When it comes to science fiction onscreen, there are some worlds you want to get lost in and others that fill you with deep fear. With the planet Vesta, Scavengers Reign manages to do both.
The series, co-created by Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner as an expansion of their 2016 short Scavengers, sees a group of spacefaring castaways stranded on Vesta. In their attempts to make it home, they'll run into a wide variety of wonderfully weird alien life forms.
These creatures and the landscapes they inhabit are wonders to behold, at once familiar and totally strange, gorgeous and terrifying. Take the otherworldly beasts of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, mix them with the cosmic horror of Annihilation, and you'll get an initial sense of what you can expect from the aliens of Scavengers Reign. (I say "initial" because there are still several surprises in store.)
To learn more about these aliens, Mashable spoke with Bennett about Vesta's real-world inspirations, made-up ecosystems, and the aliens' secret names that didn't make it into the show.
Building an alien ecosystem
While Vesta is an alien planet, a lot of the early inspiration for its flora and fauna came from nature documentaries about good old planet Earth.
"Charles and I realized that it was almost impossible to come up with something totally original that doesn't exist in some way in nature," Bennett told Mashable in a video interview. The process for creating Scavengers Reign's aliens became a matter of finding something fascinating in our world, then pushing it in a different direction. For example, in episode 3, Azi (voiced by Wunmi Mosaku) finds herself in the middle of a stampeding herd of aliens. Physically, these aliens resemble large lizards crossed with horses. But their behavior, including how they move across the plains as one, was originally inspired by birds.
"Birds will navigate and move according to wind patterns, so they follow who's to the left, or to the right, or who's in front of them. There' a kind of choreography that plays into that," said Bennet. "So [with the stampede] we were thinking of doing that, but in the world of sound. These things are going off of sound reverberations, and that's how they're shifting from left to right."
Bennett and Huettner were also inspired by symbiotic relationships in nature and the Gaia theory — which posits the Earth and its inhabitants as being one living entity — to develop the networks of relationships between Vesta's aliens. That sense of a network is already evident in the Scavengers short, in which two survivors on Vesta gather resources in a chain reaction: One alien's waste causes plants to grow, those plants contain a vital ingredient for the next stage of the scavengers' quest, and so on. Bennett described this unfolding of events in Scavengers as being similar to a Rube Goldberg machine.
In Scavengers Reign, he and Huettner take that Rube Goldberg machine planet-wide, from crimson deserts to underground forests. We witness symbiotic relationships and parasitic ones as well, as well as the interplay between predator and prey. In episode 2, sea creatures suck their eggs from a beach using a vacuum-like nozzle, all in order to shelter them from a storm. Not long after, bug-like predators take advantage of the eggs being in one place, sneaking down the very same nozzle in order to attack. That sequence is just one brief snapshot of life on Vesta, yet it's still a brilliant, in-depth piece of visual storytelling that speaks volumes about Vesta's food chain.
Experience versus exposition
When it comes to learning about the ins and outs of life on Vesta, Scavengers Reign keeps its focus on the sensory rather than on verbal exposition. The series documents each creature as it flies or runs or crawls into frame, letting their natural states wash over you before humans crash through and interfere. And while these humans will use the aliens for their own goals, you'll never hear them talk about their traits or habits, nor will you hear them give any alien species a name.
"I definitely feel very allergic to exposition, especially through dialogue. I just would rather not do it," Bennett said. "It felt a little bit more natural and realistic to not have the characters giving [the aliens] names, because they're just traversing this landscape."
Even though the characters don't name Vesta's aliens, Scavengers Reign's team had to, especially for the sake of the script. The names were mostly descriptive, like naming a parasite that attaches itself to Sam (voiced by Bob Stephenson) "Parasite." However, other aliens received more mysterious names: The toad-like alien who hypnotizes Kamen (voiced by Ted Travelstead) is simply known as Hollow.
According to Bennett, the name "Hollow" is a nod to early ideas for that alien's design. Originally, he was meant to have see-through skin similar to the barreleye fish, whose translucent forehead allows you to see the inner workings of its eyes. However, the challenges of animating Hollow's visible organs in motion — especially in 2D animation — proved nightmarish, and Bennett and Huettner reverted to opaque skin. In the end, the name Hollow stuck as a tribute to that first look.
Hollow is a Scavengers Reign standout.
Hollow remains one of Scavengers Reign's most fascinating alien creatures, even without his organs on display. "We wanted him to have the same kind of feeling as a toad — something that is a harmless little amphibian," Bennett explained. Yet that unassuming exterior hides a mildly sinister hunting trick.
Hollow and his kind feed by tricking other small tree-dwelling creatures into getting them food. They lure these tree-dwellers in with their hypnotizing light-up foreheads — anglerfish, anyone? — before feeding them a dark goo that makes them do their bidding. That bidding is initially just picking fruit from a tree and bringing it back down to Hollow.
You've introduced human greed and gluttony into this animal kingdom, and it's changed the game. What is the ripple effect of that?
However, Hollow's feeding process changes drastically once humans enter the picture. As Hollow's servant, Kamen doesn't just procure fruit. He kills other creatures for Hollow, who begins to hunger for larger and larger prey. This relationship highlights the menacing nature of Hollow's mind control abilities, but it also emphasizes that Hollow is growing into a monster because of human interference.
"You've introduced human greed and gluttony into this animal kingdom, and it's changed the game," Bennett said. "What is the ripple effect of that?"
Beauty, ritual, and the bushwall creature
Due to his control over Kamen, Hollow becomes the closest thing Scavengers Reign has to a traditional alien antagonist. Yet for every terrifying predator or parasite the show's humans come across, Scavengers Reign highlights a beautiful creature in turn. One of the most memorable appears in episode 3, when Ursula (voiced by Sunita Mani) witnesses a small, wrinkly alien (named the "bushwall creature," according to Bennett) pollinating the flower it calls home within a massive wall of branches.
The pollination plays out in an entrancing wave of glowing lights and vibrant plant tendrils. The bushwall creature wakes up within the flower, carries out its task, and then curls up and dies. The whole process — which has its roots in the Scavengers short — only takes a few minutes, but you feel like you've watched an entire world unfold in that short time. In a way, you have, but on a very micro scale.
"[Director Vincent Tsui, Huettner, and I] talked in depth about taking something that feels like a very small, seemingly mundane moment and making it feel sacred and epic in its own way," Bennett said of the pollination sequence in the wall. "There is a ritual that this character has that looks very significant when you put a spotlight on it. But in the grand scheme of things, there's like a million of these in that wall. It's kind of the same thing in real life — we will overlook the brilliance of an ant colony, and how incredible that is, and just don't think anything of it."
That such a seemingly small moment can land so profoundly speaks to Scavengers Reign's deep love of (and investment in) the world it has created. The show's characters may be in a hurry to get off-planet, but Scavengers Reign is content to linger on Vesta's plants and animals, introducing us to intricate ecosystems not too far from our own.
"It was always just an exciting thing to really push as much as we can and make [a creature] feel like it has complexity and layers to it, even if you're not going to be with it for more than a few minutes," Bennett said.
Scavengers Reign is now streaming on Max.
