Scavengers Reign: Visually beautiful, emotionally insufficient

Sci-fi movies and TV shows like Scavengers Reign (now streaming on Max) only come so often, so of course I was quite excited for this one, but ultimately I’m not sure how close it got to my fanciful expectations for the genre. I held my tongue until I could see this last batch of episodes, perpetually hoping that it’d lean into the depth of characters as much as I’d like, but after a promising start led into a stretch of idle repetition and discouragingly distant thematic cores, my faith was waning a bit. By and large, the series feels a little shallow: it doesn’t offer much to think about, and emotional resonance is pretty rare, which is made all the more frustrating by the glimpses we do get of thoughtful explorations of relationships. Instead of those moments being at the forefront of the show, far more of its length is spent on relatively frivolous action beats, many of which are caught in a pattern of characters facing a monster-of-the-week type threat and ultimately outsmarting it. Other moments are spent with characters interacting with the strange alien world they’ve landed upon.

This world, called Vesta, is gorgeous, of course, with its stunning Moebius-inspired backgrounds and an array of creative creature designs, and these elements are often paired with strong direction and animation, making the most of a somewhat limited budget by sometimes cutting corners but at other points — where it counts — demonstrating the tactility of a movement, even just a hand fidgeting, turning over a flask, or the motion of a character’s hair as they turn around. TV animation is seldom so beautiful, so assured.

When the series leans into these elements and into the characters’ humanity, it shines. Episode 10 is a standout in that regard, picking up the pieces of the rest of the series to create something — if only for a portion of a 20 minute episode — with true melancholy and a wistful celebration of human connection. Throughout the series, whatever interspersed moments that give characters some emotional grounding are few and far between. Across the various characters, their development tends to be either frontloaded or backloaded, either deciding it’s enough to establish motivations early on and do nothing with them for the bulk of the series, or trying to catch up with a lack of development as the series approaches its end. Payoffs near the end of the series still have their effect, but multiple of them were really only established in the preceding couple of episodes. Meanwhile, even a pair like Sam and Ursula, who the series spends much of its time following, aren’t given much to establish their connection or believable chemistry despite never being apart over the course of the series, leading to the emotional payoff of their relationship to have some resonance but feel somewhat insufficient.

And as beautiful and alluringly strange as Vesta is and as much creativity is poured into its inhabitants, the emphasis on aesthetics seems to extend to the way the show interacts with common sci-fi tropes and quandaries, where there appears to be more interest in mining these ideas for their aesthetics than thoughtfully exploring them in very much depth. The show blurs the edges between man, nature, and machine in theoretically interesting ways, but I’m not sure how much its exploration of such grows beyond that “wouldn’t this be weird?” stage that defined the short film the series is based upon. I don’t think simply referencing these ideas is enough to quite work for me, but it’s enough that you can technically say the show “explored” them. I just don’t think you’d get very far if you tried to uncover what exactly the show is trying to say when it incorporates these themes. The world is impressively intricate, to the point of more often feeling contrived than natural, which would be easier to swallow if its design were a more purposeful attempt to map to something that feels true.

You could talk about the grey morals of nature, but here it comes off more like a lack of commentary when it comes to how humans interact with their environment, where the most tangible thematic thread comes from the character of Kamen, who has very little overall screentime and almost seems to be forgotten about at points. Kamen’s self-absorption melds with nature to effectively create a monster, which is again something I can find theoretically interesting, but very little development is actually given to this particular story thread. It goes from being initially established to becoming a mostly stagnant plot element pretty quickly. The show insists on giving us small glimpses of each character’s pre-Vesta past, but these glimpses come too rarely and in too disjointed a manner.

I have no doubt that the creators and writers of this show have brought a lot of interesting thoughts and ideas to the table, but it feels like they don’t often know where to go with them and instead choose to throw more plot at the problem, which can make it feel repetitive. Still, enough comes through that I can’t really call myself disappointed, and I certainly can’t praise the visual creativity enough. I don’t want to diminish the assuredly painstaking work that went into every aspect of this show. In the (sparse) crowd of animated sci-fi television, this undoubtedly stands tall (I mean, it’s better than almost every Love, Death, & Robots episode, and I still watch every single one of those and enjoy many of them), so maybe I shouldn’t focus too much on what it could have been. I enjoyed it, it looks cool, and I felt something sometimes. Onwards and upwards for the genre, I hope.