Genndy Tartakovsky‘s Primal is a series that, from the moment of its debut seven years ago, established itself as one of, if not the, quintessential “dudes rock” adult animated series of all time. With a logline containing a few choice words, such as “caveman,” “dinosaur,” “fight,” and “together,” it’s pretty easy to get pulled into the caustic mayhem, violence, and, yes, primal gravity of it. That is, until the finale of its second season, which killed one half of its winning duo: Spear, the caveman.

Its third season hangs a lantern on that dead-end climax by literally raising Spear from the dead, transforming its kickass caveman into a zombie caveman. Unsurprisingly, its third season kicks just as much ass as you’d expect while having even more heart to boot.

Primal doesn’t rest on its laurels, settling for being more of the same, regardless of how comfortably high its bar of normalcy is, offering a more narratively focused tale with fewer non-sequitur adventures that acts more as an extended epilogue to a series that resigned itself to running its course before spinning the block again for another adventure.

We meet Spear at the rolling start of Primal’s third season, a walking ship of Theseus metaphor: he’s a husk of his former self, slowly shuffling across the land and rekindling the indistinguishably human light behind his jaundiced eyes. Spear already felt plucked out of time in the prior seasons, and now, having been plucked from the grave and corralled into an odyssey based more on vibes than an outward objective, he’s once again forced to fight to survive while making sense of the man he is in a world where he shouldn’t exist. It’s all pretty heady themes for an unga bunga series, known at a glance for its ultra violence, but that’s kind of the mesmerizing magic of Primal.

© Adult Swim

Whenever Spear isn’t running the dozens with any foe fool enough to test him in his newly minted undead glory, Primal indulges in the gentle stillness of his asynchronous blinks, his hilarious side-eyeing of obstacles like the language barrier between new companions, or his doe-eyed appreciation of nature. Like anthropomorphizing your pet or an animal at the zoo, Spear still reads as an expressive caveman, with a lot going on beneath the surface, which fans have come to love more than ever. Only this time, he recognizes there’s something irrecoverably missing within him, compelling him to march forward to find it, and you can’t help but root for him even if he looks ugly as sin and probably smells mad crazy as a zombie.