When Ursula — a reasonable, logical, plain-Jane female protagonist — pauses mid-survival trek to witness a tiny inexplicable creature pollinate a constellation of glowing pods in the alien wilderness of the planet Vesta Minor, she can’t rationally explain why she felt compelled to stay and watch. Neither can we explain why we rewatched that scene three times, tears in our eyes, observing something we have never seen before and might never see again outside this show.
This is what beauty and curiosity do: they arrest us in the middle of our motions, inexplicably and urgently. “Scavengers Reign” achieves this not once but constantly across twelve episodes of the most visually accomplished storytelling ever committed to television. And we don’t even really like science fiction.
“Scavengers Reign” was a lovingly animated adult sci-fi television series created by Joe Bennett and Charles Huettner, based on their 2016 short film “Scavengers.” The show follows the human survivors of a damaged spaceship stranded on Vesta Minor, whose paths traverse the highly complex and intelligent flora and fauna of the conscious planet before eventually converging back at the crash site. It premiered on HBO Max in 2023, where it was canceled in May 2024 after one season; Netflix then acquired the show, but despite its 100% Rotten Tomatoes score, also declined to renew the show for a second season. And so “Scavengers Reign” died. I humbly submit for a reconsideration — for a rebirth, really.
Most science fiction treats alien worlds as hostile backdrops, strange little stages where human drama unfolds against scorched landscapes with two suns or something else dubiously extraordinary. “Scavengers Reign” does it radically differently — it makes the lush green planet itself the protagonist, such that Bennett doesn’t even consider it sci-fi: “Really, I look at it more as a nature series,” Bennett told Gizmodo.
Consider the David Attenborough nature documentary, a form so familiar that it has become its own genre of comfort television. We are used to a hyper-intelligent narrator mediating the unknown for us, translating the Galápagos iguana or the basilisk running across water into something emotionally comprehensible. Attenborough tells us what to feel. But “Scavengers Reign” makes us amazed little children again, placing us in the condition of that E.E. Cummings poem about the little horse who is newly born, who “knows nothing, and feels / everything” — syntax fractured by the overwhelm of pure unmediated sensation, a creature for whom the world is “perfectly a strange/ness (Of sun/light and of fragrance and of/Singing.”
Just as Cummings messes with the English language to recreate that little horse’s radical openness to the whole wide world, “Scavengers Reign” strips away narration to put us right inside of it. We can watch people who are fully subject to the ups and downs of life on Vesta Minor — enraptured by it, endangered by it, utterly foreign to it. There is no narrator because the humans themselves don’t understand enough to be able to narrate.
This distinction matters profoundly. Over 12 episodes, we traversed canyons and coastlines, mountains and forests, each with their own color palettes and teeming communities of completely original, inspired creatures that exist in fully realized ecosystems. Dozens of these organisms crawl and creep and whiz across the screen, not as plot devices, but as living beings going about their lives. They exist whether or not our human survivors notice them. Sometimes, though, they do — take fish that clamp onto our survivors’ faces for breathing in toxic environments, much like gas masks, or the creatures that eat away at a human rash until it is healed. These relationships resemble symbiosis to an extreme, with functions that appear almost technologically suited for human interaction.
This is not the thin biological world of “Star Wars” movies and their one-biome planets. While those megabudget worlds do give us visual spectacle, “Scavengers Reign” gives us visual truth: the overwhelming, incomprehensible, stunningly realistic complexity of an actual living world.
And the world mimics the way that real biological worlds work, with checks and balances and merciless intensity. Take the velociraptor-like predators who hunt only creatures marked by a particular slime, dragging them up to an almost-inescapable atmospheric altitude through an elevator-like tube in a particular plant species. This reads like immunology with specific entities requiring specific interactions, with an elegance that can still be deceived by humans who stumble through these interlocking natural systems without understanding them, carrying intention and knowledge and the accumulated weight of a civilization that believes itself separate from nature. They become something like Trojan horses — mistaken by the ecosystem for something they are not and then processed accordingly. Still, we are changed by the encounter: humans are always part of the systems we think we are only observing.
The show’s creators cite inspiration from a YouTube channel called Primitive Technology, where an Australian man sits in nature and wordlessly builds contraptions from scratch, accompanied only by natural sounds. “Scavengers Reign” applies this principle to a literal TV show, with revolutionary results. The third episode, titled “The Wall,” contains two such sequences with almost no dialogue — the stubborn, gritty mechanic Azi facing a stampede of horse-like beasts, and Ursula witnessing our aforementioned ceremony of death and rebirth within a massive living flower-like structure.
That latter scene serves no plot purpose. It leads to an argument between Ursula and her older, maybe-not-wiser comrade Sam about whether it’s acceptable to pause and appreciate beauty during a crisis of survival. The show’s answer is unequivocally yes; always yes.
Nature is also brutal. Creatures are consumed, parasitized, tortured, dissolved and recycled with complete indifference to our sympathies. But the show does not treat brutality and beauty as opposites. They are the same phenomenon; the brutality is beautiful. It’s this constant cycle of ending and beginning, where everything exists only because it is necessary. Beauty and death often occupy the same moment, and the show keeps insisting that to witness the cycle fully, without flinching or cringing or looking away, is not morbid, but actually the only honest response to being alive in a world — like Vesta Minor, and like ours — that is this strange and this gorgeous.
That “Scavengers Reign” was canceled twice must be some kind of epic capitalist institutional fail that happens when viewership statistics can’t account for a viewing experience of genuine wonder. After all, a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score couldn’t save it. Maybe if enough people find this piece, watch or rewatch the show and feel what Ursula felt while standing in that living, breathing cathedral of light and death, we can accomplish what the critics could not. To be honest, we just want to watch another season before we die.
