As we learn about the way our natural world works, the less “everything is connected” sounds like woo-woo nonsense and more like scientific truth. The more we know about the ways in which colonial powers wreak havoc upon the lands they colonize, the more we realize how easy it is to alter and destroy a web that hangs in tentative balance. The adult animated sci-fi show Scavengers Reign, whose entire first season is now available on Max, crash-lands a group of would-be colonists on a hostile planet and, using stunning animation and a thrilling, emotional story, teaches them a new way to survive by accepting their place in an extraterrestrial natural order.
The show begins with the desertion of the Demeter 227, an interstellar cargo spaceship transporting goods and passengers in suspended animation across an alien solar system. A group of crewmembers manage to make it off the ship and land on the surface of a planet called Vesta – but they’re separated on the journey down, none knowing if the others survived. The environment of Vesta is beautiful, yet formidable, home to gaseous fungal spore clouds that eat flesh from bone, wolf-like carnivores that hunt in packs, parasitic plants that steal your DNA, and windstorms of metal shards that scour grassy plains and impale anything (or anyone) in their path on giant spikes. To the survivors, it’s a death trap, and they swiftly get to work on ways to escape while they’re still alive.
Ursula (Sunita Mani), a young botanist, crash-lands alongside Sam (Bob Stephenson), the white-bearded commander of the Demeter. Sam has the capability to bring the ship down safely so they can board and take off, but they have to brave miles of wilderness to get to the landing site. Sam is levelheaded and straightforward, but Ursula is much more attuned to the environment around them, making sketches in her notebook and observing clear patterns and systems in everything they encounter. Azi (Wunmi Mosaku) and Levi (Alia Shawkat) are a similar pair: Azi is tall and brutal, ready to fight to the death with any creature that tries to tangle with her, while her robot companion Levi often disobeys its programming and zones out, observing tiny flowers and bugs rather than building shelters and maintaining weapons. And then there’s Kamen (Ted Travelstead), a depressed crewmember unable to get over the loss of his estranged wife, whose fractured mind attracts a telepathic salamander-like creature that begins to use Kamen as its servant.
Scavengers Reign is, first of all, stunning to look at. The animation is fluid without being busy, every landscape and organism made of flat pastel colors on intricate linework reminiscent of Moebius’ sci-fi comic strips and Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, but also owing much of its design inspiration to the covers of the pulp paperbacks and short story magazines of the 1970s and ’80s. The alien environment is fungal and insectoid, based on creators Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner’s short film Scavengers, which similarly follows a pair of human settlers on an alien world who expertly utilize its natural resources and food chains. In the show, the characters float through vast mushroom forests using lighter-than-air plant bulbs, and traverse grassy plains on the backs of enormous striding megafauna.
The beauty of the animation complements the show’s deft, deliberate storytelling, which slowly doles out bits of information and backstory for each character while simultaneously challenging them in the present. The dialogue is often simple and natural, thanks to the voice actors’ emotional yet understated performances and their characters’ economical designs. 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 understand exactly why each of the characters does the things that they do. There’s no foreshadowed payoff or sudden heel-turn that doesn’t feel earned. The writing is strongest with Kamen, whose personal tragedy is multilayered and whose relationship with the curious, hungry creature he meets is both a figurative and, eventually, very literal rebirth. It’s not often that a show like this is both aesthetically beautiful and riveting to watch, and Scavengers Reign in particular feels like it came out of nowhere, perfectly formed.
Like any colonists, the survivors of Scavengers Reign are firsthand observers of an environment that lives in absolutely stable symbiosis: every plant and animal and plantimal is a part of a vast organized network of give and take, never gaining without sacrificing something in return. The humans are the outliers, the interlopers, the chaff, and, at times, a sinister corruption, bringing their singular greed and wanton violence and fear into an ecosystem unable to handle it. “What might appear strange to you is not necessarily a malfunction,” Levi admonishes Azi in one episode, in essence telling her to stop trying to find ways to change and control the terrain. The planet and its inhabitants challenge them to find a new way to inhabit a world by understanding how systems work and integrating themselves into them, rather than practicing brute force mastery over the natural environment. It’s a joy to watch the crew of the Demeter act on notions that scientists and politicians in our world are just now catching on to.
It’s a joy to watch the crew of the Demeter act on notions that our scientists and politicians are just now catching on to.
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The world of Scavengers Reign is called Vesta, which is also the ancient Roman name of the goddess of the sacrificial hearth – a divine reminder not to take without giving something in return. (In this same vein and as a little bit of foreshadowing, the ship is called Demeter after the Greek goddess of agriculture and the fertility of the earth.) Scavengers Reign is very much animation for adults, and there is often blood-and-guts violence, both from the human characters and from the native creatures hunting and eating to survive. The Vesta of Scavengers Reign gives its human guests a baptism of fire, indicating in no uncertain terms how quickly they must find their place in the natural order, or else be consumed, either by their own malice or by some horrifying tentacle creature. Adapt or die.
