- On: 2nd Feb 2025
- Category: Movie Reviews
Scavengers Reign, first released in 2023.
A sentiment I expressed in my review of Zack Snyder’s Rebel Moon (Parts One & Two) is that as a lover of sci-fi and a lover of movies, it’s always nice to see new IPs appearing on our screens and sci-fi TV shows are no different. Scavengers Reign is a perfect example of something new, something different, and wow – is this show a lot of things!
Scavengers Reign started life as a short film, titled Scavengers, by series creators Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner. It was initially created for Adult Swim, and you can still watch the original short on YouTube here. If you watch it, you can see a lot of the ideas present that would eventually morph into Scavengers Reign; survivors of a catastrophic ship failure, stranded on a weird and wonderful alien world, utilising its strange flora and fauna to survive.
Fast forward to 2016, and Scavengers Reign premiered on HBO Max in 2023. Sadly, the show wasn’t renewed in 2024, even though it was subsequently acquired by Netflix, they also decided not to renew (this is, unfortunately, a trend with many production companies, killing off shows and leaving stories unfinished, but that’s a rant for another day). This was a move made all the more frustrating by the release of a season 2 teaser (which you can watch here), giving us a tantalising peak at what might’ve come. Hopefully, the show will find a new home in the future and will be revived for future seasons.
As I said before, Scavengers Reign is many things, and after watching the trailer, I was immediately interested. The trailer does a great job of teasing so many of the show’s aspects without really giving anything away, and for all the oddities and bizarreness the trailer teases, the show itself is so much weirder and more wonderful.
The show starts post-disaster, where the Demeter has already undergone a catastrophic incident (the nature of which is only partially revealed later in the season), forcing the active crew to abandon ship and escape down to the surface of a nearby planet, Vesta. We follow several survivors, whose stories slowly converge as the tale unfolds. Each individual or group has interactions with the planet’s ecosystem, a complex, volatile, bioreactive environment, constantly mutating and reacting, changing and counter-changing, and our survivors get caught right up in that planetary struggle.
It reminded me a lot of the “black goo/liquid” from the Alien franchise, an extremely potent and virulent mutagenic pathogen. In Alien: Covenant, the events of the movie are centred on Planet 4. Its ecosystem is drastically altered by the android David when he unleashes the black goo pathogen on the Engineer’s city, and whilst not altered to the same extent as Vesta, I was struck by the similarities. Whilst season 1 of Scavengers Reign doesn’t delve into the nature of Vesta and whether its current state has naturally evolved or was perhaps artificially created, both Planet 4 and Vesta are worlds in flux, heavily mutated and still mutating, the life that inhabits these planets at war with itself, competing and outcompeting different lifeforms for survival and domination. Part of a description of the pathogen from Alien: The Roleplaying Game reads: “Simply put: any living thing that comes into direct contact with the black goo will either die horribly, give birth to monsters, or become a monster themselves.” – and if you replace the words “black goo” with “Vesta”, and you have a fair apt description of the mutagenic state of Scavengers Reign’s world.
It’s complex, layered, unique and wondrous, disturbing and fascinating - Scavengers Reign is beautifully presented, truly otherworldly sci-fi. Despite its cancellation, I would highly recommend giving it a watch, and who knows, maybe in time, the show will find a new home and get the renewal that fans eagerly await.
Background image by Fred Moon on Unsplash