Every so often, I find some new bit of media that feels so unlike everything else I’ve seen that it fills me with wonder. When I was a kid, it was Lord of the Rings and Narnia. The Legend of Zelda. Halo. Nowadays, now that I’ve read more and seen more, it happens less frequently. Since I studied literature and storytelling, it is very easy to draw lines between things, to find the parallels and the threads that bind it all together since even the most original works still draw their ideas from a well of experiences and past media exposure. Once you know how to look, it gets easy to see echoes of the past in the stories of the present. Which isn’t a bad thing, mind you. All storytellers take the things they’ve seen, heard, or experienced and use them as fuel to power their creativity, taking it all and turning it into something new that still reverberates with their past influences. That is true of all stories, no matter what. Sometimes, though, the story being told brings in new things that inspire wonder if only because they’re just so different. Reading the first novel in The Stormlight Archive was one such experience like this. It was a fantasy world filled with creatures and basic worldbuilding conceits that were entirely unlike anything I’d seen before. An entire world that seemed to have developed from crustaceans’ and shelled creatures. Reading my first Discworld book had a similar effect, but for the method of storytelling rather than the worldbuilding. And now I’ve experienced it again, with the show Scavengers Reign.

I’d heard a lot of good things about the show before I decided to watch it. It honestly seemed like it was right up my ally, based on some of the promotional images I’d seen a while ago and then hearing from multiple trusted sources that it was a wonderful, beautiful show, I decided to eventually give it a try. It wasn’t until this week, when I ran out of new anime episodes to watch and didn’t feel like digging into any of the stuff on my Anime-specific watch list that I decided to give it a try. In fact, I only started watching it because I’d worked a twelve-hour day at my job and didn’t have the energy to play more Spider-Man: Miles Morales. Which turned out to be the correct decision because I didn’t even make it through the show’s opening before I was hooked. There was just something about the calm, contemplative music playing over the scene of a horrible disaster that hooked me instantly. And what an opening it was! The entire premise of the show is laid out in a few seconds by two characters that we never see again. Talk about an economy of exposition! We get not just the show’s premise, but some incredible worldbuilding as well, showing us the sort of culture and tone that most of the people we’ll be meeting later in this episode and in future episodes will have come from. It does this so well, in fact, that we can easily cast aside any need for talk about the past of the characters or what sort of life will be waiting for them once they’ve gotten away because we know, based on this introduction, the broad strokes of each person’s life that would normally be required information for the establishment of each character in a story like this.

The basic premise is fairly simple, too. We follow four survivors of a wrecked cargo ship who have crash-landed on a hospitable but incredibly foreign world. Two of them, an older man and a younger woman, have landed near each other and it is these two characters, Sam and Ursula, that we follow most of the time. We see them collecting various natural resources, mostly without doing any kind of lasting harm to the world, and quickly discover that their goal is to send a signal to the ship they were forced to abandon that will cause it to safely land on the planet so they can wake the remaining crew who are in some kind of cryo-sleep and then take the emergency escape shuttle in order to return to where they’d come from. The remaining part of the show’s premise, something the characters seem to know but never talk about, is delivered via those two characters in the first few seconds of the show. There is no one who is looking for survivors. The company they work for knows more or less where they are, but will not be sending out search and rescue crews. While it could be argued that space travel takes a long time and is probably still prohibitively expensive, the characters in this show never even attempt to justify the actions of their employer. They know they mean almost nothing to whatever megacorporation is either delivering supplies to or running the colonies scattered around the universe that are mentioned but never shown.

From here, the show carries on somewhat predictably. Each of the other characters outside our initial duo is introduced, gets a focused episode, and then we move on. Eventually, they’re all in the mix to varying degrees and the show rotates between them until the end of the season. It feels like your standard fare, and the major plot points are nothing terribly original (since this show is, ultimately, about surviving in a foreign place, which is a well-worn story frame that I immensely enjoy), but each of the smaller beats twists or shifts just enough to keep you hooked. This is one of the few shows I’ve ever seen where I genuinely never even considered how it could end. As it zigged and zagged around all of my expectations in just the first episode alone, I gave up trying to predict it or sense the shape of things beyond what the show itself had told me. Instead, I just let it carry me. The narrative wound up being much more compelling than I thought it would be, even after I’d set aside my initial expectations. I started telling people to watch it after my first three episodes and it was only after that point that my expectations got completely blown away. I won’t say more about the plot yet, since the final three episodes released the day I’m writing this and I don’t want to share anything with spoilers in it until at least two weeks have passed, but I will say that the story is one of incredible humanity. It is about survival, connections, isolation, living as a mode of life beyond mere survival, personhood, and life itself. It is about how all of those are just one split hair away from each other and how that single split hair can sometimes become a yawning chasm if it is not tended to. All of which feels incredibly relevant to me right now since that’s a huge portion of the built-in storytelling of the game I’m running these days, Heart: The City Beneath.

What really stands out about the show, though, is the world the story happens on. It is so unlike our world, with entire complex ecosystems that look nothing like our own. Every creature seems to have some kind of interiority, some degree of self-possession and intelligence that the show mostly conveys through body language, verbalizations, and the actions the creature takes. It displays this incredible, interconnected system of living beings that have found some degree of equilibrium. There is not exactly harmony in the world, but there is a degree of sustainability, something that seems like it should be impossible as more and more of the world gets displayed. The number of things in the world that seem like they should have taken over by now is enormous. The only reason the show gives you to explain why they haven’t is because of what it shows for the much smaller creatures. Everything has a predator, even the other predators. There is nothing here on this world that is wholly safe from everything else. This system is in rough balance, constantly adjusting to the changes within it in a way that makes it all sustainable for the world as whole. It really focuses in on this point, too, showing that with each death, with every decaying, consumed creature, some new kind of life forms from it.

The creatures and plants themselves are incredible. Like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Everything here is different and new and utterly alien to me in a way that makes them still appear entirely at home on the world of their origin. There is never a point where the show lets me forget that the humans the camera is focused on are the alien invaders. That humanity is the grit caught in the cogs of this wonderful biological machine. Nothing looks like the humans. There’s nothing familiar for them, or for the audience, to latch onto since the designs for the creatures and plants all make coherent sense in each other’s context. They are all strange new shapes that seem familiar but not in a way that really maps to anything we’ve got in the primary world. Sure, there are some deer-like creatures, some odd crustaceans, and a bunch of plants that seem familiar, but there’s still just enough different that none of them pass anything greater than a cursory glance. There’s at least something about each creature that sets it apart from anything on earth, that marks it as clearly alien. And there’s a lot each of them have in common with each other. So many creatures in the world produce light in one way or another. So many others are ambush predators. A lot of them rely on speed and the ability to safely flee conflict. Sure, these are a lot of familiar evolutionary traits, but almost none of these broad descriptors is displayed the way we see it on each. Seeing all of the creatures and interesting plants get introduced was always a treat, unlike most other similar cartoons I’ve watched in recent years. So much more fun and interesting than the vague humanoid, goo, or genital-shaped aliens of Rick & Morty (a show I’ve grown to dislike since I first watched it) or the largely human-esque aliens found in Marvel movies and TV shows, and many other franchises like Star Wars (which has plenty of non-human-shaped aliens, but they rarely get much attention).

What really takes the cake, though, and makes the show something everyone needs to watch, is the way it reflects on the human experience of the world. We are shaped by the world on which we live and the world is shaped by us, creating a balance in our better moments and warping either party entirely beyond recognition in our worse ones. The entire show winds up being a treatise on this idea, on how we shape our environment and how our environment shapes us, an idea that it subtly pushes to the front at the very beginning of the show and that comes back time and again in ways that were sometimes more subtle and sometimes more obvious. It really worked through the idea quite thoroughly and I unfortunately can’t say more about it without heading directly into spoiler town. Which is where next week’s blog post will go, since two weeks will have passed by the time it goes up and I’ll be able to write about all the spoilers I want. And will have hopefully talked the show over with someone else by then so I’ll have had a chance to flesh out my thoughts a bit more fully than this frantic, late-night blog post allowed (I went right from the couch where I’d watched twice as many episodes as I’d planned to this evening to my computer desk to start writing this post).

Honestly, this might be one of my favorite shows. I’ve always loved a story about people surviving and adapting in a strange new world. Stories of life and creating a home always appealed to me, though there were few of them that weren’t part of imperialist, colonial narratives. Sure, The Swiss Family Robinson seems fine, but there’s a lot in there that’s a fairly troubling, given that the main characters are on their way to colonize somewhere and mostly just wind up colonizing somewhere else when their ship crashes. Same for pretty much any story about “The Western Frontier” or “Exploring The New World” (I’m looking at you, Little House On The Prairie) since dealing with Native Americans was frequently presented as a danger similar to, say, blizzards or prairie fires, while always conveniently ignoring that the settlers were invading an already lived-in land. Some of that gets touched on, here, in Scavengers Reign, as we see the effects the humans have on the world, but we also see the world defending itself. Additionally, the people who are not just surviving but living a healthy, comfortable life in this place are the ones who have found ways to live within the world’s systems rather try to conquer them. It is probably the only kind of survivor story I can still enjoy nowadays (though I guess Hatchet is probably still okay), especially because it manages to avoid falling down any of the “supreme conqueror” type survivalist holes that have caused the term “prepper” to be strongly associated with people who are hungry for the apocalypse or some flavor of white supremacist. I just really love seeing competent people survive in a strange world in a way that displays their experience via the ways they’ve adapted to a new environment.

I really can’t recommend the show enough. It can get a bit gruesome at times, since we see the circle of life in full effect in this show, but it is never as gratuitous as, say The Legend of Vox Machina was. It’s produced by the same studio, so there’s some overlap in carnage effects, but they feel a lot less gory in this show, perhaps because they’re rarely the focus of the scene and mostly just part of a quick chain of events (except in one case, but then that episode’s entire plot is sort of about that scene). It can also hit pretty hard, emotionally, even though it never really tugs on your heart strings. It just does such a good job of presenting the characters that you can’t really help but feel for them. Plus, the art of the show is absolutely gorgeous and every episode is a visual treat of new biomes, strange creatures, and mysterious plants.