Tear Jerker / Walking with Beasts

Episode 1

• The series starts with the extinction of the Dinosaurs. Later on, there is even a reminder that the Age of The Giant Reptiles is over.
• When the Gastornis chick is eaten alive by ants it is an odd mixture of this and Nightmare Fuel.
  • The mother Gastornis comes back to the nest and discovers that her baby is dead. She reacts with a huff, then quietly walks away. For a moment, you really feel sorry for this giant predatory flightless bird — and as of 2014, it's not even predatory. It was discovered to be a complete herbivore.

Episode 2

• The episode is set just at the start of the climactic changes that would eventually cause the Eocene-Oligocene extinction event. Due to the dramatic climate changes, a large number of both terrestrial and marine mammals suffer as a result.
  • Aside from the Basilosaurus mother, the best example is a female Brontothere, who is shown halfway through the episode, anxiously watching over her dead calf. The narrator confirms that she is not the only mother to lose her baby to the drought.
    • To make matters worse for the mother, she is shown being harassed by a pair of predatory Andrewsarchus who want to eat her dead calf. After putting up some resistance, she appears to accept the inevitable and give up. This is followed by a Moment of Awesome when she mistakenly thinks that her calf is alive, charges in and drives the scavengers off. In the end though it is all in vain. Her calf is indeed dead and the carnivores will eventually get what they want.
    • What is especially heartbreaking is that the mother does not appear to even understand the concept of death. Her brain is either too small to comprehend it or like most modern-day mammals she is just too devoted to her offspring to accept reality. As such, she continues to guard the corpse of her baby and defend it from predators as though it were alive.
• The poor Moeritherium getting stranded on the sandbar, with the hungry Basilosaurus lurking in the lagoon waiting for the tide to come in so it can kill and eat it. Even though it escapes its predator, the moment where the camera pans out to show the Moeritherium stranded while the Basilosaurus swims around it feels pretty hopeless.

Episode 3

• The mother bear dog returns to find her den collapsed. She whimpers pitifully whilst she digs frantically to extract her pups from the collapsed den. In the end, the one pup she finds is already dead.
• The mother Indricothere aggressively chasing off her young, since she's due to have a new baby soon, and her maternal instincts have now transferred over to her unborn youngster. The current Indricothere can't understand why his mother is so hostile and can only dejectedly run away.
  • Later on, the young Indricothere injured while out on his own, prompting him to return to his mother. He returns to find his mother with the new baby, but she sees her previous offspring as nothing as a threat. The young Indricothere is once again violently driven off by his own mother. What's worse is that earlier, the same thing happened to him, as he witnessed his mother's previous young being chased off, and the narrator made it clear that he was looking at his own future - and the new young is doing the same. It's also worth noting that this practice is treated as normal well into the Holocene among modern-day rhinos as well. Ouch, guess old habits die hard...

Episode 4

• The australopithecines "mourning" their elder female in "Next of Kin", probably because of how human they look.
• Blue's situation throughout most of the episode. Without his mother there to guide or protect him, he is shunned by the rest of the troop and is forced to grow up fast just to stay alive. The expert animation and animatronics do a really good job of making Blue look like a kicked puppy. Fortunately the episode ends on a positive note, showing that Blue is accepted by his peers.
• Grey's troop is in a precarious situation during Act 1. Blue's mother was the fourth victim of a malaria outbreak that has reduced the group's numbers from twelve to eight. When a group of males from a rival tribe show up, the group are quickly pushed out of their territory and forced to relocate.
  • They eventually appear to find the perfect home, only for another member of their troop to be taken from them, this time by a predatory Dinofelis. As the narrator notes, it will be a long time before humanity can protect itself from nature.
    Narrator: Later members of the human family will rise up the food chain to become top predators, but in this era, '''our relatives, are prey!'''
• The Ancylotherium are the last surviving members of the Chalicotheriidae. Like so many mammals before them, they are now a relic of a bygone time and can now only be found on one continent.

Episode 5

• Half-Tooth exploring his usurped territory in the rain, only to find the severed head of one of his last cubs. The narrator makes it clear that this signifies the completely severed ties between Half-Tooth and his former pack, and the completion of the brothers' take-over.
  • This means that the same cub that Half-Tooth saved from the terror bird at the beginning of the episode is killed by the brothers.

Episode 6

• The opening of the final episode where one mammoth falls into a frozen lake and is stuck. Her herd immediately doubles back, and when they fail to free her, they stay with her, comforting her for as long as they can. But eventually, they have to leave her behind to the mercy of a growing group of predators, and continue their journey.
• The matriarch of the herd is driven off a cliff by the Neanderthals, and she gives the most horrid scream as she falls to her death. What's worse is that two mammoths are killed that way, and one of them isn't even dead yet, and can only tremble helplessly as the Neanderthals put it out of its misery only so that they can feast.
• The final scene of the series, transitioning from an early modern human carving a mammoth figurine to a prehistoric museum displaying the same item, can be pretty haunting. A stark reminder that these magnificent animals are long gone, and so humans too will one day perish.

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