Now Streaming: PRIMAL, Resurrected and It Feels So Good

Spear lives! Again!

Primal
The first episode of Season 3 is now streaming on HBO Max . Subsequent episodes debut every Sunday on broadcast cable's Adult Swim channel and every Monday on HBO Max. All 20 episodes of Seasons 1 and 2 are also now available via Adult Swim and HBO Max.

In December, Starz' Spartacus: House of Ashur brought a supporting character -- who was very, very dead in the original series -- back to life and installed him as the protagonist, thanks to some brief mumbo jumbo.

That resurrection followed on the heels of many other (mostly television) characters who have been brought back to life over the years -- Dexter: Resurrection even made it part of its title -- so it should be no big surprise that Genndy Tartakovsky has resurrected the protagonist of Primal in the first episode of Season 3.

The Neanderthal caveman Spear (Aaron LaPlante) lost his entire family to a pack of hungry tyrannosaurs in the very first episode of the series, eventually forming an indelible bond of friendship with Fang, a female tyrannosaur who lost her brood of hatchlings to a hungry tyrannosaur from the same pack that destroyed Spear's family. United in tragedy, they faced an amazing variety of fierce foes together, until Spear died nobly at the end of Season 2.

Thanks to some more mumbo jumbo, Spear is brought back to life some years later. He is still a primitive caveman, so he's not spouting Shakespearean sonnets, but his grunts and groans still go a long way toward communicating on his behalf, even though his body is still wounded and, in the episode's opening minutes, a combatant sliced off part of his brain (?!).

In other words, Primal is still very much an Adult Swim title, rude and quite explicit in its violent imagery -- internal organs have a habit of becoming external organs, if you take my meaning -- which meshes with the first two seasons, in which (practically) every living thing was trying to kill every other living thing, as quickly and decisively as possible.

Storyboarded and directed by Genndy Tartakovsky, the new season also features the vivid primary colors that were a hallmark of the first two seasons, as well as the absence of dialogue that distinguished the first season. The horror comes from what happens to all the hapless bodies that must fall by the hands of Spear. As Season 2 concluded in 2022, Tartakovsky talked about a proposed Season 3: "I don't want to do this story further. I feel like this season we've done it all, in a way. I want it to almost become an anthology show, where season 3 would still be called Primal, but with a different subheading. Low-dialogue, high-emotion, survival, rawness, visual storytelling: All that stuff, but with different characters."

Will the resurrected Spear stick around? What about Fang? What about their descendents? I can't wait to see where Tartakovsky and his team take the series in all 10 episodes of Season 3. One thing's for sure: it will be exciting.

Now Streaming celebrates independent and international genre films and television shows that are newly available on legal streaming services.