Scavengers Reign: A Blend of Imagination and Everyday Life

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Scavengers Reign has just landed on Netflix this week, and it’s a hard show to describe. “You just have to watch it” is a pretty pathetic line coming from someone whose job is to convince you that this is one of the best television programmes of the past year.

Fortunately, I do happen to think that. Unfortunately, I must now tackle the difficulty of describing why, head on.

The plot of this animated show, brought to life by creators Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner, is relatively simple. A large space vessel, the Demeter, has gone wildly off-course, stranding the few inhabitants of its escape pods on the planet Vesta. While their mothership hovers in orbit, its remaining staff are suspended in cryo-sleep. We follow events on the ground — specifically the fates of those in the three pods, as they work to stay alive, restore connection with their ship and get back home.

There’s grizzled captain Sam and his lieutenant Ursula, who we find using whatever resources they can scavenge to restore power to their equipment and bring the Demeter down to the surface. Elsewhere we find the stoical Azi, attempting to get by with Levi, a service android whose time on Vesta appears to be shifting its personality in unlikely, possibly disturbing, ways. And finally, there’s neurotic ship engineer Kamen, whose guilty conscience renders him easy meat for a telepathic creature seeking to use him to its own ends.

One pathway to understanding the show a little better is to note that there is no apostrophe in its title. ‘Reign’ here is a verb, and speaks to the wider thrust of the show. For its focus is not solely, or even mainly, on its human characters. It is on the mind-bending flora and fauna who reign in this alien world, and their myriad ways of living, eating, mating and killing. This is — as unlikely as such a description sounds to the human ear — a masterpiece of ecological sci-fi. It is a series which luxuriates in long, wordless passages, designed to showcase the planet’s non-human residents. An endless parade of chittering insectoids, amorphous slugs, winged beasts and beady-eyed parasites of inscrutable function, their life cycles, hunting strategies and predation patterns are very much shown not told.

The result is nothing less than a brutal and wondrous tidal wave of ideas, from gene-replicating plants and fruits that can communicate with electric circuitry to coalacanths that feed on scar tissue and Lovecraftian horrors that feed on, well, you.

To be clear, this is very much an adult offering, with at least half a dozen plunges into body horror that would put David Cronenberg to shame. It’s also gorgeous, however, bringing its many thousand ideas to life with deft and expressive art.

To put the show’s appeal another way: If you’ve ever enjoyed a brief glimpse at a creature design in Star Wars, Avatar, or Dune, then imagine a show that drops those twenty times per episode, without ever getting boring.

Which is not to say that the human characters are overlooked. Part of the show’s genius is in creating such compelling drama from protagonists who could read as stock in less nimble hands. There are obligatory flashbacks to their previous lives, and the various ways that fate, or their own missteps, have led them where they are. Everywhere is the threat of being horribly eaten, poisoned or commandeered, but also the quotidian struggles of ego, regret, self-fulfilment and loss.

What Alien discovered, and so few other fantastical works have remembered since, is that the alien trappings of their outlandish threats are only enhanced when placed in contrast to the familiar staples of the humdrum human experience. In Alien’s case — and, I’d argue just as strongly, the original Ghostbusters — these are workplace dramas, involving people navigating their fiction’s outlandish enemies through the lens of instantly recognisable blue-collar jobs. The crew of the Nostromo are space truckers; the Ghostbusters, no-hoper private detectives.

Here, we find a more hardy and scientifically-minded crew, but their human foibles are just as relatable. We enter the story many weeks into their being marooned, and each has already discerned some uses of local plant and animal life to eat, start fires, and a few more complex utilities that are joyous to behold. (When, for example, Sam and Ursula blithely insert their hands into a pufferfish-type creature and use its inflating belly to descend into a crevasse, one does wonder how many trials it took them to figure this trick out).

Compared to the bulging sacs and chitinous thrumming of Vesta’s inhabitants, the human designs are beautifully simplified, allowing for maximal latitude in movement and emotional expression. The result is a smooth and polished show that doesn’t need to sacrifice quality for extraordinary detail. It’s an inspired choice, doubtless borne of necessity, which nonetheless allows the show’s true bravura designs — the various flora and fauna of Vesta — to shine all the brighter.

Scavengers Reign began life as a short film on Adult Swim five years ago, and has since scuttled through a curious life cycle of its own. Commissioned by HBO some time afterward, these 12 episodes were launched on the platform back in October, only to be cancelled last month, at which point it was acquired by Netflix. In this blood-beaked transfer of prey between apex predators, the show’s survival now depends on as many people as possible watching it in the first week after it airs.

In a sense, the main reason I’m writing this article is due to my own hardwired evolutionary instincts: I simply want to watch more, and will need more people to watch it for that to happen. As alien as our media culture may seem to us when described this way, the fact is, we have somehow landed in an ecosystem where the only way a televisual organism can survive or evolve, is by immediate and rapturous reception from as many beady little eyes as possible. It’s a strange and hostile world, but if it allows such marvels as Scavengers Reign to thrive, then so be it.