Genndy Tartakovsky believed he’d finished with , and by all indications, he had. The second season of his lauded Adult Swim animated series — which garnered widespread acclaim for its wildly creative (and extremely gory) tale of a Neanderthal named Spear who forms an unexpected bond with a Tyrannosaurus rex named Fang — wrapped up on a quite final note: Spear died, sacrificing himself in a pivotal battle against a vengeful Viking spirit. Yet his legacy endured through his daughter with Mira, whom we see embarking on adventures atop one of Fang’s offspring.
“I thought it was done.”
It felt like the ideal conclusion for Primal, a daring and blood-soaked horror-fantasy show that represented the peak of Tartakovsky’s innovative 2D animation work. Having left his stamp on the medium with classics such as Dexter’s Laboratory, Samurai Jack, and , Tartakovsky essentially received carte blanche from Adult Swim to create Primal, a beautifully animated, mostly wordless series that pushed the boundaries of animation — and Tartakovsky’s own endurance.
“A season takes nearly two years to produce. I spend two years immersed in it, then we release it, and it’s only in the public eye for a week or two,” Tartakovsky tells Inverse. “In the meantime, I’m thinking, ‘That was exhausting. I need a break.’ So I truly believed it was over.”
Tartakovsky took that break, shifting to work on a for Netflix before revisiting Primal. He didn’t want to cancel the show outright — he intended to retool it as an anthology series. But then a thought struck: What if he resurrected Spear?
“It started as a joke,” Tartakovsky explains. “I thought, ‘Maybe Spear could be a zombie — ha ha.’ Then I paused and thought, ‘Wait, that actually works.’”
Making Spear a zombie wasn’t out of character for the show. An early Season 1 episode featured Spear and Fang facing a zombie dinosaur — one of the first times the series, which had long dabbled in pulp, fully embraced horror. “The image of a naked zombie caveman roaming the jungle, searching for his identity, that sold me,” Tartakovsky says.
“The idea of a naked zombie caveman wondering the jungle in search for who he is, that sealed it.”
Tartakovsky quickly penned 10 episodes and presented the concept to his team. They greenlit it, and production began. Four years after Season 2 premiered, Primal is back, with a zombified Spear at its core. But this isn’t the same Spear. Brought back by a vengeful shaman, he’s a shell of his former self — no memories of his life or the people he fought to protect, save for vague flashes. He wanders silently through perilous terrain, once again confronting and brutally tearing apart monsters and creatures. In many ways, it harkens back to the standalone adventure format of Season 1 — except now, Spear has a bit of brain visible through his skull.
“In Season 1, we worried about it feeling like a ‘monster of the week’ show,” Tartakovsky says. “The characters developed, but they had no clear destination. Season 2 added the goal of rescuing Mira. Now Season 3 is about whether Spear can rediscover his identity.”
As the season unfolds and Spear regains more memories — triggered by each new battle — he becomes less zombie-like and more like his old self. “We begin with him as a pure zombie,” Tartakovsky says. “Once he starts having memory flashes, he begins to feel more.”
But before that slow transformation, viewers can expect the early episodes of Primal Season 3 to surpass the violence of the first two seasons. After all, you’ve got a zombie lead — with the aforementioned exposed brain — battling creatures. Now he fights on “pure instinct,” Tartakovsky says. “He’s just flailing wildly, and it’s brutal.”
“We’re starting him pure zombie.”
Tartakovsky enjoyed revamping the action animation for Season 3, as zombie Spear allowed him to rethink fight choreography. “I could do 6,000 classic Spear fights without breaking a sweat,” he says. “But this is a brutal,新生 creature learning to survive. So the choreography is even more raw and feral.”
This formula refresh has reignited Tartakovsky’s passion for Primal, and he hopes to keep making it as long as possible. But he insists he’s “finishing the story” of Spear and Fang. However, he has ideas for a possible fourth season that would return to his original anthology concept: “Brand new characters, a new vibe, but still raw, with little to no dialogue, and emotional and visually driven,” he teases.
Tartakovsky is well aware he’s sharing these hopes as Warner Bros. Discovery approaches a . But he’s no stranger to corporate changes. “This will be my sixth or seventh merger,” he says dryly, listing the companies he’s worked with: Hanna-Barbera, Cartoon Network, AT&T, and Warner Brothers.
“Ultimately, my top hope is that the people I work with keep their jobs,” he says. “Beyond that, I create content, and there will always be a need for content. I just hope the content I make is what they need.”