The less “everything is connected” sounds like woo-woo nonsense and the more it appears as scientific truth as we learn about the workings of our natural world. The more we know about the ways colonial powers throw havoc on lands they colonize, the greater we appreciate how easily it can be altered or destroyed a delicate web in balance. Scavengers Reign, an adult animated sci-fi series whose whole first season is now streaming on Max crash-lands would-be settlers on a hostile planet and uses stunning animation and an exciting emotional story to teach them how to survive by respecting their place in an extraterrestrial ecosystem.
It all begins with the abandonment of Demeter 227, a freight spaceship for star travel carrying goods and passengers in cryogenic suspension across an alien solar system. Several crewmembers manage to escape from the vessel and are able to land on Vesta – though they fall apart during descent operations without any idea if anyone else made it out alive. Vesta’s atmosphere is beautiful but harsh; it breeds gaseous fungal spore clouds that eat flesh off bones, wolf-like carnivores hunting in packs, parasitic plants stealing DNAs and windstorms carrying metal shards that scour plains of grass impaling everything (or anyone) into spikes. To survivors, this spells doom and they immediately start figuring out how to get away before dying.
Sam (Bob Stephenson), a whitebearded captain of Demeter alongside Ursula (Sunita Mani) – young botanist – crashes amid this wildness. Sam can safely crash land so that he could come aboard again and depart but he must pass through miles of wilderness to reach where he intends landing his plane. While Sam is calm-headed and direct with his thinking, Ursula is very observant when it comes to their surroundings; she draws in her notepad, taking note of clear patterns within different things she sees around herself always knowing what will happen next. Meanwhile, Azi (Wunmi Mosaku) and Levi (Alia Shawkat) are a pair as well: Azi is tall and brutal, willing to kill everything that dares to fight her while her robotic companion Levi often disobeys its programming by zoning out on little flowers or insects instead of constructing homes and maintaining weapons. Lastly, Kamen (Ted Travelstead) who is a crewmember always in deep sorrow concerning his divorced wife whose broken mind attracts a salamander like telepathic creature which eventually uses him for its own purpose.
Firstly, Scavengers Reign is visually stunning. The animation moves smoothly without being overtaxed, all landscapes and creatures are made from solid pastel colours on complex line work reminiscent of Moebius’s sci-fi comic strips and Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind but also with strong influences from book covers for pulp paperbacks and short story magazines of the 1970s and ’80s. Its alien environment blends fungi with insectoids; it originates from Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner’s short film Scavengers that similarly follows two human pioneers taking advantage of resources provided by such an alien world having food chains developed in it. In this series, characters float around vast mushroom forests using lighter-than-air plant bulbs or travel across grassy plains riding giant walking megafauna
The show’s storytelling is deftly done by the animation’s beauty, which slowly gives information about the characters’ background and little flashbacks at the same time challenging them in their current lives. This is made possible by simple, natural dialogue that is made possible through voice actors’ emotionally restrained performances and cost-effective design of their figures. It’s a very elegant show, keeping the riotous colors and vibrant details to the scenery while letting the story find its way forward.
You get why each of them does what they do. Being earned, there are no foreshadowed payoffs or sudden heel-turns that don’t feel earned. Perhaps it is strongest with Kamen as far as writing goes—he has his own personal tragedy going on and also has to deal with a curious creature that he meets who turns out to be an animal which eats anything and everything.
It’s not often that you see shows like this which are both aesthetically beautiful and keep you on your seat. Scavengers Reign seems to have come from nowhere to form fully.
Just like any other colonizers, those left behind in Scavengers Reign are witnesses to a completely balanced symbiotic environment: every organism—plant, animal or plantimal—is part of an overarching give-and-take system where nothing comes without losing something else in return. People constitute exceptions within this harmonious balance; they intrude into this order as an evil force when they include into it their unique greediness, sheer violence and dreadfulness. “That may seem strange to you but does not mean there is something wrong,” Levi warns Azi in one episode telling her she should stop trying to manipulate or change terrain at all costs.” The planet challenges them; it insists they learn how systems work instead of trying to use sheer energy over nature for survival purposes.
The crew of Demeter act on notions that world leaders are just now figuring out.
This world which belongs to Scavengers Reign is called Vesta—the ancient Roman name of the goddess of the hearth as a symbol of sacrifice and reminder that one should not take without giving back. (To hint at this, the ship is named Demeter after Greek goddesses who were in charge of agriculture and fertility on Earth.) It’s made for adults too—Scavengers Reign features plenty of bloodshed both from humans and from some local creatures as they hunt each other to death. The human visitors are given a baptism by fire via the Vesta, reminding them that they must find their place in nature or be devoured either by their own wickedness or a tentacled thing emerging from somewhere below. Flex or perish.
Set in an alien planet, Scavengers Reign, by creators Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner involves human drama when a group of survivors’ land on a new world that terrifies them. The landing site of their spacecraft becomes the meeting point for the survivors who are then met with horrible fauna and flora. They are thus exposed to the interconnection between nature and its kind such as this extraordinary plants and animals they have run into. Adaptation is encouraged among these individuals as they proceed further into this fascinating animated domain, truly one of the greatest sci-fi TV show ever made.
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