The opening credits sequence of Scavengers Reign is heavy with doom, with images of the Demeter, an interstellar freighter whose wreckage orbits an alien planet, dissonantly set to peaceful classical music. Bodies float in the vacuum of space, escape pods burn up in the atmosphere, and the leaping flames of a sun hint at the cause of the disaster. It’s a perfect encapsulation of the series that follows, a superb survival story depicting both the planet’s natural beauty and the violent, horrible ends it can visit upon the people who encounter it.
Rendered in a detailed 2D style by the prolific animation studio Titmouse, each of the show’s 12 half-hour episodes cuts between multiple perspectives. After all, the Demeter’s few survivors are scattered in different terrestrial environments, unaware of one another’s existence, and the series delights in foregrounding their often ingenious use of the local ecosystem to survive.
One group consists of the human Azi (Wunmi Mosaku) and the bulky robot Levi (Alia Shawkat), who are both working to grow crops in the middle of a prairie. They’re harassed by a group of large creatures that live in white, rocky shells like hermit crabs, leaving only their protruding legs visible. In addition to this conflict, a weary Azi must also contend with Levi’s behavior, which has grown increasingly strange since yellow, veiny plants began growing in its hardware (essentially, the robot is becoming self-aware at the most inconvenient possible time).
Another group consists of Sam (Bob Stephenson) and Ursula (Sunita Mani), who manage to remotely land the Demeter. Both benefit from having another human being to speak with, but they’re also constantly reminded of their own frailty in a hostile environment where storms send debris flying like knives and inhaled spores cause deadly fungal growths.
The series certainly isn’t shy about the violence inherent to survival on the planet, with frequent depictions of guts spilling out of grievous wounds. In one sequence that encapsulates both the alien world’s inspired beauty and its lurking peril, Sam and Ursula take shelter inside a jellyfish-like creature only for another creature to invade, intending to feed on its eggs.
Elsewhere, Kamen (Ted Travelstead) is first seen trapped alone in his escape pod among the corpses of his fellow crew. He soon gains a companion of his own: a sorta salamander with a bulbous gray head, its dispassionate gaze suggesting an ambiguous intelligence. Like a parasite, it telepathically compels other creatures to bring it food, and Kamen finds himself in its thrall.
These scenes provide some of the most frequent depictions of the time before the Demeter’s crash. Otherwise, Scavengers Reign’s early going is hesitant about leaving its characters’ present perspectives. By relegating most glimpses of the past to Kamen’s perspective, the series establishes his anger and the disturbing transformation it drives him to undergo.
In a curious inversion of how most shows handle dreams and visions, the reality of Scavengers Reign’s alien ecosystem is often far stranger than anything in its characters’ heads. At least several times per episode, the series breathtakingly depicts a vista or natural process in arresting colors that draw clear inspiration from Moebius and René Laloux’s Fantastic Planet, among other sources. So many alien worlds of similar films and shows feel dispiritingly limited in their imagination. Scavengers Reign, though, abounds with invention of the kind that only animation can bring to life. It has no illusions that its singular world is the real star, and what a star it is.
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