Well, here we are, in our last week of #JurassicJune for 2024. As has been my habit, I’ll be reviewing another episode of Genndy’s Tartakovsky’s PRIMAL. The third episode, which is called ‘A Cold Death’.
(Brief aside, I think I’ll take a little break from PRIMAL for a few posts in July since I’ve had a few book reviews piling up that are not dinosaur related, but the show has at least two seasons with a third approaching so I won’t be quitting it anytime soon.)
This third episode is perhaps our strangest one yet, and the episode with which I’ve struggled the most so far. Namely, because our heroes do not seem to behave very heroically.
I usually try not to give spoilers, and while I’m generally loathe to summarize (and loathe when others do), I’m really unsure how to demonstrate any meaningful points without referencing pieces of the plot. So, for those who are looking for a recommendation of whether or not to watch the episode but want to preserve a kind of unassociated perspective, I’d say definitely go for it. It’s a bit weird, and definitely leaves you thinking afterward, but sometimes that’s just what the doctor ordered.
Ok . . . spoilers ahead . . .
So far, in Episode 1 and Episode 2 our duo have mainly been on the back foot, fighting for survival in a brutal world in which you kill or be killed. They’ve been preyed upon by a pack of evil Ceratosaurus, and attacked by giant snakes. Aside from a hapless boar and some squabbles amongst themselves, the two have instigated very little violence on their own, mostly occupying the role of victim and survivor.
That changes this episode with the pair brutally murdering an old and decrepit wooly mammoth. And boy oh boy does it feel awful.
I feel like the episode offers a multitude of excuses for their behavior — after all they must eat, and the carcass provides a plethora of food and the mammoth’s fur can provide them with warmth; also it was old and was left to die by its herd anyway — but none quite seem to be enough to justify the death, especially when the herd seeks revenge and attacks our unlikely duo.
I’ll admit, I was genuinely worried our heroes might not survive the encounter, but right as I’m sure the two will die, the mammoths call off the attack. They take the old mammoth’s remaining tusk and leave Spear and Fang alone. The episode ends with a kind of weird mammoth funeral which I cannot fully come to grips with.
The reduction of our heroes and the elevation of the mammoths, their ability for mercy and seemingly sophisticated — almost religious — social dynamic, a flashback of a neanderthal father and son (it is unclear if it was a young Spear and his father, or and older Spear and his son) hunting deer-like creatures . . .
What does it all mean?
At the moment . . . I have no idea.
I do feel like the mammoths — which are often depicted as noble lumbering creatures — are positioned as somewhat more evolved than our proxies, a neanderthal and T. Rex respectively. Certainly they are depicted as more dangerous.
This is interesting in that since the 60’s it’s been generally held that humans were adept at killing mammoths and hunted them to extinction (see the ‘overkill’ hypothesis from Paul Schultz Martin).
A quick google search returns a 2021 article from NPR suggesting that Humans May Not Have Hunted Woolly Mammoths to Extinction Those Thousands of Years Ago.
Steve Brusatte, whose The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs I reviewed last year for #DinosaurDay, explains another theory in a new (published in 2022) book, The Rise and Reign of Mammals:
“DNA extracted from their bones suggests that megafauna population sizes got smaller during these warming intervals but would then normally replenish over time, through dispersals that mixed different populations. All this can be explained by climate. But then, if humans were around to interrupt those connections between populations, declines in small groups of megafauna scattered here and there could coalesce across an entire continent, turning climate-caused local shrinkages into human-caused complete extinctions.” – Pg 395.
So it was it was climate change . . . AND humans.
Of course, Brusatte’s work and the NPR article would not have been around in 2019 when this episode of PRIMAL came out, but it is interesting to consider Tartakovsky’s portrayal of the mammoths nonetheless. Had he already seen some study suggesting humans were not the (main) culprit, or was he simply reversing a common trope? Perhaps the move was supposed to suggest something else entirely.
I haven’t come to a firm conclusion, and I’m hesitant to dig into any interviews because I would like to avoid spoilers as much as possible. In one interview in Paste Magazine, Tartakovsky mentions the episode but nothing relevant to our discussion here. I actually think Tartakovsky seems to make a mistake dropping the episode name and then describing something else. So far as I recall there are no polar bears or seal pups in A Cold Death.
Watch PRIMAL episode 3 ‘A Cold Death’?
Definitely. After finishing the episode I was thinking: “Well that was weird. What the hell am I gonna write about it?” And now I’ve preceded to write about 1500 words and learn a whole lot about mammoths in the process (and ‘accidently’ skip all my chores for the day!).
I’m not saying that all of this will happen to you if you watch it . . . but it could.
That’s all I have for this week. I hope you enjoyed this post! What are your thoughts on the episode? What themes might Tartakovsky been suggesting by depicting neanderthals and mammoths this way? Leave your thoughts in the comments! I’m looking forward to chatting about this one!
See you next time!
alligators and aneurysms! 