Spoiler Warning for Scavenger’s Reign. I’m going to be going into detail about the plot and major events of the show in most paragraphs except the one immediately after this one (to hopefully prevent you from accidentally seeing any spoilers before you can read this and can click away if you don’t want to read about what happens in the show). Also, before you read this post, you should probably check out the spoiler-free review from last week to make sure we’re all on the same page.

Also, Massive Post warning. This baby might take you half an hour to read.

I’ve considered rewatching Scavengers Reign in the week since I finished it. I would have, even, if I’d had the time. I’ve just been so busy since then that all I’ve been able to do is think about it. No one I know has watched it yet, which is frustrating because I’m bursting at the seams to talk about it with someone, but also it’s not exactly fair to expect people to jump that quickly on something. Getting a whole show watched in a week was not something people thought was possible to do back before the arrival of streaming shows via Netflix. It still feels weird to think about and do sometimes, especially when so many shows are still being released piecemeal, so I try not to expect it of people. Still, I really wish someone would watch it. I really wish I had someone to discuss it with. I really wish I knew other people were experiencing the same wonderful show that I got to. It’s just so good. There’s just so much there to love and to dig into, visually and critically. Also, just to cover my bases, don’t forget that the second definition of “criticism” is “discussing the merits and faults of an artistic creation” (paraphrased from good old Merriam-Webster), so maybe keep in mind that a lot of people can and will discuss something critically without hating on it or thinking it’s bad (though sometimes things are bad and it should be okay to say why you think they’re bad or just not for you).

The most interesting part of the show for me, that I walked up to and then away from in last week’s review because I realized I couldn’t talk about it any further without going into spoiler territory (and because last week’s post was long enough without this whole essay I’ve written for today), was the commentary it provided on the way that Humanity interacts with our environment. Each character we see in the world and spend time with over multiple episodes of the show represents a different way of interacting with the world, many of them held up against each other to highlight the differences between them. Such as the juxtaposition between Sam and Ursula, the first two characters we meet and follow on the planet.

Both of them live in harmony with the world around them, or at least as close to it as they can get. For Sam, though, this is a means of survival. He does this because he believes it is the best way to survive long enough to escape the world they’ve been trapped on. He is not curious and does not wish to know more than he must, but he will absolutely embrace everything on this world he needs in order to survive and get away. Ursula, on the other hand, treats this harmonious way of living as a source of wonder. She is open to new experiences, to witnessing all the world has to offer, and to exploring things not just to survive but to learn even if it doesn’t help her move closer to her goals or live another day. She is curious, eager to look at things in a different way that she’s used to, and willing to take risks in situations that Sam rushes through even if all she gets from it is a new sketch in her notebook or the chance to witness something unlike anything she’s seen before.

As we watch these two characters move through the world, we quickly begin to learn that the show is not casting one or the other as superior despite holding their approaches in juxtaposition to each other. There are situations that Sam is better suited for, because his focus is on survival, his next step, and the path towards his goal (to send a landing signal to the wreck of the ship, awaken the crew still sleeping on it, and then leave the planet on the escape shuttle in the ship’s hangar). There are also situations that Ursula is better suited for because her attention is on the present, she is taking in everything she can learn about the world, and is willing to set aside her goals for the time she needs to look at the world around her. Sure, you could probably argue that if Sam was less focused on the future and more focused on the present, he wouldn’t have gotten stung by the plant that was ultimately responsible for his death (in a round-about way). And sure, you could argue that if Ursula was a little more cautious, a little more paranoid and focused on survival, then Sam might have lived through the sequence of events that followed him getting stung. Both would require ignoring every time the show showed Sam correctly anticipating danger and every time Ursula’s sense of wonder and openness to the world allowed them to bypass an obstacle or otherwise survive a dangerous situation.

Neither approach is more “correct” and it is largely bad luck, combined with Sam’s growing frustration with himself and their situation, that was responsible for him getting stung and, ultimately, the world’s fault that he was killed. Like the ambush predators that make up so much of this world, sometimes danger is all around you and you just don’t realize it because you don’t have the perspective you need to see it. In the end, it is only Sam’s focus on completing his mission rather than his specific survival, that allows him to help get Ursula within spitting distance of the finish line, even if the danger he is most cautious of at that point is himself, and Ursula’s attentiveness to the world around them that allows Sam’s more restrained approach to be brought to bear where it will actually be effective. Neither one of them would have made it to the end (or incredibly close to it, in Sam’s case) without the other, since the two of them working in tandem, each balancing the other out in a harmony all of their own that resonates within the larger harmony of the planet itself, is the only thing that allows them to overcome their most severe challenges.

What really sets these two apart from the other characters in this world is how readily they’ve adapted to using the plants and creatures of the planet to support their lives and adventures. Sure, they mostly eat the food they brought with when they left the wreck of their ship, but everything from light in the darkness to breathable air in a toxic environment to aboveground transport to emergency escape balloons is something that they picked up on planet. Even more amazingly, none of that seems to be harmful in any kind of lasting way to the creatures they’re interacting with. Sure, it is probably not pleasant for the beast whose innards they harvest to act as glowsticks for their underground explorations, but the scars on its side show that it has survived multiple harvests and the placid way it allows this to happen makes it seem like it doesn’t really hurt it, either. In fact, the only creatures these two characters kill are the ones they are forced to kill in self-defense. Most of the time, they work to avoid conflict where they can rather than fight it. Sure, part of that might be a result of their only weapons being a pair of heavy-duty knives, but you can see Ursula’s influence in their attempts to avoid harming creatures and Sam’s caution in their efforts to avoid anything that looks dangerous.

Elsewhere on the spectrum of coexistence versus conquering and harmony versus conflict is our next major pair (which includes, according to IMDB, the character who is in the most episodes, so maybe SHE is the main character, not the Sam/Ursula duo), Azi and her robotic companion Levi. The glimpse we get into Azi’s life before the show’s plot upsets the status quo shows her and Levi attempting to quietly live beside the life they’ve encountered on the planet, doing their best to avoid interfering with it beyond what they had to do to protect themselves. That definitely puts them on the “coexist” side of the spectrum, but much closer to the “conquer” side than Sam and Ursula because, ultimately, Azi is more interested in living a life along the lines of the Human standard, just on this other planet, than she is in finding a way to exist within its ecosystem. We also see this desire for a “normal” life play out in her interactions with Levi. When Levi does something that concerns Azi, either overreacting to danger, showing too much initiative, or appearing to lose focus, Azi berates Levi and has Levi alter their parameters to better suit Azi’s preferences.

This sets up the second juxtaposition Scavengers Reign has to show us. Even as their simple life lived just beside the ecosystem of the world comes under threat, we largely see Azi and Levi on the same page when it comes to how they should act in regards to the world around them. This appearance is quickly brought into question though, as Levi’s behavior continues to diverge from what Azi expects and we see Levi show more empathy towards and interest in the world around them than Azi does. When the local ecosystem breaks down the barriers that Azi and Levi had erected, wrecking all attempts they made to live beside the world rather than in it (by wrecking Azi’s habitat in a storm and her greenhouse full of food crops in a critter rampage), Levi is the one to suggest that they must alter their behavior. Azi does so by erecting more distance between herself and the world around her, making use of the colony or survival supplies (the show never really says which) to pass through the world as quickly as possible in pursuit of the wreck of her ship. Levi does so by getting more in-tune with the world around them, putting them into conflict with Azi.

This minor conflict between Azi and Levi serves as a catalyst for change. Azi’s rigidity tries to reinforce the status quo on Levi, despite their growing awareness of themselves as a discrete entity and ability to experience sensations and desires previously unknown to them, but since Azi is ultimately interested in coexistence rather than conflict, she yields to Levi’s wish to be left to continue developing via their attunement to the planet (which is a literal connection thanks to some kind of mold or similar substance that has been growing inside them, replacing some of their damaged circuitry). This attunement to the world around the two of them provides Azi with the tools she needs to deal with a couple dangerous situations that otherwise likely would have gotten her killed, pushing Azi out of her routines and complacency in a way that makes her truly become aware of the world around her in a way she had avoided prior to this.

Now, in addition to being a potential source of problems, the world has also became a font of solutions if she could only find the right perspective with which to view it. This gradual shift from unity in separate coexistence to conflict and then back to unity but in a more harmonious form of coexistence takes most of the course of the show, but forms the basis for the show’s eventual conclusion about what it means to live as a part of a larger ecosystem. Azi and Levi never quite get to the harmony that Sam and Ursula had originally, but that’s because they have goals beyond temporary survival or travel. Levi is ultimately interested in being something new added to the system rather than learning to live within it and Azi is ultimately trying to do the same thing but by adding humanity to the system that is the planet rather than live entirely apart from it as a temporary, traceless harmony within it.

That said, Azi’s path to that point is far from smooth and it looks for a while that Levi would be denied their goal. Levi is destroyed by a chance encounter with a creature that has broken free of the planet’s ecosystem thanks to a disruptive influence and Azi is forced to go on alone. As she mourns her friend, Azi momentarily falls back into her old patterns as she calls for help on a distress beacon she has was using back when she was trying to stay separate from the planet and its ecosystem. As she casts aside this now-broken device (damaged in the same conflict that destroyed Levi), she forces herself to carry on, now more in-tune with the planet than ever as all the barriers between her and it have been broken. Her primary connection to the planet, Levi, has been lost as well, so she is adrift and winds up growing further from the harmony that she had with Levi when she finally encounters the people, off-world scavengers looking to supply their colony with the goods on the wrecked ship Azi mentioned in her distress call, who have nominally come to rescue her. These people, a trio of rather roguish scavengers working to supply a colony that seems to exist outside the system that our main characters were attempting to provide for, all have their own relationships with the world they find themselves on. Relationships that are highlighted when they learn that they are just as stranded as Azi when they get back to their ship with her in tow and discover that is has been wrecked by the same creature that destroyed Levi (though this fact is not made immediately known to the characters).

Kris, the leader of this group, sees the world and its ecosystem as something to either be avoided or conquered, a philosophy that she also extends to the entire universe as seen through pretty much every interaction she has. She wishes to be the dominant party in all encounters and lacks interest in what anything or anyone else can offer her other than what she has decided she wants from them. She would prefer to avoid interacting with the planet at all if that were possible and will only do what she feels she must on her own, incredibly strict terms. Terrence, the second-in-command of this crew and the one who seems to know Kris best, has a more moderate and passive view, closer to the separate coexistence that Azi initially sought, but with only one eye on the wonderful world around them. He views the world as something of interest, but unimportant. He will examine what he can when he has the time to, but he will not take the time to even engage with it enough to separate himself from it. He tries to be entirely untouched by the planet except when he wants to reach out to it and this attempt quickly fails the first time the world presents a danger to him that does not appear to be dangerous. The very first ambush flora he encounters quickly snaps him up, showing that no environment is so safe and docile as to allow someone to tread through it without being a part of it.

Barry, the youngest of this trio, exists as a counterpoint to Kris’ view of the planet. He is curious, youthfully exuberant, and incredibly incautious. While Kris acts to correct this reckless behavior, she does it by attempting to mold Barry into a tool that fits her worldview rather than allowing him to developer or learn on his own. She even forces him to kill a creature that he disturbed rather than have the group flee from it or kill it herself. She does her best to beat the curiosity and wonder out of him and that leaves him with a worldview similar to the one that Azi started with, except without the caution Azi had or the eye toward the consequences of her actions. He leans some of that when Terrence is caught by the ambush plant, but ultimately Terrence was a force of positive reinforcement for the wonder and joy that Barry felt and even in his absence continues to encourage Barry to be more than the steel blade that Kris has made of herself.

Azi seems to recognize this and often tries to reach out to him, to encourage him to look around at the world they’re passing through on the way to the wreck of her space freighter in the same way that Levi encouraged her. It is only partially successful, though, because of the growing tension between Kris’ dominate-or-die attitude and Azi’s recent shift toward harmonious coexistence, something that she eventually backslides on in order to remove what she sees as a negative influence on the world, herself, and Barry. The growing conflict between Azi and Kris, ostensibly because Kris wants to extract the resources from the wrecked freighter and leave the people to die while Azi wants to rescue the people and doesn’t care about the resources, also represents an aspect of the human and ecosystem relationship we haven’t seen up to this point in the show. Azi is interested in preserving lives and trying to avoid damage to the systems around them while Kris is only interested in extracting value (from the wrecked freighter, from Azi, and even from Barry since her greatest compliment to him is calling him “an asset”) and Scavengers Reign eventually shows us the results of what incautious extraction and careless destruction of the environment can cost us (albeit far more immediately than we usually see in the world).

Her attempts to load up the shuttle with the cargo she wants and escape with it are set back by the destructive means she uses to extract the resources from the freighter. The blast she directs Barry to set up to free the shuttle from its bay alerts the creature that wrecked her ship, bringing it into conflict with her and Barry as they try to collect more resources. Azi, left behind after losing a fight with Kris because Barry, the then-passive observer sides with the person who has directly controlled him for most of his life (and who is his only remaining well-known companion after Terrence’s death) knocks her out, eventually meets up with Ursula and the two of them attempt to mitigate the damage that Kris’ extraction is doing. Kris manages to get out, leaving Barry and a lot of unclaimed resources behind since her true motivation is domination or, failing that, self-preservation, firmly showing that she not only views the world in terms of what she can extract from it, but every other aspect of her life.

Worse even than this self-serving extraction is our final main character, Kamen. When we first meet him, we know nothing about him other than that he is stuck inside his escape pod and slowly losing his mind as his complete separation from the world around him, even if it is secure and fairly healthy (thanks to the supplies in his escape pod), drives him off the deep end. When he is rescued, it is the world coming to break down the barriers between him and it in the form of a small but powerful creature that can use limited telekinesis and some kind of mind twisting abilities to influence and control the creatures in front of it. It uses its powers on Kamen, first to mesmerize him, then to rescue him, and then finally to bind him to it, extruding some kind of black gunk that, when consumed, causes Kamen to believe he is helping his wife in some way when he acts in service to this creature. Unlike every other character, we don’t get to see how Kamen feels about the planet and what he would do to live on it. Before he can more than nearly fall to his death, he is under the influence of this creature (called Hollow by the show’s subtitles) and being subsumed into the ecosystem.

Unfortunately for the world, Kamen proves to be more than the ecosystem can handle. He is able to buck the control of Hollow a little bit, frequently acting beyond its wishes with a capacity no other local creature has. He begins to immediately twist the environment by introducing violence and weapons to a system that had largely been herbivorous until he began to act in it. What starts out as petty revenge against a creature that had taken a piece of fruit he was trying to retrieve at Hollow’s direction becomes the twisting of not just the local ecosystem but Hollow itself. When Kamen is able to eventually deliver some of the fruit Hollow wanted, he also delivers the corpse of the creature that had taken the first piece of fruit and we see a shift in Hollow as it considers the dead creature before in a way that it had never before. Hollow, though powerful in its own way, was much smaller than this creature and the somewhat slow start of its mesmerizing powers meant that anything sufficiently large could quickly flee or strike out if Hollow tried to control it. Kamen was only different because he was stuck in his escape pod during their first contact and so desperately alone that he embrace the visions of his past rather than reject Hollow’s influence.

What this amounts to is a gruesome subversion of the established food chain. Kamen, in service to the creature, becomes an apex predator unlike anything the local ecosystem has seen before. There are many horrible dangers on this planet, many of them more than a match for a single human, but most of the planet is vulnerable to a creature with tools the world has never seen and a predilection for indiscriminate violence. Hollow, driving Kamen onward by pitting Kamen’s memories of his souring relationship with his wife and general feelings of inferiority against him, continues to consume and grow until the two of them are a force beyond what their section of the forest can handle or even support. Kamen hunts larger and larger creatures, eventually event attempting to take down nearby apex predators, but is only able to do so when Hollow intervenes to save Kamen from one and learns that it does not need Kamen to inflict violence on the world around them. This horrible parasitic relationship, Hollow feeding off Kamen as Kamen feeds off it, eventually reveals that Kamen is the parasite as his violence and slow warping of Hollow poison the world around them. We see that this is not some result of Kamen’s isolation or trauma from the wreck but that he was always a violent, angry man who lashed out at the world around him, blaming everyone but himself for his failings and never attending to the needs of the people he supposedly cared about.

Eventually, though, Kamen’s ability to act on the world around him is unnecessary for Hollow to carry on. Nothing can stand against Hollow and the horror of what Kamen has created through his petty, eager violence is revealed when another human, an escapee from the wreck of the space freighter, finds him and is killed by Hollow since this other human threatened to take Kamen away. Kamen’s destruction is complete in this moment and Hollow subsumes him, bring him into its body to give it access to not just Kamen’s memories but his violent and aggressive instincts. A process that Kamen surrender to because we are shown that not only is he responsible for the destruction of the ship, but the death of his wife as well because he did not stop to think of her when he fled the slowly exploding ship (he is witness to her final moments as a result, since she appears at the window of his escape pod mere seconds after he sealed it shut and told it to launch).

As the two of them, Hollow and Kamen, are now bonded together, Hollow sets off across the planet to wreck even more callous destruction than Kamen could have on his own. Hollow is the creature that destroys Levi and the off-planet scavengers’ ship. It is the creature that attempts to not only wreck the ruins of the space freighter when attracted by the explosions that Kris and Barry set off, but also kill all the surviving humans. when it finds them sleeping all in one room. It even creates the conflict necessary to pull Azi away from stopping Kris’ attempts to steal the escape shuttle. All because of Kamen’s destructive influence on the world and almost sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences of his actions to anyone but himself.

When even the other humans prove incapable of stopping the ripples of destruction that Kamen began, the counter to this destructive influence appears in the form of a rebuilt Levi. Levi, now a mix of plant and machine brought together by the planet, Vesta, exerting its influence on the world, shows up just in time to save their friend Azi. Despite an encounter with Ursula as she approached the wreck showing that Levi was not concerned with the plight of the nearby humans any longer, they eventually run to join the conflict when they discover that Azi is in danger. Levi, now a balanced and harmonious meeting of the planet and human influence, is able to counter the destructive power of Hollow, even as Hollow attempts to warp Levi through the use of its mesmerizing and manipulative powers.

Levi, though, brings the entire force of the planet to bear in an instant, unleashing the experience of it going from a cloud of dust in space to the lush, diverse place it is in the show on the warped combination of Hollow and Kamen. As this force of balance between humanity’s influence (as represented by Levi’s metallic components) and the planet’s ecosystem (as represented by the varied plants holding Levi together and turning them into something more than just a robot) pushes against Hollow, we see it stripped of all the influence Kamen had on it, returned to its original smaller shape, and we see Kamen left, alive, on the ground, as Hollow flees. This moment of balance, this assertion of how the world should be, with humans present but not influencing the world around them, sets the baseline for the life the surviving humans will live now that they are being awakened and their one chance to get away is gone.

As the show wraps up, we see this in full effect. The surviving humans, now spilling out of the ship, have created a life beside it, incorporating things from their ship into the bounty of the world around them. The final sequence focuses on the way that Ursula has begun to cultivate and catalog the plant life that exists on the planet and how the other humans have begun to make a home for themselves alongside the planet. We see Levi, now raising smaller creatures that are entirely of the planet but that look like them, content to work in a way that shows the planet more actively influencing itself, changing the local topography in small ways to create something that seems not only pleasing to Levi and their offspring (little creatures growing beneath the flowers we’ve seen growing out of corpses this entire time), but to the many creatures of the planet that live around Levi as well. Even Kamen gets a moment of peace and redemption as we see him silently working under Ursula’s guidance, no longer trying to destroy or conquer but to merely exist alongside the world.

The only person who does not get this is Kris, who we see at the end of the show, drifting through space on the shuttle she stole, when she is finally rescued by some strange space cultists. She doesn’t get much time, though, as attention is stolen from her emaciated, dehydrated form to show one of Levi’s offspring wandering around the ship (brought onboard earlier by Barry, who wanted a souvenir in the form of a flower he found), an alien in a incredibly Human world. This reversal of the show’s beginning, humans scattered about an alien planet that they all influence in different ways becoming an alien plant creature arriving on a massive cultist ship and reaching out to said cult in what is a clear symbol of the same influence the people had on the planet, just seals the focus the show hand the entire time. What influence can we have on our environment, for better for worse, and what influence can our environment have on use, also for better or for worse? The show clearly states that Ursula’s method (harmony led by curiosity, wonder, and careful coexistence) is ultimately the best option for both parties, so long as this happens in a way that meets the environment halfway as represented by Azi’s influence on the community of humans that sprung up around the wreck of the ship.

It is always a treat to see a story so solidly and carefully developed, to reach the end of something so fascinating and realize that the story has been subtly showing you what it is all about since the very first episode. There was nothing in this show that wasn’t carefully and discretely foreshadowed in an earlier episode and every single instance of foreshadowing was the sort of thing that only ever became obvious in hindsight. I managed to catch a few as I went but, as I said in my review, this show did such a great job subverting my expectations just enough that I had to stay on my toes (and the edge of my seat) the entire time. If you read this entire essay without having watched Scavengers Reign, I really hope it has convinced you to go watch the show. Even knowing how most of it will end, there’s still so much more for you to see. I only touched on this one (admittedly sizable) aspect of the show. There’s still so much more of you to go look at and for me to focus on when I inevitably watch it again and, just as inevitably, write about it again. It might not provide the comfort of some of my other favorite shows, but I genuinely do not think I’ve seen a better constructed one.