The Dark Herald Recommends: Scavenger’s Reign
I’m definitely torn on this one.
Scavenger’s Reign is an animated series that was absolutely nowhere on my radar. Not even a blip. I blundered across a TikTok of it while I was looking for something else and decided I needed to check it out.
Scavenger’s Reign is a product of the Covid Lockdown. Warner Brothers was well past the point of total commitment on HBOmax when the plague washed over the world like Noah’s Flood. The company needed new series content and actors could only telecommute. And so the twenty-first century’s Golden Age of American Animation was completely stillborn because Warner greenlit nothing but flaming rivers of sewage like Velma and Seth Rogan’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Some decent anime got picked up from Japan and studio C-suite executives tried to ruin that too with notes about how women needed to be unattractive, and Samurai melodramas needed blacks and Native Americans. These executives don’t care about being noticed for doing something good, they are just desperate to be noticed for doing anything at all.
So it’s not a surprise that Scavenger’s Reign almost, but didn’t quite slip past them.
I may as well start with the unavoidable comparison. This show clearly started life when a couple of Millennials were watching a show that they were both too young to see on MTV’s Liquid Television block called Aeon Flux.
If you watch this show that’s the vibe that going to be jumping out at you.
The absurdist combination of art nouveau, and Korean manga is all pervading in this series. Just like Aeon Flux. However, the plot of this show is actually fairly coherent.
A starship named Demeter 227 has had a disastrous interstellar accident, (by the way, forgive me for stating the bloody obvious but under no circumstances get on a ship named “Demeter.” Especially if you are in a work of fiction). It was in orbit around a (more or less) habitable planet named Vesta. Habitable does not mean friendly.
This is primarily a survival story, while I instinctively loathe nihilism, a certain degree of that is always unavoidable in a man-against-nature setting. When the Demeter had its accident, the escape pods launched with only a few survivors of the awake-crew. The rest were in cold sleep hibernation. You see one of the escape pods exploding during the opening credits.
The first shot of the show is a couple of men from the Demeter’s company discussing the loss of the ship. The possibility of search and rescue is brought up but immediately discarded because the company won’t be cool with the expense.
“But what if there are survivors?”
The other man grimly notes, “Let’s hope for their sake there aren’t any.”
Opening credits and then we get to know our survivors. They are divided into three groups:
Ursula and Sam. These two are based on the characters from the 2016 short “Scavengers” that this show is based on. The characters were silent in the original short, but they are more fleshed out here.
Azi and Levi. Azi is a black lesbian and Levi is a robot who seems to be going native.
Kaman and Hollow.
There was a lot of “show, don’t tell” in the first few minutes. We see the state of escape pods and the vegetation encroaching on them. We see the number of days tallied on a wall, telling you they’ve been there for a while. In one of his first scenes, we see Sam approach a large but apparently docile quadruped… and then matter of factly crawl inside of it through one of its gills(?) he gathers a couple of nodules quickly, it is obvious that he’s done this before, then he squeezes an organ that makes the creature barf him out. Ursula is unfazed by this. They’ve been stuck there long enough to find out what creatures are usable as resources.
Azi and Levi have a more difficult problem with the local wildlife. Various creatures are encroaching more and more aggressively on their farm. Levi has some of the local flora growing on his circuits and he claims it’s repairing him. When I say “flora” it’s a little inaccurate, on this planet the line dividing plants and animals appears to be pretty fuzzy.
Kaman has it the worst. His capsule crashed high in the canopy. He’s trapped inside, and in consequence, he’s starving to death. The isolation dementia is not a big help either.
Sam and Ursula are trying to send a signal to the Demeter ordering it to make an emergency landing on the surface. There should be a working shuttle aboard her. If they can’t get the transmitter charged up with what they have on hand they will have to get the battery out of Pod 5 and the way they say that, it is clearly a last resort.
Azi fights off the wildlife in 2020’s kick-ass girl-boss style that gave me a sinking feeling when I watched it.
Kaman is broken out his escape pod by a demi-telepathic, semi-intelligent creature (Hollow) that more or less makes a pet out of Kaman. To its detriment.
Sam and Ursula have to go to Pod 5 after all. It landed in a cavern filled with poisonous gas. Its human occupants are being consumed by the flora/fauna of the planet.
They barely accomplish their mission but they do get the battery. It works and the Demeter is called down from orbit. All three groups of survivors see it. And all three spend the first season making their separate ways toward it.
Like I said, I’m torn about this show.
The artwork and layout designs knock it out of the park. The concepts are absurdist but it does the job of conveying a truly alien world. It’s the best I’ve seen in years if not decades. Each episode was imaginative, and each threat to the scavengers was new and strange.
The characters weren’t bad either. Since this is the kind of show with a lot of walking we get to know them through the good old-fashioned standby of flashbacks. They all had layers and they all had demons to one degree or another.
The problem with the show is quite simply the problem we are always being told doesn’t exist.
White racism.
All of the villains are white. All of the men who are too weak to get the job done are white. Kaman in particular is the Doctor Smith of the show. I’ll use the words of the show’s creator here, “Kaman introduced human greed and gluttony into this animal kingdom.” Kaman corrupts Hollow and turns it into a monster.
While the characters are indeed good and you do need antagonists past a certain point in a story like this, all of the fundamentally bad or weak people were white.
I was already too far along in this to give it up by the time that was apparent. So I put the show on my insomnia list and finished it when that issue next came up.
Scavenger’s Reign had everything else going for it but that one thing and if it wasn’t for that I’d be recommending with enthusiasm.
As it is…
The Dark Herald Recommends with Reservations
Where to watch: Netflix
