Scavengers Reign

This is a show so good that I refused to make popcorn for the season finale. I did not want to miss a single chirp, hiss, or squelch. I didn’t want to be grabbing something so prosaic as a salty puff ball when here is a majestic (and probably still salty) and vividly alive puff ball alighting from a bubbling alien landscape to spread its puffiness across the sky and whirp…disappear out of site into the accumulation of now-offstage, mind-meltingly ingenious flora and fauna articulated by the creators of this thrilling experience.

If you’ve been keeping tabs, you know I love Jung. I therefore really love storytelling that gets into and under the nervous system and reminds you you’re a human, especially when it takes its time to do so, creating a mood and an atmosphere that, like poetry, manage to put us in touch with a version of us we didn’t know existed. This is why I love Tarkovsky. At the same time, I really love science fiction, like the shows Black Mirror and Pluribus, where insanely detailed and Raymond-Carver-short stories make you confront the reality of technological apotheosis and touch the boundaries that still separate human from machine.

Scavengers Reign plays to both sides of my storytelling hunger. It’s both moody and precise. I re-engaged my Netflix subscription to follow the real-time Stranger Things wave crashing across America. I don’t watch sports unless I’m at a friend’s house, so I don’t often experience the sensation of feeling the feelings I know all my neighbors are feeling in all the buildings within earshot out my window at the same time. The Stranger Things finale reminded me of being in Cambridge for the finale of Cheers, and how the whole nation, and especially Massachusetts, just fell to pieces saying goodbye to those Boston characters, all at once. It was audible across the city. Or being alive to see the Iron Curtain come down, when we could all watch, in real time, together, on TV, human beings begin to just walk peacefully across lines that had separated the world for decades (all because a president who had been hired to keep a war going lost his mind enough to insist on peace).

When ST ended I caught up on Black Mirror and finished the second season of Arcane. I will write separately about Arcane. It seems that animation, paradoxically enough (especially anime- and graphic-novel-inspired animation) is one of the art forms best suited to tackle this moment in history when time seems to be fracturing against the endpoint of the planet’s limited life. As if ‘storybook’ forms of animation that aren’t hyperrealistic capture the part of our imagination that took off when we saw the shadows of flames animate the pictograms our fellow cavemen made on the walls. I think we find this kind of flickering, oneiric storytelling comforting, so we allow it to communicate profound truths about the reality of being human (as opposed to animation like Love Death + Robots, which I also like, but which makes us question reality altogether).

The soundscape of Scavengers Reign is really something. It reminds me of David Lynch so much that I can’t help thinking of him smiling down from Humanist Heaven in appreciation. It blends music and effects into an audio tapestry that feels like an acid trip. You go through very precise emotional states created by this music and these sounds. And the ride is very much a rollercoaster. You are in an alien world, full of all kinds of expressions of Darwinian adaptation. Creatures you’ve never seen (rendering the phenomenon of expectation utterly useless in this dreamlike dimension) make up your entire experience as you try to find your way back to your damaged ship. Characters are separated across this landscape because their escape pods all landed in different locations. But your journey through Scavengers Reign is always one of complete surprise at the wonders and dangers of evolution as you attempt to reunite with your fellow travelers on the mothership.

Along this journey, we see what happens to aliens who land here. And there are, perfectly enough for storytelling purposes at a time when the line between man and machine is being deliberately blurred, two distinct types of aliens. Human and robot. Or, more precisely, humans plural and one robot whose name is Levi. Just as toxoplasmosis uses the strongest evolutionary tools it can muster to rewire a mouse’s brain so that it will run toward a cat instead of away from it (and thereby be eaten, and thereby be excreted, causing the creation of more contagious toxoplasmosis), this alien planet seeks to absorb and use the aliens to its own advantage. Or, stated from a different perspective, the humans and robot must adapt. And it’s these very adaptations that begin to unravel truths about the human psyche that we forgot we knew until we see them carefully, precisely, represented on the imaginative cave walls of Scavengers Reign.

You’ll notice there’s no apostrophe. Neither before the ’s’ nor after it. By the time you get to the end of this wondrous, psychedelic journey through a remarkable parable of God being broken into pieces which are now trying to find each other through the world of the flesh, you realize that for life to exist, scavengers must reign.