Lady Tarzan smartly updates the problematic colonial undertones of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ original. There is no “white savior” narrative here. Kaya’s strength is not measured by her ability to conquer the wild, but by her symbiosis with it. The show’s action sequences are less about brute force and more about fluidity —Kaya swinging between drone-lit canopy bridges, using echolocation to evade heat-seeking rounds, and communicating with piranha swarms as a living shield.
“Lady Tarzan - 2024 - NeonX Original” Title: Reclaiming the Jungle: How “Lady Tarzan” Rewilds the Heroine’s Journey for a New Generation
Critics have noted that the series owes as much to Annihilation and Alita: Battle Angel as to the 1984 Greystoke . The jungle itself is a character: vines pulse with cyan light during animal migrations; the rain sounds like distorted modem handshakes. NeonX’s signature high-contrast visual style—think Blade Runner meets FernGully —turns ecological decay into a hauntingly beautiful backdrop. Lady Tarzan -2024- NeonX Original
Some purists have grumbled that removing the “Lord” from the title strips the character of her iconic identity. But as Chen noted in a recent Variety interview: “Tarzan was never about the crown. It was about the belonging. Kaya belongs to a world that’s burning. The question is—do we still belong to her?”
★★★★☆ (4/5) Recommended if you like: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind , Dora and the Lost City of Gold (but darker), Love, Death & Robots (season 3’s “Jibaro”) Lady Tarzan – 2024 – A NeonX Original. All eight episodes streaming now. The show’s action sequences are less about brute
The twist? Kaya is not a feral outcast. She is the last known keeper of the “Mycelial Code”—a fungal neural network that records the memory of the jungle. When a ruthless agri-corp known as Helix Dynamics begins terraforming the Sector for synthetic bio-fuel, Kaya must decide: remain the jungle’s silent ghost, or become its warrior.
Created by showrunner Mira Chen (known for NeonX: Velocity ), Lady Tarzan introduces Kaya (breakout star Zara Montoya), a young woman raised in the depths of the Amazonian “Viridian Sector”—a genetically enhanced rainforest wired with bio-sensors and cloaked from satellite surveillance. Orphaned after a research expedition went dark, Kaya was adopted by a matriarchal troop of rare jaguar-faced monkeys. Unlike the classic Tarzan, who learns English to assimilate, Kaya speaks through a modified neural-linked drone companion, Echo, translating animal calls into data streams. That’s just their word for free.”
Lady Tarzan lands at a moment when climate anxiety dominates young adult consciousness. But rather than preach, the show embeds its message in spectacle and suspense. Episodes frequently cut to real-world infographics in the end credits—this episode’s carbon offset failures, that animal’s extinction status—a subtle but powerful reminder that the fiction is barely ahead of the facts.
Lady Tarzan (streaming now on NeonX) is not a perfect show. Early episodes struggle with pacing, and Echo the drone can feel like a plot crutch. But when it swings—and it swings often—it achieves a rare alchemy: respecting a century-old myth while setting it ablaze. For viewers tired of grimdark superheroes and cynical reboots, Kaya offers something radical: a heroine who protects not a city, not a nation, but a living, breathing world that has no voice but hers.
Zara Montoya delivers a physically demanding, largely non-verbal performance that recalls Andy Serkis’s motion-capture work, but with raw, emotional transparency. Kaya’s arc is not about learning to be human—it’s about recognizing that humanity does not have a monopoly on intelligence or honor. In one wrenching scene, Kaya finds a recording of her late mother, a botanist, who whispers: “They will call you wild. That’s just their word for free.”