The Significance of "Scavengers Reign"

I love the recent run of adult-oriented animated shows we've had, and "Scavengers Reign" may be the most exciting title for a couple of reasons.  The biggest one is that where most adult-oriented shows have been taking their cues from American superhero media or Japanese manga and anime, "Scavengers Reign" is a hard science fiction series with roots in European bandes dessinées, and specifically the work of Jean "Moebius" Giraud and his fellow artists from the heyday of "Métal Hurlant." 

The plot of "Scavengers Reign" is simple.  The survivors of a crashed cargo spaceship, the Demeter, struggle to survive on the alien planet of Vesta Minor and find their way back to the ship.  We follow three groups of characters.  The gruff captain, Sam (Bob Stephenson), and a scientist, Ursula (Sunita Mani), form one duo.  A woman named Azi (Wunmi Mosaku) had the luck of escaping with some salvaged equipment, including a vehicle and a robot, Levi (Alia Shawkat), who is slowly evolving into something more sentient through its interactions with the planet.  Finally there's Kamen (Ted Travelstead), a haunted man who forms a mutually destructive symbiotic relationship with a strong, violent alien that uses telekinesis.  

"Scavengers Reign" immediately sets itself apart by plunging the audience into the world of Vesta with almost no explanation.  We don't learn the characters' names right away, or the particulars of what happened to the Demeter.  Instead, we just follow the characters as they navigate Vesta, a planet teeming with life, and all of it incredibly alien in a way that little science-fiction media bothers to be anymore.  It immediately reminded me of Rene Laloux's films, with their surreal, psychedelic imagery, and the unnerving level of impersonal violence and brutality.  The creatures of Vesta can be incredibly dangerous, with threats coming in the form of everything from the hulking beasts to completely innocent-looking pollen clumps floating on the breeze.  One minute, our protagonists can be completely fine, and the next minute they're fighting for their lives because a chance interaction with something seemingly benign has gone horribly wrong.  

However, there's also a sense of interconnectedness and harmony in the ecology of Vesta.  The show is full of these little vignettes of alien life cycles and demonstrations of how the various life forms are linked to one another.  Ursula views Vesta as a puzzle, where working out how everything fits together gives them a better chance at survival.  Azi is initially worried by the organic matter that invades Levi's systems, but eventually realizes that they're beneficial, allowing the robot to grow beyond its original limitations.  There are scenes of incredible beauty and strangeness, and I honestly would have been perfectly happy if "Scavengers Reign" never bothered to do any of the standard stuff of setting up a larger storyline or creating interpersonal conflicts among the survivors.  

Originally, "Scavengers Reign" was an eight-minute short film created by Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettners for Adult Swim, which followed other visitors to Vesta interacting with the planet's life forms.  The short is totally dialogue free, and the early parts of "Scavengers Reign" are similarly light on conversation, heavy on visual storytelling.  Kamen's segments in particular are trippy and difficult to parse at first, because we don't know who we should be rooting for.  Fortunately, he's also the character who has the trippy flashbacks to a troubled relationship with his girlfriend Fiona (Shawkat), and hallucinatory visions that eventually reveal what happened to the Demeter and the rest of its crew.  

There are additional human characters introduced later in the season that push "Scavengers Reign" into a more recognizable action thriller mold.  This is done well, and I was perfectly happy to watch Sam, Ursula, Azi, and Kamen reach conclusions to their stories.  However, the more experimental, more existential early episodes are what the series is really worth watching for.  It's been such a long time since I've seen any animation that felt like it had the DNA of "Fantastic Planet," "Heavy Metal," "Aeon Flux" and the weirder Western animation of my youth.  The fact that "Scavengers Reign" seemed to come out of nowhere was such a wonderful surprise.  

And it makes me hopeful for more animation like it getting a chance to exist in the future.      

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