he poses to all three of our heroes makes them, and the show’s storboarder and designers, get creative.
What ends the battle isn’t some superior show of force or strategy, but heretofore unknown evil, Cleopatra-esque queen grabbing the two remaining eggs and basically bending Fang, Spear, and Mera to her will with the threat that she’ll destroy them. It’s a fascinating dynamic that recurs through the rest of the episode. We don’t know much about the Queen yet, beyond the malevolent smirk on her face as she threatens those poor eggs and the people who care for them, but it adds an emotional component to everything that happens next.
Spear and Fang are imprisoned and even chained. Mera is thrown into a room with other women like her, with not great implications as to what their role on the ship is. Attempts by Spear and Fang to rebel are quashed by the Queen laying down her threats one more time, and Spear trying to calm his friend amid the anger lest it result in the loss of something so meaningful.
The most interesting part of this interlude to me comes when the Colossaeus is sent to the cage next to the twosome. As with the other moral gray areas that abound this season, he is not some snarling villain or monster, despite him being the instrument that caused their pain. He too is a tool, used by someone else to cause harm, whether he wants to or not, part of another slaver society. In a strange way, despite the devastating consequences of losing one of Fang’s eggs, it’s not his fault, and he is as pitiable and pathos-ridden as she and Spear are.
We see that when the Egyptian ship reaches another shore filled with a quasi-Arabic looking army filled with men on elephants. The combat that we see is heart-pumping, as always, with the biggest scale battle we’ve seen on the show to date. The gargantuan warrior stopping a massive beast in its tracks, Fang chomping the leg of one of the hulking pachyderms, and Spear himself slashing one through the belly as arrows fly show how these battle-hardened fighters thrive in the throes of war.
But this is one hell of a shift in the premise of the show. We are beyond a couple of primitive heroes fighting and scrapping their way through a primeval wilderness. We are onto their being enslaved by a malevolent monarch, ferried on great ships to foreign shores, and forced to fight in epic battles. What I thought was the series listing toward final resolution is, instead, a sea change in where they are, what challenges they face, and the complexity and scope of the threats and perils before them. Candidly, I don’t know how to feel about that shift just yet, particularly given the speed, but it certainly has my attention.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2022-08-26T21:02:25Z
[7.9/10] Holy hell, that took a turn quickly! I loved the first two segments we got here, and was impressed by the sequences that followed, though with a certain amount of shock at how fast the show has seemingly shifted.
I’ve been reading Dante’s Inferno recently, so the scene where the Chieftain looks up at angels beckoning him to Heaven, only to be dragged down by demons through the center of the Earth to Hell was especially gripping to me. The imagery of the show’s creative team is captivating and haunting, with a black and red palette of human suffering in rocky confines that turns the stomach and inspires awe. The simple composition of a gigantic, all black, horned ruler of this realm, lording over the Chieftain with his burning eyes and unmoving expression, strikes fear into the heart. Seeing the Chieftain witness his son’s arrival into this grim locale, and willingness to make himself a vessel of the dmon’s rage and punishment for Fang and Spear, is horrifying. The chieftain is turned into a miserable flame creature, one seemingly poised to exact damned vengeance upon our heroes.
Those heroes, one the other hand, get one more moment of cuteness and fun before things turn remarkably sour remarkably quickly. Watching Mera and Spear lure Fang onto their boat by basically playing some combination of keepaway and tag with her eggs is downright adorable. The fun of Fang’s understandable defensiveness, the roughhousing spirit when she’s leery of the humans wanting to move her soon-to-be offspring, and the comfort when she sees the nest they made for ehr on the boat and plops down there, are all just aces.
But good lord, from there we nigh-literally drift into a harrowing story of seaborn assault, an evil queen, gladiatorial slavery, and the clash of civilizations. I’ll admit, after the last episode, I began to wonder if season 2 might be the end of Primal. This had long been a story about Fang and SPear recovering from the loss of their families, but they seemed poised to settle into new ones. I thought that maybe the balance of the season would be the trials and travails of setting up those new families on this new shore, possibly fending off the Chieftain one more time, before rounding things out with a happily ever after.
Well, they quickly disabused me of that notion. To be frank, I wasn’t sure why Mera and Spear wanted to leave in the first place, but presumably they were trying to get back to Mera’s people, or maybe returning to Fang and Spear’s homeland? Either way, it leads to them running into a quasi-Egyptian battleship, and good lord, what ensues is a nightmare.
For one thing, I cannot remember the last time I gasped as much as I did when a skirmish with the titular gigantic man results in one of Fang’s eggs being destroyed in the tumult. As I said about last week’s episode, we know what those eggs mean to Fang and Spear after what they’ve both lost, so it gives them renewed anger and fury. The fight itself is good, as the massive man is more than cannon fodder like his invading compatriots, and the challenge he poses to all three of our heroes makes them, and the show’s storboarder and designers, get creative.
What ends the battle isn’t some superior show of force or strategy, but heretofore unknown evil, Cleopatra-esque queen grabbing the two remaining eggs and basically bending Fang, Spear, and Mera to her will with the threat that she’ll destroy them. It’s a fascinating dynamic that recurs through the rest of the episode. We don’t know much about the Queen yet, beyond the malevolent smirk on her face as she threatens those poor eggs and the people who care for them, but it adds an emotional component to everything that happens next.
Spear and Fang are imprisoned and even chained. Mera is thrown into a room with other women like her, with not great implications as to what their role on the ship is. Attempts by Spear and Fang to rebel are quashed by the Queen laying down her threats one more time, and Spear trying to calm his friend amid the anger lest it result in the loss of something so meaningful.
The most interesting part of this interlude to me comes when the Colossaeus is sent to the cage next to the twosome. As with the other moral gray areas that abound this season, he is not some snarling villain or monster, despite him being the instrument that caused their pain. He too is a tool, used by someone else to cause harm, whether he wants to or not, part of another slaver society. In a strange way, despite the devastating consequences of losing one of Fang’s eggs, it’s not his fault, and he is as pitiable and pathos-ridden as she and Spear are.
We see that when the Egyptian ship reaches another shore filled with a quasi-Arabic looking army filled with men on elephants. The combat that we see is heart-pumping, as always, with the biggest scale battle we’ve seen on the show to date. The gargantuan warrior stopping a massive beast in its tracks, Fang chomping the leg of one of the hulking pachyderms, and Spear himself slashing one through the belly as arrows fly show how these battle-hardened fighters thrive in the throes of war.
But this is one hell of a shift in the premise of the show. We are beyond a couple of primitive heroes fighting and scrapping their way through a primeval wilderness. We are onto their being enslaved by a malevolent monarch, ferried on great ships to foreign shores, and forced to fight in epic battles. What I thought was the series listing toward final resolution is, instead, a sea change in where they are, what challenges they face, and the complexity and scope of the threats and perils before them. Candidly, I don’t know how to feel about that shift just yet, particularly given the speed, but it certainly has my attention.