Released on Max streaming over the past month with little fanfare and I’m sure little attention paid, the animated science fiction survival adventure drama Scavengers Reign is one of the most fascinating, creative, at times frustrating, and very often downright baffling new television series to come along in ages. After watching the first few episodes, I had no idea what to make of it, but I could tell that it was trying to do something interesting. Fortunately, that was enough to get me on board.

The thing to understand about this show is that it’s really, intensely weird. Seriously, as much as I can tell you that it’s weird, I could never possibly convey just how deeply strange it is from start to finish. The entire thing is made with artistic choices that seem nearly impossible to understand, much less explain. Yet, somehow, the series is held together with a strong and compelling unifying vision. I may not understand it, but I’m convinced that someone does. Remarkably, that works.

Title:	Scavengers Reign
Season:	1
Number of Episodes:	12
Release Dates:	Oct. 19 – Nov. 9, 2023
Watched On:	Max

At some point in the distant future, the spacecraft Demeter – a transport ship ferrying colonists and cargo to a settlement on a new world – has crashed near an uninhabited planet called Vesta. Most of the crew were killed in the collision. A few survivors manage to eject to the planet below in escape pods, where they are separated into small groups, unable to contact each other, unaware whether anyone else survived.

This set-up for the story I’ve just explained, that provides what surely sound like critical details essential to understand the plot, is condensed into an eight-second wordless montage as part of the show’s opening credits. That’s as much depth as the series will feel like going into it for three or four episodes. Beyond that, the first episode starts many months (possibly more than a year) later, after the main protagonists have already had time to adjust to their new environment and learn some of its very strange rules. The show jumps right past their entire learning process. In doing so, it feels like it picks up with Season 2, skipping over the entire first season.

While Vesta has air they can breathe, water they can drink, and gravity comparable to Earth, the planet is otherwise at best indifferent to, and more often outright hostile to its new human intruders. The various flora and fauna are completely alien to anything they’ve known or experienced from Earth, and figuring out how it works and connects, which are safe and which are very much not so, are the biggest challenges on the world. Many of those puzzles have already been solved by the time the show starts, which is just one of the perplexing creative decisions made for the series.

Another is the choice to direct the whole voice cast to deliver their performances as flat and monotone as possible, as if the actors’ voices had been simulated by A.I. Admittedly, that makes sense for the one robot called LEVI (played by Alia Shawcat), but not so much for the humans. I don’t blame the actors for giving poor performances. It’s clearly a deliberate choice, but like many things in the show, seems willfully designed to challenge the audience’s expectations.

The characters in general are thinly sketched at first. Personalities for some of them only start to form over the course of the season. Early episodes focus mainly on survival. The bulk of the season then finds three groups each separately making their way toward the wreckage of the Demeter in hopes of finding a way off the planet. Meanwhile, in addition to all the regular adversities they must face, an intelligent and very aggressive creature seems intent on thwarting them for reasons none understand.

For all the unconventional and possibly alienating aspects of its storytelling, Scavengers Reign presents a truly mesmerizing vision of an alien world with a complex and fully thought-out ecosystem totally unlike ours on Earth. The details of it are bizarre, frequently beautiful, and sometimes horrifying.

In some ways, the series is a little reminiscent of the 1973 animated cult film Fantastic Planet. It also draws a lot of inspiration from the artwork of Jean “Moebius” Giraud. Ultimately, the show is its own thing, and there isn’t anything else like it on television right now.

Video Streaming

Scavengers Reign premiered on Max with three episodes on October 19, 2023, followed by an additional three half-hour episodes each week for the next three weeks, finishing the season with a total of twelve episodes in all. The show streams in 1080p high-definition at a standard 16:9 aspect ratio. While I’m sure the whole thing was almost certainly produced on computers, the series is stylized to imitate traditional hand-drawn animation, specifically with a heavy influence from Japanese anime of the 1980s and 1990s.

For as visually imaginative as the show may be, the technical aspects of its a/v presentation don’t try to break any new ground. The image is acceptably sharp and colorful, though the animation often doesn’t have a tremendous amount of fine detail and its frame rate can be a little low. It looks to me like Max compresses it pretty heavily as well.

The Dolby 5.1 soundtrack comes in English, Spanish, or Portuguese dub options, but feels like it needs Japanese. The mix is decently enveloping, especially with the musical score, but doesn’t have much depth or bass.