Scavengers Reign, now on Netflix, has so much more to say

In the media landscape of 2024 Scavengers rule feels like nothing short of a miracle. Originally conceived as a 20-minute short film by co-creators Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner, the series was greenlit for a 12-episode season on Max (then HBO Max) and slowly matured in production for several years before premiering last fall. With its emphasis on visual storytelling, phantasmagoric imagery, and heady themes of survival and symbiosis, the most obvious question is simple: How did the creators of Scavengers rule How do you go about perfecting access to this peculiar science fiction universe?

“The main principle [of the original short] was that we followed these characters [as they] “When you run a process through nature, you kind of see this Rube Goldberg-esque process of cause and effect, trial and error,” Bennett tells Polygon. “There was no dialogue, so it was all a visual narrative.” […] Little by little we began to think about the nature of the planet Vesta and what it might be.”

From that small seed of ideas grew a richly detailed imagination of exotic animals, inscrutable native life forms, and a vast, interconnected ecology of creatures living in harmony with one another.”[The idea was] “If each character uses these organisms for a specific function, that has to be consistent throughout the show,” Bennett said. “It’s never just about the characters being the focus. […] These characters are battling so much inner turmoil and psychological stress, and when you see that against the backdrop of this planet, which is unforgiving in many ways, it was always important to keep that dichotomy in mind.”

With influences from as far away as the comics of Jean “Mœbius” Giraud and the animation of René Laloux to the YouTube channel Primitive Technology, Scavengers rule was unique from the start. “One of the things I always heard from Joe and Charles was that they wanted this thing to breathe,” says Titmouse founder Chris Prynoski. “If you watch an episode of Lower deckswe try to pack as much story as possible into one of these episodes. […] [On Scavengers]even the number of shots, it’s like, We can have fewer shots but spend more time making them special.”

Image: Max

But this balance was important; as clichéd as it may sound, the planet Vesta is a character in itself in Scavengers ruleneither benevolent nor explicitly malevolent; a truly alien frontier where the survivors of Demeter 227 face not only the limits of their physical bodies but also the full weight of their personal histories. The focus is never just on the human characters themselves. The series spends as much time, if not more, examining the micro and macroscopic creatures of this beautiful and often hostile world as it does the helpless humans struggling to navigate and survive in it.

Audiences see this not only on screen, but also in the way the series is edited, with close-ups of the survivors of Demeter regularly intercut with wide shots that make them appear as tiny iotas, dwarfed by the immense scale of the strange and unfamiliar landscape that surrounds them. It makes sense that Scavengers rule would place so much emphasis on Vesta’s views and biomes considering how much time and attention the production team put into getting the planet’s appearance perfect.

“We had a nice runway for concept design and building the ecosystems and all that stuff,” Bennett said. From character and creature designs to the environments and sound design, all the elements of the show flowed together. “I’m a big believer that when you create any kind of show, you have to have that thread [of the creative process] where the composer makes music, and you would send that to the animators, and that would inspire them in some ways. Then you would take some of the drawings that the concept designers do, and you would send those to the writers, and that’s inspiring to them.”

Image: Max

Image: Max

Image: Max

And you can really see that this creative cycle and symbiosis runs through the entire Scavengers rule, like in the first episode, when Ursula and Sam convert a pufferfish-like creature into an air filter mask and later into an escape device, or when Azi uses the pheromones of a jellyfish-like creature to fend off the advances of a herd of supposedly hostile aliens. “That was the really fun part. You think: These creatures really fit well with these organisms and this foliage that fits well with this whole scenery,” Bennett says, “It was just this idea that, as different as they are, everything still feels like part of a planet and that these things also have some meaning. Whether it’s a benefit to the characters or just their function on the planet.”

The result, even in a show with less dialogue, speaks volumes. The first season of Scavengers rule is shaping up to be a deliberately slow and thoughtful science fiction story about more than just a group of survivors stranded on an alien planet, but a story about what a healthy, mutually beneficial relationship between humans and their environment should ideally strive for. “We wanted to tell a sincere story,” Bennett said. “The pacing was really important, and giving these kinds of things some brevity.” […] It was such an organic process right up until the end. And so things just changed and were constantly being optimized.”

So many changes in such a complicated process can be scary, of course. But it seemed important to the tone of the show. “You get so much better results when people feel like you trust them to get involved,” says Prynoski. “A lot of these primetime comedy shows […] It’s more about putting in jokes, and we’re so glad that wasn’t the tone of this show.”

Image: Max

At the time of writing, it has been over a month since the news first broke that Scavengers rule was cancelled by Max after its premiere last October. Fans and newcomers to the series waited with bated breath for news on a possible renewal of the series by Netflix, which added the series to its streaming library on May 31. When asked about his plans for a possible second season, Bennett stressed that it would focus in part on the mysterious group of gold-masked figures who encounter one of Lev’s techno-organic descendants aboard a stranded scavenger. “I think there’s definitely some kind of roadmap,” Bennett said. “After maybe five or six episodes, it gets vague. But there’s definitely a roadmap, an idea for these guys.”

“If we’re lucky and can do a second season, there will be a lot more context and it will make more sense. But I also like the idea of ​​not knowing anything and just going with the flow and things just change.”

Season 1 of Scavengers rule is now streaming on Netflix and Max.