Headscratchers / Primal (2019)

• Just, why exactly was there a wall of snakes damming off an oncoming flood? I mean, the very concept almost sounds too weird. Do snakes just do that in this setting? If so, why?
  • Some snakes gather in what are essentially huge balls of dozens, or if numerous enough hundreds, of individuals. These can serve several reasons, the two most prominent being body heat and breeding orgies. Presumably, the titanoboas were doing one of these and the torrential rain started the flood that swept them to the river.

• So, there are three horned tyrannosaurs, plus the alpha: One with a big forward-swept horn, one with two rhinoceros-like horns, and one with a series of short ridges along the snout. During the final battle, the one with the ridges just seems to vanish altogether. Spear battles the one with the single huge horn, while Fang rips off the face of the rhino-horned one. Cue hope spot, then enter Final Boss Alpha. Isn't there still one left, besides him? Did he book it once he saw how badly things were going? Did he leave to alert the Alpha? Was it an animation error? Was Fang supposed to kill him when she grabbed one by the neck and tossed it aside, but it was drawn with the wrong headgear?
  • It's possible that, yes, it simply decided to leave when it saw the others being brutally killed by Spear and Fang and realised there was simply nothing to be gained from that battle.

• There's a bit of inconsistency with the Night Feeder's Super-Speed: It at first is able to nearly catch Spear and Fang who only able to dodge the attacks albeit barely. But when the two started to attack the Night Feeder, they are somehow able to go at an even pace. So how did Spear and Fang manage to catch up with the monster?

• Why do the other mammoths attack Spear and Fang for killing the old mammoth but leave him behind in the first place?
  • If you observe, the old mammoth was at the back of the herd and because he fails to keep up. the others had not realised he had fallen behind since they couldn't see him and his calls were drowned out by the wind. Also, the fact that they appear to have taken the same route all the way to where he died suggests that they deliberately went back for him and then followed the route he took until discovering the body, implying that they cared about him enough to search for him and did not deliberately leave him behind.
  • As for attacking Spear and Fang, you can see the matriarch search his corpse and react when not being able not find the tusk, they weren’t taking revenge against Spear and Fang, they just wanted his tusk back which is why they leave peacefully after getting it.
• Why wasn't using the knockout powder on Spear literally the first thing the druidess did when treating his wounds? Does she just enjoy watching her patients writhe in agony too much for that, or is there a more sensible reason?
  • It may have been some petty revenge, after Spear blew up part of her hut in his panic. Though given that she wasn't alone when this happened, and would've probably been told to knock it off if that were the case, that theory raises questions of its own.
  • Much like anesthesics in real life, there might be dangers associated with it or it could make treating him rather difficult by being unable to see where it hurts or if he's comfortable, so it's only used if strictly necessary...which it was.

• Anyone else a bit confused by the taxidermy saber-toothed cat that's part of the set-dressing in "The Primal Theory", since this is ostensibly real-world England in the late 19th century, long after there would be any live saber-tooths to stuff?
  • It could just be a very high-quality model, akin to the Crystal Palace sculptures (which predate the year of the episode by several decades). Then again, given that the Primalverse is heavily implied to be some form of Alternate History...who knows?
  • It'd definitely not the real world, considering that Charles Darwin lived between 1809-1882, whereas this "Charles" is a young man in 1890. If the episode is set in the same universe as Spear and Fang's story, where dinosaurs, primordial arthropods, ice age mammals and ancient civilizations coexist, then it makes sense that an Anachronistic Animal or two survived into modern times.
    • It's never actually said that the "Charles" in the episode is meant to be Charles Darwin himself, even if he's clearly a No Celebrities Were Harmed Expy thereof.

• Now that they escaped their captors and have been roaming free for a while, why hasn't Mira's hair started growing back? The Doylist answer is, of course, to make her recognizable and to avoid creating another animation model for her, but is there a Watsonian answer? She obviously doesn't keep shaving her own head, so over a fairly short amount of time it should start growing back.
  • Have we seen Mira with hair? Perhaps she has alopecia, and naturally can't grow her hair.
  • It's highly likely Ima was keeping Mira's head shaved. Possibly because she liked the bald look on her, enjoyed the brand on her scalp, or as part of the continual humiliation ritual needed to break Mira down and turn her into a proper harem slave.

• How many days have passed in the boat episode for Fang's eggs to already hatch? The previous episode had one egg be crushed and it contained only an undeveloped embryo. To say nothing of them being laid just the episode before.
  • There's a montage showing Spear, Fang and Kamau battling various armies near the beginning of the episode, indicating that they've been raiding for weeks, if not months. Plenty of time for the embryos to develop and hatch.

• Given just how inhumanly strong Kamau is, why didn't he just take his daughter away from the Egyptian queen by force, instead of resorting to wiping out an entire village when he clearly didn't want to?
  • Quite probably he tried and the Queen/High Priestess handed him his butt. She's been shown to be so combat-adept she defeated Spear hand-to-hand. Like Spear he's very adept at brute force combat but he's no martial artist, and a good martial artist can easily defeat a much larger and stronger opponent.
  • We also have to consider the Queen isn't working alone—she's surrounded by a veritable army of guards, all wielding blades and other weapons. If Kamau so much as throws a punch at her while his daughter is across the room, a simple gesture or command could mean a sword to the girl's throat.
• In "The Colossaeus Part III", we see that the rest of Kamau's people have been enslaved and forced to row the ship. So why didn't they fight back since they're literal giants thrice to size of the Egyptian soldiers? Kamau being forced into servitude is due to his daughter being held ransom, but nothing's stopping the rest of the giant tribe from going on a full-scale mutiny.
  • They’re Actual Pacifist(s) by their very nature, and likely so well associated the whips with pain that they became too afraid to resist or disobey (similar to some very real and incredibly cruel practices with large circus animals). Chances are Ima also threatened them with killing Amal to keep them in line, and it’s only at the sight of Kamau getting hurt in the process of fighting off the Egyptian soldiers with his daughter in hand that they finally had enough and joined him.
• In the finale of Season 2, we get to see what appears to be Spear and Mira's daughter...and she looks like a modern human despite being half Neanderthal. But then, we see Spear's first wife in a flashback, and she also looks a bit like a modern human? So did Spear take a Homo sapien mate twice, and is this because he's the Last of His Kind?
  • Was the man sacrificed to the Coven also a Neanderthal or a modern human? Either way he died at the hands of the Coven so the Last of His Kind point might still stand.
  • Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism is also a possible explanation, or Spear's first wife might've also been a hybrid (breeding between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens happened on a large enough scale that the majority of Eurasian-descended human populations today still have Neanderthal genes, so there's probably more than one out there).
• What happened to the old medicine lady in Shadow of Fate? She ducks when Red charges in her direction, but she was very close to the explosion that he causes when he crashes into her stone hut. Is it possible that she died during the attack?