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Scavengers Reign debuted on Max in October 2023 to almost universal acclaim. The plaudits and awards nominations were easy to understand. This animated series about a handful of crewmembers from a doomed space freighter fighting for survival on the surface of a beautiful yet brutal alien world, serves up a feast. From the aesthetic to the thematic, it deftly melds form and content, paying homage to everything that makes the science-fiction genre great, but in a wildly imaginative and unique configuration.
Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner’s show isn’t simply a niche survivalist thriller made exclusively for space geeks and sci-fi purists (though both will love it), it’s a show with universal reach and appeal that asks deep questions about where we’ve been, and where we’re going, and in the process strikes at the heart of what it means – and feels – to be human.
All of which made the show’s subsequent cancellation by Max in May of this year all the harder to fathom. Mercifully, there wasn’t much time for fathoming, as Netflix quickly snapped up the non-exclusive streaming rights to the first season (meaning that Max subscribers can still watch the show as well, despite the streamer declining to greenlight future seasons), giving the show both wider global reach, and hope – however faint – for the future. That hope, of course, now rests solely with Netflix and its subscribers, who will be the ultimate arbiters of the show’s survival.
Simply put, Scavengers Reign is one of the brightest stars to have shone across the sci-fi landscape. To see it snuffed out now would be a crime. Here’s why the show matters, and why it deserves your time, attention, and a second season.
In the Beginning…
Everything you need to know about the premise, tone and feel of Scavengers Reign is right there in its sublime title sequence. We see the planet Vesta hanging in space, its surface illuminated. A soft, slow and insistent piano melody begins to play. The haunting nature of the notes, and especially the spaces between them, cultivates a mood that’s as lonely as it is beautiful. Indeed, composer Nicolas Snyder’s work here and across this season is exceptional, at turns soulful, mournful and uplifting, each piece complimenting and accentuating the show’s deep-baked humanity.
The short sequence tells the story of the doomed space freighter Demeter 227 in a series of static shots, from showing us the great hulking mass adrift in space surrounded by silently floating bodies, to the jettisoning of escape pods towards the planet below. As the images become progressively bleaker and more urgent, a chilling orchestra of rushing, scraping and shrieking crescendos alongside the piano notes until the two compositions are indivisible. The sequence ends on another shot of Vesta, this time with the planet sheathed almost entirely in darkness.
It’s all here in microcosm; the nuts, bolts, soul and heart of Scavengers Reign, and the juxtapositions that form the show’s core: Yin. Yang. The familiar. The alien. Symbiosis. Autonomy. Chaos. Harmony. The inner. The outer. Life. Death. There is light and hope on Vesta, but also fear and darkness. There is beauty in the journey, but also ever-rising notes of terror and panic.
The show concerns itself with a great many things: the selfishness and resourcefulness of humankind; the ways in which we can affect the environments (and whole planets) around us, and vice versa; the destructive and corrupting capabilities of guilt, shame and anger; how, to live a worthwhile life, we must surrender ourselves in service of a greater good or higher power, whilst never surrendering our individuality or autonomy (or compromising it in others).
But above all else, Scavengers Reign is about adaptation and balance.
Meet the Crew
Of course, these themes and ideas couldn’t hit home as powerfully as they do without a solid story or strong characters through which to convey them. The show’s characters and their arcs – filtered through the talented cast of voice actors – lift the whole into the exquisite, timely and important work of art Scavengers Reign is.
Over the course of the season we begin to learn more and more about the characters’ lives before and after joining the ship, and the colliding psychologies and fateful decisions that sealed their collective destinies. The show begins many months after the event that forced our survivors to abandon ship. We’re introduced to three pockets of survivors and watch as they adapt or die (sometimes both).
There’s Sam (Bob Stephenson) and Ursula (Sunita Mani), captain and biologist respectively, whose knowledge of and mastery of the living environment around them could be instrumental in bringing the Demeter 227 and the bulk of its cryogenically suspended crew to the surface of the planet, thus providing them with a means of escape. Along the path of their perilous journey the pair are forced to square the circles of their differing natures, and learn the meaning of symbiosis, sacrifice, and kinship.
There’s Azi (Wunmi Mosaku) and Levi (Alia Shawkat), a human and a robot, who arguably form the heart and soul of the show. As Levi’s circuits become infected by the Gaia-like, interconnected sentience of the planet, Azi grapples more than most with what it means to be both free and alive, reckoning with a new paradigm that could redefine humanity’s lonely position in the cosmos – and her own place within it. Their relationship as it evolves provides some of the most rousing, uplifting and heartbreaking sequences of the series.
And, finally, there’s Kamen (Ted Travelstead), a deeply damaged and troubled soul whose rescue, or co-opting, by a native creature with telepathic and telekinetic powers unleashes a foreign force on Vesta that threatens to destroy them both, and everything around them.
Here the show grapples with both ecology and psychology, showing how humanity’s greed and desperation can corrupt whole ecosystems, and the ways in which the unprocessed trauma, grief and selfishness of one solitary human can curdle or sever the destinies of those who encounter them. These ideas of power, ego and control are explored again later in the season, when Kamen and the creature’s unintentionally malevolent symbiosis is mirrored in a trio of new human characters. Humans, after all, don’t require telepathy in order to subjugate or wreak havoc. Nature at large may be benign, or at least indifferent, but our free will – or the illusion of it – can make us uniquely dangerous.
Viva la Vesta
There is arguably another main character in the story: the planet itself. Vesta itself is alive and aware in ways that boggle the mind. Everything on its surface is connected. Everything – no matter how bizarre or fantastical – makes perfect sense in its wider context.
Vesta’s vistas are at once familiar and awe-inspiringly foreign, teeming with creatures that look as though they’ve been plucked from the dreams of Leonardo da Vinci, Hayao Miyazaki and H.R. Geiger.
The depth and breadth of the show’s world-building, and the visually rich, cinematographic way in which it’s realised on screen, brings the planet’s intricate ecosystems and whispering wildernesses gloriously and convincingly to life. Intelligence, forethought and artistry crackles through the show’s every word and frame.
It’s hard to select a visual highlight from this world: hollow tubular monoliths with whole ecosystems inside them, underground caverns filled with mutagenic fungus that can mimic their prey and surroundings, parasites that puppet animals and humans alike like flesh marionettes…, but the sequence that really hammers home the beauty and complexity of Scavengers Reign centres on the life-cycle of a phantasmagorical flower.
Deep inside a dense, living hedge of solid, calcified pipes, one of the survivors, Ursula, by chance triggers the self-propagation of a plant that comprises both flora and fauna. The process that unfolds seems by turns natural, bio-mechanical, symbolic and nothing short of magical. Hollow tendrils unfurl from the plant and work to dislodge orbs of pollen from shallow dirt at the giant flower’s centre. The orbs are thrown into the air, where they remain, hovering and glowing. A wrinkled and wizened little creature, a strange hybrid of frog and walnut – no more than an inch or two tall – is plucked by its head from that same sandy dirt, before being placed gently on its feet in the middle of the flower. The walfrog transforms an orb into a ‘button’ that when pushed, activates the plant’s next stage of life in a bioluminescent light show. The little creature, its only task in this world now complete, gently collapses into a foetal position in the centre of the dirt as its corporeal body ages, withers and dies. A tendril reaches out to tenderly bury the creature beneath a layer of dirt, the lights blink off, and the flower closes in on itself, sinking back into the pipe.
This bold, profoundly beautiful sequence almost single-handedly justifies the show’s existence. It’s a bewitching feat of imagination, design, animation, and direction that speaks to some of the show’s key themes and ideas around harmony, balance, fate, free-will, and sacrifice for the greater good. Everything is contained within the mesmerising circumference of that one alien flower. Not just life on Vesta, or life on earth, but life – real and imagined, and everywhere across all possible universes. That flower will make you think about how short life is. How cruel. How beautiful. How our destinies boil down to becoming either the pollen or the button-pusher, but knowing that one day, each of our buttons must be pressed while understanding that the end is never the end.
Ultimately, Scavengers Reign reminds us that it’s not how life ends that’s important, but how it’s lived. We’re both a part of something greater, and greater than the sum of our parts, and, if we try our best to remember that, then perhaps the greater parts of all and each of us will echo into eternity. Two things are certain: no story ever truly ends; and we can’t allow Scavengers Reign’s story to come to an end.
Not yet.
It’s just getting started.
Scavenger’s Reign season one is available to stream now on Netflix.
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