Review: Primal “The Colossaeus II”

Overview:

Life as prisoners continues to be as hopeless and soul-crushing for Fang and Spear as one might suspect. The duo’s extended stay on the Colossaeus warship shatters their spirits and breaks their hearts, but their pain turns out to only be a fraction of what’s experienced by their callous convict. Differences are put aside and futures are considered once each player in this adventure takes a major risk in an effort to spin themselves onto a different cog on the wheel of fate.

Oh, and a certain dinosaur becomes a proud mama.

Our Take:

Primal heads past the point of no return with “The Colossaeus II,” the antepenultimate episode of the season and it’s perhaps only fitting that an installment that features hundreds of casualties, elemental gods, and seductive murder dances is ultimately about children and legacy. Make no mistake, there are exponentially more deaths than their are births (or rebirths) in “The Colossaeus II,” but the focus on Fang’s eggs, the warrior prisoner’s child, and even the baby tiger that’s acquired by the War Queen all attempt to tip the karmic scales before Primal’s second season concludes. It’s a harsh, harrowing, humane dose of Primal. 

“The Colossaeus II” highlights the lengths that parents will go to protect their children and one of the season’s strongest examples of this, Eldar the Viking, returns to fulfill his legacy in a particularly surprising manner. Eldar’s molten rebirth occurs so matter of factly, but it cannot be stressed how goddamn cool all of this and that it’s one of the most unique sequences to occur in the series up to this point as Norse mythology blends together with supernatural body horror and elemental chaos. Oddly enough, this transformative sequence turns into a fleeting thought in “The Colossaeus II,” but it’d be a serious shock if Eldar’s superior state isn’t a central element of the concluding chapter of this trilogy or the following season finale. In a series that’s full of rewarding possibilities, this storyline remains one of the exciting.

This episode of Primal casually travels through huge swathes of violence where coats of blood become second skins for these characters and arrows jut out of their bodies like extra appendages. “The Colossaeus II” intentionally plays these vicious, barbaric sequences back-to-back-to-back so they somehow begin to feel dull and repetitive, despite the intense action that they deliver. It’s a beautiful way to highlight the toxic cycle that Fang and Spear get caught up in during their days as these weapons of destruction. It truly feels like a cyclical purgatory with no end where countless lives are claimed to zero effect. Murder. Rinse. Repeat. 

Amidst everything that happens in this busy episode, “The Colossaeus II” still finds the time for the muted, human moments that make Primal soar. Spear and his new aggressive ally lock eyes with a child slave that’s able to convey just as much as several minutes of bloody fisticuffs. The same is true for earnest moments of frivolity, which feel practically foreign in an episode like this, but better reiterate just how big a discrepancy exists between the War Queen and her prisoners. In doing so, “The Colossaeus II” shines a light on new cultures and pockets of humanity that go on to experience the cold, conquering actions of warriors. 

The acts of brutality that are carried out in “The Colossaeus II” are honestly hard to watch at times and the episode picks the right moments to artistically pan away from the carnage, yet the impeccable, grisly sound design still makes it difficult not to wince. Furthermore, the score really compliments the horror through these sequences (which include a severed head straight-up rolling down a flight of stairs), especially since some of these rampages are carried out with an absence of rage and just reflect broken husks of men and how war can erase someone’s personality.

“The Colossaeus II” does everything that a “sequel” should and it’s an entertaining extension to what its predecessor started. The first part of “The Colossaeus” doesn’t suffer from “part one tedium,” but “The Colossaeus II” does bear a lot more in common with a standard second installment in a trilogy. That’s not a knock against the episode, but it does feel as if it bides its time to some degree and uses this opportunity to humanize Fang and Spear’s fellow inmate while it builds to a thrilling cliffhanger that’s poised to bring all of this together in a satisfying finish. The same can be said for Primal’s second year as a whole and the evolution of the season’s big endgame showpiece continues to be a reflection of Primal at its best, bloodiest, and most benevolent.