The Cathedral of Silence
The most emotionally devastating show on television never says a word
Primal has no dialogue.
None. Two seasons of television—grief, found family, betrayal, sacrifice, love, rage—communicated entirely through action, expression, and silence.
This shouldn’t work. Every writing manual insists dialogue is essential. Every screenwriting course teaches you to reveal character through what people say. Prose workshops drill you on subtext within conversation, on the telling pause, on what characters mean versus what they state.
Genndy Tartakovsky ignored all of it. And made one of the most emotionally devastating pieces of fiction in the last decade.
This essay isn’t a review. It’s an autopsy—a dissection of why wordless storytelling works, and what prose writers, game designers, and anyone building narrative can steal from it.
The Hierarchy Most Writers Get Backwards
Here’s what Tartakovsky understands that most of us don’t: body language is the architecture. Dialogue is furniture.
We’ve been trained to think of physical description as seasoning—the “he crossed his arms” you sprinkle between lines of speech, the “she looked away” that signals emotional subtext. Beats. Stage direction. Garnish on the main course.
Primal inverts this completely. The physical behavior isn’t supporting the emotional content. It is the emotional content. When Spear grieves, we see his body curl inward, see the way he holds space around the absence. When Fang protects, we see her position herself between threat and ally before the threat even materializes. When trust fractures between them, we see the physical distance open—literal space becoming emotional truth.
No internal monologue to clarify. No dialogue to state the subtext. Just bodies in space, communicating everything that matters.
The radical claim: if your scene collapses without dialogue, you’ve built on sand. The words should be punctuation, not load-bearing structure. And most of us—myself included, for years—have been building upside down.
Demonstration
Theory is cheap. Let me show you what I mean.
Here’s the same emotional beat written three ways: a subordinate announces he’s transferring to a new master. The man who “collected” him—who views ownership as identity—receives the news. The subordinate, who has always seen more than he let on, chooses this moment to stop extending that courtesy.
Version 1: Dialogue-Forward
“I’m returning this.” Calix held out the bolt pistol. “My new master provides his own tools.”
“Your new master.” Saren let the words hang. “Origen.”
“Yes.”
“And what does he see in you, I wonder? The controlled violence? The useful savagery?” Saren’s laugh was soft, almost admiring. “He’ll catalog you. File you away in that vast archive of his. Is that what you want? To be understood?”
“You speak as if understanding is a threat.”
“For men like us? It is.” Saren was quiet for a moment. “He’ll find the hollow places, Fellner. The ones you’ve papered over. He’ll name them. And once something is named, it can be used.”
“Like you used mine.”
“I gave yours purpose. There’s a difference.”
“Is there?” Calix’s voice was quiet. “The storm you hold back must be immense.”
Silence. When Saren spoke again, something had changed. “Origen taught you that. That particular cruelty.”
“No. I’ve seen it since Margard. I simply never had the words.”
This works. The subtext is present—Saren’s fear of being known, his possessiveness framed as protection, Calix’s deliberate withdrawal of a courtesy he’d been extending all along. A playwright could stage this. Pinter could make it sing. The rhythm carries genuine weight.
Version 2: Dialogue + Integrated Beats
“I’m returning this.” Calix held out the bolt pistol, grip-first. “My new master provides his own tools.”
Saren didn’t take it. He circled instead, boots marking a slow rhythm on the deck. “Your new master. Origen.” He stopped at the viewport, silhouette framed against the burning star. “And what does the old scholar see in you, I wonder?”
“Purpose.”
“Purpose.” Saren turned, smile playing at his mouth. “He’ll catalog you, Fellner. Every trauma indexed. Every wound cross-referenced.” He moved closer. “Is that what you want? To be understood?”
Calix remained still, the pistol extended, untaken.
“For men like us, understanding is violation.” Saren’s voice dropped. “I never named your hollow places. Did you notice? I let you keep them.”
“And I extended you the same courtesy.” Calix met his gaze. “Until now.”
Saren went still.
“The storm you hold back must be immense.”
The smile didn’t fade—it froze. Something behind Saren’s eyes shuttered, then cracked.
“Origen taught you that,” he said finally. “That particular knife.”
“No. I’ve seen it since Margard. I simply never chose to say it aloud.”
Also competent. The movement creates tension, the beats add information rather than merely labeling emotion, the physicality supports without overwhelming. This is professional prose fiction—physical behavior integrated with speech, each informing the other. Most published work lives in this register.
Version 3: Body Language as Architecture
“My new master provides his own tools, Lord Captain,” Calix replied, his voice a level stone cast into turbulent waters.
The words seemed to suction all sound from the cavernous room. The slow, rhythmic clicking of Saren’s boots ceased. He went utterly still, his head tilting fractionally, like a predator that has just caught an unexpected, dangerous scent on the wind.
“Your... master,” Saren repeated, the words a low, dangerous purr.
He reached out, his movement a slow, meandering approach. His gloved fingers, splayed, did not touch Calix’s face, but instead went to the high collar of his new uniform coat. He adjusted it—a proprietary gesture disguised as paternal care.
“Look at you. Dressed in his sober colors, reciting his cold logic.” His other hand settled on the Grave-Pelt at Calix’s throat, thumb brushing against cold, dead bone. “But beneath it all... the beast I found still lingers.”
For a long, suspended moment, the predatory focus in his eyes wavered. The carefully constructed mask seemed to fracture—not into anger, but into something older. The sharp gaze softened, becoming distant, lost. It was the look of a boy adrift in a cold and empty void.
Calix saw it.
“The storm you hold back must be immense.”
The words were a key turning a lock Saren had forgotten existed. For a silent moment, the door to the hollow space within him swung open, exposing the raw, lonely void he had spent centuries papering over with gilt and fury. He looked seen. Utterly, completely seen.
Then the moment shattered. The mask slammed back into place—colder, more perfect, infinitely more dangerous than before.
What Each Version Can Do
These aren’t failures and successes. They’re different instruments.
Version 1 is how a playwright might approach the scene—dialogue as primary instrument, subtext carried in rhythm and what remains unsaid. The power is in the pauses, the implication, the way “I simply never had the words” lands differently than a direct accusation would.
Version 2 is professional prose fiction—physical behavior integrated with speech, each informing the other. Saren’s circling establishes threat. His stillness after Calix’s line registers the hit. The beats support the dialogue without overwhelming it.
Both are legitimate craft choices. Both can be executed brilliantly.
But here’s what they cannot do:
In Version 3, the scene communicates before anyone speaks. The cessation of Saren’s clicking boots—that arrested motion—tells you the power dynamic shifted before “your master” leaves his mouth. The collar adjustment violates more than any stated claim of ownership could. Saren’s fingers on the Grave-Pelt, thumb against dead bone, says I still own this wildness without a single word about possession.
And the mask fracturing—that involuntary collapse into the “boy adrift in empty void”—happens in silence, in physical transformation, before Calix ever delivers the killing blow. The wound opens in the body before the word names it.
Some revelations, spoken aloud, become smaller. The moment Saren says “you’ve hurt me” or Calix says “I see through you,” the power drains from the scene. The dialogue in Version 3 is minimal—punctuation rather than structure. The physical behavior carries the entire emotional payload.
This isn’t prescriptive. Dialogue-forward writers exist and thrive—Mamet, Pinter, Elmore Leonard. Their work does things mine cannot. The stage has constraints that demand speech carry weight prose can distribute elsewhere.
But most writers don’t choose dialogue-heavy. They default to it—building the way they were taught without examining why, treating physical description as the beats between the “real” content.
The question isn’t which approach is correct. It’s whether you’re making the choice consciously.
What Failure Actually Looks Like
I intentionally created at least competent examples above so they wouldn’t be strawmen for my point. But that might not illustrate what failure actually looks like, so let me give you something to avoid.
There’s a fourth version that doesn’t appear above—the one that reaches for body language but flinches at the last moment.
“A wave of hatred washed over him.” “The figure moved with predatory grace.” “His terrifying presence absorbed the light.”
These are labels wearing costumes. The writer gestures at physicality without committing to it—still naming the emotion, still announcing the threat, just with more adjectives. “Predatory grace” isn’t an image. It’s a tag. “Absorbed the light” isn’t visual description. It’s shorthand for “this is the dark scary part.”
This is worse than Version 1, which at least knows what instrument it’s playing. Version 1 trusts dialogue to carry weight. Label-heavy prose trusts nothing—not the dialogue, not the body, not the reader. It hedges everywhere, labels everything, and mistakes adjective density for atmosphere.
Why This Matters Beyond Prose
The psychological architecture underneath the above scene is extensive. Saren von Aurastor is a man built entirely from scar tissue—an amnesiac survivor who’s spent centuries constructing a performance so total it’s fused with whatever identity remains beneath. His possessiveness isn’t cruelty; it’s terror of losing control dressed in gilt and fury. Origen Thule, the “new master,” is his perfect opposite—a stillness so ancient it warps everything around it. Calix is caught between two gravitational forces, and in that moment, he chooses to stop being collected.
For the full psychological breakdowns:
None of that is stated in Version 3. But all of it is present—in the arrested motion, the collar adjustment, the mask fracturing. The physical behavior is an iceberg. Readers feel the mass beneath the waterline without needing it diagrammed.
Versions 1 and 2 can’t carry that weight. The moment you state Saren’s psychology—”he felt the terror of losing control”—you’ve shrunk it. Named it. Put it in a box the reader can dismiss. The body failing to maintain its performance is the revelation. Anything spoken after is aftermath.
This is why the principle matters for any media, not only prose.
Tartakovsky isn’t working in prose. He’s working in pure visual sequence—animation that will never have the luxury of interiority. And yet Primal carries psychological complexity that most dialogue-heavy fiction can’t touch. Spear’s grief isn’t explained. His bond with Fang isn’t declared. His capacity for violence and tenderness aren’t reconciled through conversation. They coexist in his body, visible in how he moves, what he protects, where he positions himself in frame.
Games face the same constraint. Combat, traversal, environmental storytelling—wordless by necessity. The narrative designer who understands body language as architecture can make a character’s fighting style communicate psychology, their positioning relative to the player speak relationship. These aren’t cutscene problems. They’re design problems, solvable with the same principles Tartakovsky deploys.
The question for any narrative medium becomes: what can the body say that speech would diminish?
What Tartakovsky Actually Does
Primal isn’t just “animation without dialogue.” It’s a systematic deployment of physical storytelling techniques that most writers never consciously learn. Here’s what to steal:
Distance as Emotional State
Watch where Spear and Fang position themselves relative to each other across the series. Early episodes: wary distance, neither willing to expose their flank. As trust builds, they sleep closer. After betrayal or conflict, the gap reopens—literal space measuring emotional breach.
Tartakovsky never cuts to a character thinking “I’m not sure I trust her yet.” He doesn’t need to. The three feet of empty ground between them says it. When that distance finally closes—when Spear sleeps against Fang’s side for the first time—the audience feels the magnitude of what’s been earned precisely because no one announced it.
Craft application: Before writing dialogue, ask where your characters are standing. Are they facing each other or angled away? Who has their back exposed? Who’s nearest the exit? The blocking often knows what the scene is about before you do.
What Gets Faced, What Gets Avoided
Characters reveal themselves through what they’re willing to look at.
Spear, early in the series, cannot look at fire without his body going rigid—the trauma of losing his family encoded in his physical response to flame. He doesn’t explain this. He doesn’t have flashbacks with convenient voiceover. His body flinches, orients away, and we understand.
Later, when he’s able to sit beside a fire with Fang nearby, the progress is visible. Not because he’s announced healing, but because the flinch is gone. His shoulders have unlocked. He can face what once destroyed him.
Craft application: What does your character avoid looking at? What do they always orient toward? These micro-movements reveal psychology more honestly than any internal monologue. The character who never makes eye contact. The one who always positions themselves facing the door. The one whose gaze keeps drifting to someone’s hands. These aren’t quirks—they’re archaeology.
Violence as Character Signature
Every fight in Primal is a character study.
Early Spear fights desperate and reactive—a survivor, not a warrior. He takes hits he shouldn’t, makes inefficient choices, wins through sheer refusal to die. As the series progresses, his combat evolves. He becomes strategic. He starts positioning to protect Fang’s blind spots. His violence becomes relational—not just “how do I survive this” but “how do I keep us alive.”
Fang’s combat is different in kind. Predator logic. Patient when patience serves, explosive when the opening appears. She doesn’t fight like a human because she isn’t one, and Tartakovsky never lets us forget that her psychology operates on different architecture.
When they fight together—the synchronization, the wordless coordination, each covering what the other can’t—you’re watching relationship made kinetic. Trust expressed in who takes point. Love expressed in who absorbs the hit meant for the other.
Craft application: How your character fights is who they are under pressure. The calculating one who waits for openings. The explosive one who commits everything to the first strike. The protective one who keeps drifting between threat and ally. Combat isn’t action sequence—it’s characterization at the pace of violence. If you can swap your protagonist for a different character and the fight reads identically, you’ve written choreography, not story.
Stillness vs. Motion as Character Signature
Spear is motion. Restless, pacing, burning energy even at rest. His trauma expresses as inability to be still—keep moving or the grief catches up.
Fang is stillness. The predator patience of something that can wait hours for the right moment. Her motion, when it comes, is explosive precisely because the stillness preceded it.
This contrast does relational work. When Spear finally learns to be still beside Fang—when his body can rest in her presence—we’re watching him heal. When Fang moves restlessly, something is wrong. Their baselines are established so clearly that deviation becomes communication.
Craft application: What’s your character’s resting state? Stillness or motion? When they break pattern, it means something. The always-pacing character who goes still has just made a decision. The statue who starts moving is about to act. Establish the baseline so the deviation can speak.
The Accumulated Image
Tartakovsky trusts repetition.
Spear and Fang share meat after a kill. The first time, it’s wary—two predators circling the same resource. By the tenth time, it’s ritual. By the twentieth, it’s communion. The gesture hasn’t changed. The meaning has transformed through accumulation.
This is how relationship gets built without declaration. Not “I love you” but a hundred small actions that accrete into something undeniable. The audience isn’t told they’ve bonded. The audience has watched the bond constructed, frame by frame, meal by meal, fight by fight.
Craft application: What repeated gesture defines your characters’ relationship? What action, insignificant at first, becomes sacred through repetition? Don’t announce the bond. Build it in accumulated image until the reader realizes they’re invested without knowing when it happened.
The Test
Here’s how to know if you’ve built on architecture or sand:
Take a scene you’ve written. Strip out all dialogue. Every word spoken, gone.
Does the scene still communicate? Can you follow the emotional arc through pure physical behavior—who moves toward, who retreats, who can’t meet eyes, whose hands betray what their words hid?
If yes, your dialogue is doing its proper job: punctuation, emphasis, the precise word at the precise moment. The architecture is underneath, load-bearing and invisible.
If no—if the scene collapses into characters standing in a void, waiting for their next line—you’ve built the house out of furniture. The dialogue isn’t enhancing; it’s compensating. And your scene will never land with the force it could.
This isn’t about removing dialogue from your work. It’s about building the foundation first. Then adding the words that need to be there—and only those.
The Cathedral
Primal isn’t a show that happens to lack dialogue. It’s a thesis statement: everything essential about story—character, relationship, growth, loss—can be communicated through action and image alone. Tartakovsky didn’t work around a limitation. He proved that what we treat as essential is often crutch.
The words we lean on are frequently the words we hide behind. The explanation that preempts the reader’s own understanding. The dialogue that states what the body already showed. The interior monologue that hand-holds through subtext anyone paying attention already caught.
Economy is sacred. Tartakovsky built a cathedral of silence, and it speaks louder than most fiction ever will.
Next time you write a scene, try building it mute. Block it like a silent film. Find out what the bodies know before anyone opens their mouth.
You might discover the scene was already finished. The dialogue you were planning to write? Furniture for a room that didn’t need it.
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Fair winds,
—D. S. Black