Here Comes the ‘Reign’ Again

A tired trope in science fiction that continues in overuse: that alien life and biology resembles ours. That’s despite the spectacular crapshoot in which our planet evolved. We could have turned out a billion other ways. The animated series “Scavenger’s Reign,” which Netflix added recently after its single 12-episode season on Max last year, takes the idea of foreign and unknowable alien life forms and runs with the concept.

The basic idea, explained in a brief cold open and visualized in a haunting opening credits sequence, is that a freighter vessel taken off its expected course faces an emergency causing its crew to try to escape to a nearby planet called Vesta. The handful of survivors land separately in their escape pods, facing a weird and hostile environment as they try to reunite and get to the ship’s crash site.

The ship’s inhabitants included engineers and scientists, so they’re not completely unskilled or unable to adapt. But the planet’s plant and animal life — with stunning visual design — are so varied and surprising that death, wonder, and even mind control are around every patch of vegetation and canyon.

The survivors include Azi (Wunmi Mosaku) a cargo worker who makes the best of the situation with Levi (Alia Shawkat), a helpful robot that Vesta’s fauna begins to inhabit. Sam (Bob Stephenson), the ship’s captain, and Ursula (Sunita Mani), a botanist, navigate the wilds and encounter one body-altering crisis after another. And then there’s Kamen, a deeply disturbed loner who forms a parasitic relationship with a greedy grub-like child with telekinetic and mind-control powers.

The paths all cross, but it’s a surprisingly long road to get there as each survivor suffers painful, sometimes disgusting calamities almost made up for by Vesta’s inherent beauty. For every blood-sucking flower that can clone an entire species, there are gentle birds that camouflage into metal, submarine-like whales who suck up their eggs from the shore and go deep to protect their offspring, a tiny humanoid-shaped creature that is born and dies in a few seconds surrounded by balls of light within a plant. The bravura visual design is most of the point of Scavenger’s Reign.

It’s a show that wants to wow you with never-before-rendered animals and plants, stuff you’ve never even imagined, and on that score it succeeds wildly. Creators Joe Bennett and Charles Huettner adapted the show from their 2016 short film, “Scavengers.” The animation from short to series got a big upgrade, particularly in the design of the human characters and going from wordless to full voice casting.

Unlike the eight-minute-long short, the full TV series has a tone that can sometimes feel oppressive; I wasn’t able to watch more than two or three episodes at a time without its anxious, dark energy weighing on me. It’s violent and bloody and the body horror never relents; Vesta does terrible things with human flesh. But I never wanted to stop seeing what the characters would encounter next or whether they’d survive.

The voice actors portray the main characters, and the ones shown in flashbacks including Kamen’s estranged wife Fiona (also Shawkat), so well and you get so invested in their survival that it’s almost a letdown when a new set of characters enters the narrative in the last third of the season. But those characters help raise the stakes; the mission expands from survival to thwarting mercenaries who don’t care whether the crew lives or dies.

Despite strong reviews last year, the show wasn’t popular enough to avoid cancellation on Max. Fans who devoured it hoped its addition on Netflix would widen the audience for Scavenger’s Reign and lead to a renewal. Unfortunately, the series hasn’t cracked Netflix’s list of top TV shows; hopes may fade if the series remains under the radar.

That’s a shame, especially because the first season ends with some tantalizing threads dangling. On the other hand, I can’t wait to see what Bennett and Huettner do next with their talent for adult-oriented animation. Their wild imaginations shouldn’t be contained by one show, even when it’s one as remarkably well-made as Scavenger’s Reign.