Name: Why Scavenger's Reign Actually Feels Alien
Uploaded: 2026-01-15T16:56:58.000Z
Duration: 6 min 47 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Relative clauses (Restrictive vs. nonrestrictive)

The only thing that is lacking is the dinosaurs here.

It's like a curse weighing on an entire landscape.

And whoever goes too deep into this has his share of that curse.

So we are cursed with what we are doing here.

While I was watching the stellar new animated science fiction show Scavenger's Reign about human beings stranded on a beautiful, terrifying alien planet, I kept thinking of Werner Herzog.

Specifically this famous clip of him from the documentary Burden of Dreams where he talks about the Amazon rainforest taking a close look at what's around us.

It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder.

And we have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming for Nicolas and overwhelming lack of order.

We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it.

It's easy to laugh at Herzog with his German accented intensity and grave, sometimes grandiose language.

But he's conveying what I think is ultimately a profound perspective on nature and humanity's relation to it.

A perspective that's evoked by his own movies and by Scavenger's reign.

Burden of Dreams documents the making of Fitzgerald.

Herzog's film about a man's determination to drag a massive 360 ton steamship over a mountain in the Amazon jungle.

A feat that Herzog, his crew and local indigenous tribes actually accomplished.

As the doc shows, making Fitzgeraldo was a punishing experience.

The never ending hardships of living and working in the jungle running parallel to the never ending hardships of the characters in the movie.

Only a real confrontation with nature, he felt, could capture its immensity and volatility and brutality on film and then transfer those senses to the viewer.

In Fitzgeraldo and Herzog's other film set in the Amazon, the wrath of God.

Colonial explorers and would be conquerors are confounded, defeated or driven mad by the jungle.

Herzog doesn't present nature as an antagonist to his characters, but

as something that exists outside of human attempts to conceptualize it, which is ultimately more terrifying and awe inspiring.

And that is exactly how Scavenger's Reign presents the ecosystem of its alien planet, Vesta Minor.

Scavenger's Reign tells the story of maroon space travelers, the surviving crew of a downed interstellar cargo ship who are fighting to stay alive and searching for a way home.

But as much as this crew is central to the show, the main character is really the planet itself.

The artists and animators spend a lot of time showing the plant and animal life of Vesta Miner and how they interact in a complex ecosystem.

What's equally complex are the interactions between the planet and the humans.

The characters use nature and are used by it.

They're terrified and bewildered, delighted and astonished.

They form symbiotic relationships with alien animals.

The the AI robot Levi is nurtured and enlightened, while the crew member Kamen is exploited and literally consumed.

The show skillfully avoids simplistic readings of nature.

Vesta Minor isn't just a Garden of Eden, and human beings aren't just avaricious destroyers.

Instead of a mawkish environmental message, the creators of the show opt for something more sublime.

You know, viewers and critics keep coming back to this point that Scavenger's reign actually feels alien.

Personally, I don't think that's down to the bizarre and gorgeous, gorgeous creature and landscape designs, which are really no more bizarre than what you might see in a David Attenborough documentary.

I think it comes from the presentation of a world like Herzog's presentation of the jungle, that is indifferent to the human need to understand it.

In this respect, there's something essentially alien about Earth as well, something that fills us with dread and wonder, something that makes our values look absurd.

It reminds me of this great scene from Aguirre, where the leader of the conquistadors, who are days, hours away from being fully destroyed by the jungle, suddenly announcement.

The jungle's response to this ridiculous pronouncement is silence.

And that unfathomable silence is what's alien, what's foreign to us?

As Herzog says, there is no harmony as we have conceived it.

The key word being conceived, there is a reality beyond our conception, one we can never access in daily life.

Humanity loves its illusions of control and understanding.

One of science fiction's great strengths is its ability to peel back those illusions and confront us with a radical strangeness.

This is what Scavenger's reign accomplishes by foregrounding the ecosystem of Vesta Minor.

In that ecosystem, in that strangeness, we feel our limits, which is humbling, even a little disturbing.

But that feeling is also the closest we can ever get to the real.

I love this show, so if you haven't checked it out, I highly recommend that you do.

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