Best lines
I’m waiting for an old friend - Bran
You left me for dead - Hound
I also robbed you - Arya
I’ve always had blue eyes! - Tormund
Whatever they want - Dany
but
It had its moments - Sansa
They need wheelchair ramps in Winterfell. They left Bran in the courtyard overnight!
Parallelism between Season 1 Episode 1 and Season 8 Episode 1
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ S08E01 Jon: "Where's Arya?" Sansa: "Lurking somewhere."Foreshadowing (from different Seasons/Episodes.)
01. S03E05“ “Let’s not go back. Let’s stay here a while longer,” Ygritte tells Jon. “I don’t ever want to leave this cave, Jon Snow.” S08E01 “We could stay a thousand years. No one would find us,” Daenerys says to Jon.02. Sam is suggesting rebelling against the Targaryen because they burned his father and brother alive. Similar to when Robert's Rebellion, began when Rhaegar Targaryen, allegedly abducted Robert's betrothed, Lyanna Stark.
Heads up: I know that there are a lot of folks going into this expecting it to scratch the same itch as Game of Thrones or Vikings.
You’re going to come out extremely disappointed if you expect that.
This is way slower and artsier than your average 'manly' action movie, the tone and feel are more akin to something like The Revenant
Alright, so I did not give this its due the first time around, here are my updated thoughts.
The first thing that stood out to me during the rewatch is how much of the imagery had already burned itself into my brain, there are so many fantastic long takes that I still easily remembered months after seeing it the first time.
I love the brutal and raw feel, which combined with the score creates a very good sense of atmosphere.
The characters clicked for me this time around, a lot of their development is done in subtle and visual ways (pay attention to how cold Skardsgard’s character claims he is versus how he acts). As a result, I wasn’t bored and the pacing fell into place for me.
While the story is still a little by the numbers and predictable, I picked up on this theme of the toxicity and pointlessness of revenge, which sets it apart from similar stories like The Lion King or Hamlet.
The action slaps, but I’m still not a fan of some of the arthouse touches. For example I don’t get what that hallucination fight during the sword retrieval scene wants to convey.
But yeah, it’s much better than I initially gave it credit for, even if it’s nowhere near peak Eggers.
7.5/10
9.5/10. If you'd said to me, "Hey watch this short film that's a cross between Lost in Translation and the opening act of Wall-E," I'm pretty sure I would just look at you funny. And yet that's pretty much what this was, and it worked beautifully. The undersea world BoJack found himself in, where he couldn't eat the food, couldn't engage in his usual vices, and most of all couldn't speak or understand the local dialect, captured the experience of isolation and confusion that can come from visiting a foreign country through a distinctively BoJack lens.
But it also created a great atmosphere for a format-bending episode. Offering a nigh-wordless half hour of comedy in a show that makes its hay from its dialogue could either be gimmicky or bold, and thankfully this episode tended toward the former. It helped to put the viewer in BoJack's shoes -- only able to communicate and express mood through non-verbal cues like gestures, body language, and the score.
And in the absence of dialogue, Bojack Horseman reverts to a certain Looney Tunes-esque vibe where BoJack finds himself inadvertently responsible for an adorable little seahorse moppet. (I had flashbacks to the "Buttons and MIndy"segments of Animaniacs and a dozen other classic cartoons.) The design and personality of the seahorse baby struck the right balance of adorable and mischievous, and it created a nice opportunity for BoJack to be caring, brave, and as always, eternally frustated.
But this being Bojack, of course there's a quiet strain of melancholy through the whole thing. When Bojack returns to the seahorse babe to its father, the dad is mildly grateful, but mostly blase, and the baby doesn't even wave to him when it's time for BoJack to say goodbye. They went through this experience together, through shark attacks and taffy explosions and being stranded, and the moppet is too little to even look up for his soup or appreciate what his equine friend did for him. There's an emptiness there, a sort of existential realization that all that effort, which was quite noble in and of itself, feels a little hollow without someone to share it with or to appreciate it.
So through this experience, BoJack finally finds the words to apologize to Kelsey Jannings, noting that grand acts are nice, but that accomplishments, even ones far more important than winning and Oscar like returning a child to their parent, can seem like building a sandcastle, inevitably fleeting and meant to be washed away with the coming tide. But that those connections between individuals are what sustain us and give us life and reason to go on in a world of sandcastles.
Again, this being BoJack Horseman, those words too are washed away before he can get them to Kelsey in any sort of readable fashion. To add insult to injury, he realizes in the end that he could have talked this whole time, which is the right combination of sad and funny. But overall, this is a wonderful episode that uses some great Warner Bros. silent capering to further the show's project of examining its lead's attempts to find meaning in his life, and finds an inventive way to convey that experience.
[7.7/10] I appreciate it when things come full circle with a twist. There’s poetry to AFC Richmond’s last game of the season. In contrast to the first episode of season 2, they’re happy to have a tie, because it means promotion back to the Premier League. Jamie lines up to take the penalty kick, only now he’s a different man. He shows the humility and trust in his teammate to give the show to Dani Rojas, who makes up for the pup-pulverizing kick we started this year with. It’s an easy thing to bookend a season like that, but damn if it isn’t effective.
And despite everything, I like Nate’s heel turn. He’s wrong in his actions, and wrong in his assessment, but not so far off either. He’s not wrong to feel a little sidelined or overlooked once Roy came back into the fold. He’s not wrong to have a complex as the towel boy turned manager who worries no one here will take him seriously since they know where he comes from. He’s not wrong that Ted has to rely on other people’s knowledge of the beautiful game to have any success.
Where he is wrong is thinking that if he came to Ted with his concerns, that Ted wouldn’t listen. He’s wrong to use his disgruntlement as an excuse to try to undermine Ted in public. He’s wrong to call Ted a joke given how he recognized and fostered the talent in Nate himself, and everyone else on the team. No, he’s not a brilliant tactician, but he’s a good manager and motivator. And while it’s too much and too far to imagine that succeeding in the real world, within the more graceful confines of fiction, he’s more than proven his value.
Nate isn’t fully wrong, but he’s bitter and envious, and that leads you to see the world in a certain way. He is the negative image of Ted’s motivation, the chance to feel like the “most important person in the world” for a moment when you’re in focus of Ted or Keeley or Rebecca, but with an aching hole when you start to feel underappreciated or infantilized. A good redemption arc is incredible, but an earned, misguided, but comprehensible heel turn is its own thing of beauty. The arc of Nate from overlooked cinnabon to self-made triumph to vengeful foe (he torn down the friggin’ “Believe” sign!) is superb.
And hey, I also like how the show handles the public reveal of Ted’s panic attack. Ted handles it like the mature adult that he is, using it as an opportunity to show humility by apologizing to his team and speaking frankly with the media about how we treat mental health in athletics. Particularly in the shadow of the recent Simone Biles story, it’s wholesome to see the ideas tackled in such a sensitive matter.
But then there’s the romantic stuff. I’ll say this much. I appreciate that at the end of the day, Sam chooses to stay in Richmond, but not because of Rebecca. He wants to stay and continue inspiring kids here, not just where he’s from, and bring more of his culture to this place. It’s a nice zig where I expected things to zag, even as someone who was rooting for Rebecca and Sam. Making it about his journey and not just about their relationship is a canny call. (Plus hey, Okufu promising to buy Sam’s childhood home and “poop in every room” is strangely hilarious.)
I also just don’t care about the Roy/Keeley stuff. Roy’s supportive. Cool! But I don’t know what they’re doing with the couple, or why they’re hinting at potential break-ups or trying to reassure the audience about that or something amorphous going on there. I guess Roy’s insecure about Keeley being independent, and that's something. But they don’t really pay it off, unless they’re saving something for next season.
I’m also not especially invested in Keeley getting her own PR firm. She’s such a cartoon character most of the time, and the show is so chock full of wish fulfillment, and you just know she’s going to stay in AFC RIchmond orbit in season 3 anyway that it’s hard for it to feel like too big of a deal.
The only thing I like about it is that it draws a contrast with her and Rebecca on the one hand and Ted and Nate as the other vis-a-vis mentors. Higgins’ line about good mentors wanting you to move on and great ones knowing you will is well-founded. There’s a difference in the “break-ups” between Rebecca/Keeley and Ted/Nate, and maybe it speaks to the kind of relationships both had, with more Ted could have done even if Nate interprets a lot of things in bad faith.
Otherwise, the other developments are all fine. Rupert buying a rival Premier League club and poaching Nate adds to his cartoonish villainy. Trent Crimm leaving The Independent because he wants something deeper is a little too tidy, but it’s heart is in the right place. And Roy accepting Jamie’s apology about what happened with Keeley, and later headbutting him so they can hug and celebrate together is a great coda for their repaired relationship.
Overall, season 2 is a lot shaggier than season 1. You can feel Ted Lasso having eclipsed its original premise and struggling to figure out how these characters make sense afterward. Not every storyline works. A lot of the material with Roy, Keeley, and Jamie feels particularly aimless, and even though there’s some great Rebecca stuff here, the show doesn’t always know what to do with her. Still, the season takes some big swings, from Ted’s slow acceptance of therapy, to Nate’s steady turn to the dark side, to the outstanding standalone Coach Beard episode. There’s still a lot to harmonize and for Ted Lasso to “figure out how to be a show” in the wake of so many major developments, but also some big creative efforts that are worth applauding and hanging onto.
[8.8/10] It’s easy to love Primal’s action. Sure, it is violent, but that violence is artistic, kinetic, heart-pumping, balletic, filled with the incredible work of the show’s animation and design team that turns even the most bloody battles into visual poetry. We care for Spear and Fang after all they’ve been through. We fear for them when they’re in danger, cheer for them when they triumph, and sit on the edge of our seats through every blow and battle.
But this is not Genndy Tartakovsky’s prior show, Samurai Jack, where all the opponents are robots. The creatures and, now, people that the duo take down are living beings. They have the same familial and societal bonds that Fang and Spear did. They feel those bonds severed with the snap of powerful jaws and mighty blow from fearsome fists. The violence here is not costless, not simple, not easy to cheer for.
That’s what gripped me in “The Red Mist”. We start out wanting to root for Spear and Fang because they’re our heroes. They are freeing slaves from imprisonment by the Scorpion tribe. They are facing off against equally scary and powerful warriors astride their own sharp-toothed beasts of burden. These enemies are no pushovers. They’re ultimately no match for the combined force of primitive man and powerful dinosaur. But they have numbers, and weapons, and home field advantage, which makes the good guys’ position seem tenuous and perilous.
The way Primal can make us bite our nails in these moments is incredible. We know, or at least have good reason to think, that the show won’t kill off Fang or Spear in a random episode in the middle of the season. And yet, when Spear is crushed underneath a bear, when Fang is cornered by a group of ax-wielding warriors, you worry that something terrible could happen, because of the way the expert flow and progression of battle leads to emotional highs and lows amid the tumult.
It helps that the episode gives us key figures to follow on the opposing side. There are plenty of cannon fodder soldiers who mostly exist to be chomped through, knocked pasts, or slayed in any number of gruesome or bloody ways. But there is also a chieftain leading his people in battle, a mother protecting her village, and a child striking a blow for the fellow members of his tribe wherever he can.
Therein lies the rub. This is not a simple war of nature, where Fang and Spear fend off rival beasts or mysterious critters. This is not killing a giant turtle to avoid starvation, or snatching fish from the air for sustenance, or slaying a massive shark for survival. This is a community they’re fighting, with connections and mutual support and devotion and conviction and pain and anger at the losses they suffer.
At some point, the fight in the Scorpion tribe stronghold goes from being a battle between good and evil, to being a more complicated test of wills between groups with contrary interests, to being a horrifying massacre.
Spear and Fang are not wanton. They do not kill for sport. They try to escape after winning the day and find themselves backed onto a cliff. They try to run past the Scorpion tribe’s defenses, only to face a flurry of spears in the process. They absorb arrows, suffer major wounds, and are driven to the point of fury and self-defense, rather than choosing to kill indiscriminately.
When push comes to shove, though. Fang kills that mother when it’s that or dying himself. Spear kills that child, after trying several times to find non-lethal ways to stop them. And when the titular crimson mist floats above the hazy grounds of the battlefield, they kill everyone. It is the most shocking, widespread, blood-curdling loss of life in the series to date.
On the one hand it is righteous. These are slavers after all. Fang and Spear wouldn’t even be here if they weren’t trying to free what seems like a collection of meek individuals who’ve been kidnapped and menaced into submission. These are conquerors, possessing of weapons and mounts and other technologies that mean they are naive innocents. What’s more, they fight back, unrelentingly, even when Fang and Spear try to retreat. At some point, our heroes have no choice. They’re fighting for their lives against enemies who’ve committed a moral wrong and who refuse to surrender.
But these are also people defending their homes, their brethren, their elders, and their children. To them, here are two barbarous invaders who have barged into their village, torn down their homes, and killed their standard bearers. To them, this is a righteous defense. And even if we want to write them off as a heartless slave-holding society, it’s hard when the show humanizes them. We see mothers and fathers defending their children, kids joining the fight to try to protect their caretakers, other lamenting those they’ve lost in the fray. This culling is not as simple as it is a complete one.
I walked away feeling conflicted. Fang and Spear triumph. They free the slaves and escape in a ship with Mira in tow. They’ve defeated an unjust society that held other sentient beings captive. And yet, it’s hard not to recoil at the absolute carnage left in their wake, mourn for parents and children alike felled in the storm of spears and claws, sit aghast at the bodies spread and stacked across what used to be their homes.
The sharpest choice “The Red Mist” makes is to put us in the perspective of a father and son returning home to find this horror. There, in the quiet spaces that the flurry of combat do not provide for, we can sympathize with them. They too are slavers, coming in with fellow souls in shackles, a party to such evil. But they also look upon the bodies of their loved ones, torn to bits and viscera, their partners slain, their children lifeless, and weep.
The father struggles to light the funeral pyre. He decks his son in armor and prepares him to exact vengeance. This action does not happen in a vacuum. It is not the law of the jungle playing out. It is, instead, the cycle of violence, where even such inhuman slaughter, however justified or total, sparks the cause for more in the name of revenge.
To them, it is just as righteous. To our heroes, it is a necessary cost of self-preservation. And to us, it is the queasy moral middle ground of being thrilled, enraptured, even awed by the images Tartakovsky and company paint on the screen for us, while also recoiling, repulsing, chastening ourselves at the scope and force of such violence, that will surely not end here.
Wow! So much exposition yet done so well. It made the payoff worth the wait! I did not expect them to explain everything so well with only 20 minutes. Dense but still very palatable.
I find it incredibly interesting how much the show's plot seems to draw from the Bible this episode.
Firstly Ymir and the parallel of taking the fruit from the devil (which gave the knowledge of good and evil) or in AoT's case, the extreme power of the titans.
Next the Eldians (Israelites) Tied in a bloody genocidal war with another faction Marley (Egypt).
Then they were eventually banished to wander aimlessly (40 years in the dessert) to find the promised land (Paradis Island / The 3 walls) Just like the Israelites.
They then after wondering so long they arrived at Jericho (A city surrounded by huge WALLS described as being surrounded by rectangular towers and being Heavily fortified, with a virtually impregnable double wall) - now while they did not BUILD these walls, it really seem similar to the walls we see in the show. Walls that we're almost considered divine and infallible at that point in time.
After they won the battle at Jericho the tracts of land were assigned to each tribe (which we can relate to Walls Maria, Rose, Sheena) and they lived peacefully with each other. (Like the King's rule in AoT, just minus the mind wipes)
I guess my forced youth group studies as a child finally paid off huh...
[7.7/10] So much good stuff in this one. At base it has a surprisingly strong story, rooted in Leela’s emotions. She’s lonely because of her eye. She ends up trying to connect with someone who, despite his piggish exterior, seems to feel the same way. And in the end, she realizes that he was just as superficial and dunderheaded as she thought, only to find a different kind of comfort in the pet she saves from him. It’s a great throughline to build a story around.
Plus, holy hell, what a fun Star Trek parody. When I originally watched Futurama, I hadn’t seen The Original Series, and this episode is twice as much of a blast when you’re more versed in what they’re spoofing. Brannigan isn’t just Kirk-as-Shatner taken to the extreme, but Kif is Spock with his “long-suffering second-in-command” bona fides exaggerated, the Prime Directive is rightfully satirized, and trappings like Captain’s Logs and velour outfits brings the yuks. This one is a real treat for Trekkies, and it speaks to how strong the material is that you don’t have to be a Star Trek fan to appreciate the ridiculousness of Brannigan and company -- it just enhances it.
There’s also some just plain entertaining sci-fi lunacy here. The various animals on Vergon 6 let the writers flex their goofy zoology muscles. The dark matter fuel solution is surprisingly clockwork and comes at the right time. Even the “retro” bar where everyone wears hovering rings is a laugh-fest. The show clicks with great visual gags and fantastic quotability here.
Overall, this is a hilarious coming out party for Zapp Brannigan in particular, but it’s also Nibbler’s debut and, more importantly, a great establishing episode for Leela that give us her plight but also her determination and kindness. Another early winner.
[9.0/10] Primal is about loss and family. I rewatched the first episode with a friend recently, and it struck me how central that tale -- of both Spear and Fang losing their families but finding each other -- remains to the series. And in many ways, “Vidarr” is the counterpoint to that first, fateful chapter of this story.
Because on the one hand, this is an episode about Spear and Fang making it to the other side of that tragedy. After so many trias, Spear and Mira are together. She integrates seamlessly into their team, launching arrows, directing sails, and tying off ships in conjunction with her caveman and dinosaur counterparts. Spear may have lost his wife and his children, something which can never be replaced. But he has a new partner, someone to start over with, a fellow human being who makes his life better through her mere presence.
And after losing her own children, Fang is poised to start a family again. I’ll confess, I didn’t understand what was happening when she began digging a hole and covering it with leaves. But when I did, when I figured out the reason behind Spear’s utter joy at what he realized was happening, when I witnessed Fang creating life anew to liven her days and brighten her nights, I don’t mind telling you that I teared up.
After all that they’ve been through, the hardships and struggles and mortal threats that have taken so much away from each of them, both Fang and Spear have found a new start. Their solace and opportunity makes the latest threat so scary and tense. To have found this after so long, only to have it taken away yet again, would be devastating, insurmountable, unfathomable. I don’t know how the audience could take it, let alone the characters. So when they fight to protect Fang’s eggs, or save Mira from a skybound attack, there is so much at stake given what’s already been lost.
And yet, to the Chieftain and his son, Fang and Spear are no different, no better, than the terrifying creatures who gobbled up the caveman and dinosaur’s children in the first chapter of the series. Their quest for vengeance is no less righteous, their loss no less great, their reason to fight no less worthy.
At the same time viewer like me exalted to see Fang lay her eggs and Mira hear Spear speak her name, they witness the Chieftain having painful dreams of the familial bliss that he was robbed of, and visions of an evil that must be eradicated. His loss is as deep, as painful, as Fang’s and Spear’s, and it makes this hour of combat as heartbreaking as it is triumphant.
Not for nothing, it’s also thrilling as hell. The initial boat-to-boat combat is a rollicking thrillride. The Chieftain is every bit the combatant that Spear is, with size, fury, and weapon that make him a formidable opponent who poses a genuine threat to our hero. At the same time, the nimbleness of his son, Eldarr, the battle of arrows between him, Mira, and Spear, makes for an equally challenging avenue of defense. The fact that they all must brave the rapids, keeping the lot of them off-balance and destabilized, only adds to the excitement.
The airborne battle that follows later, after both sides have had time to recover and lick their wounds, is just as incredible. The Chieftain and Eldarr’s skyward attack on the wings of gigantic buzzards gives it a unique flavor. The acrobatics both Spear and Mira must manage to save themselves, and Fang’s nascent eggs, are stunning, and leave you biting your nails at every turn. With how much hangs in the balance, on both sides of the ledger, it’s hard not to feel your heart racing with every balletic lunge and narrow avoidance of death.
But both sides can only avoid it for so long. In the end, the Chieftain is knocked off his mount and smacks his way to the forest floor, a battered soul and tough son of a bitch to even survive the fall. His son, however, is not so fortunate. The imagery of the young man, crushed to death from the plummet onto hard stone, is heart-rending. This quest was meant to rob another family of their happiness, but only led to one more loss, one more piece of a family broken away.
I don’t know with certainty what “Vidarr” means, when it’s uttered by the Chieftain and his son en route to secure their buzzard mounts. But I take it to mean vengeance, revenge, the quest for righteous justice after unspeakable crimes are visited upon those you love most. It is a sense that, if they understood, Fang and Spear would appreciate, would know like their own souls, once haunted by the same fires that burn within the people striving so hard to kill them.
For now, at least, those fires have been dimmed, replaced with the joys and passions that come with new life and new loves, that don’t replace the old but add to the joyful capacities of our hearts. It is stirring, moving, to witness our heroes defend these new starts to their lives, preserving the possibility to secure a touch of joy in a sea of so much pain. But through the trials and travails of this season, we know that such happiness comes at a cost, of those who’ve lost exactly what Fang and Spear have found, and whose pain and righteous anger is no less deep or deserving. Families are lost. Families are found. It’s a shame, and a tragedy, that one must come at the expense of the other.
[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.
