Scavengers Reign
“The Reunion”, Season 1 Episode 12
Requested By
MrAnimA on our Discord server
What do I know about this series going into it?
Never heard of it. It’s animated and TV-MA.
Recap
Earth, from space. Soft piano music plays over broken pieces of satellites and spaceships and pieces falling from orbit. Aha: this is not a scene but rather the opening credits.
The episode proper begins with two men in a large, echoing metal room, surrounded by glowing pods - most of them white, a few red. They can’t go back the way they came, says one; there’s a creature in the air ducts that they’re afraid of. One of them stares wistfully at a woman in suspended animation, but the other, named Kris, persuades him that they need to leave now.
The ship they’re on is called the Demeter, and there’s a brief glimpse of a dead zombie.
Sometime after they leave, two running people find their way into the same room. They call one another Ursula and Azi, and confirm that most of the sleeping people are still alive. Pressing a few buttons opens a computer terminal, from which Ursula can confirm that “the shuttle is still in the dock” and that Kris and the other guy haven’t reached it yet. Ursula orders Azi (or possibly vice versa?) to start the wakeup process, while she rushes to cut Kris & Friend off.
Which she does, with a flying tackle. “You tried to kill me! You left me out there to die!” she - Azi, it turns out - accuses. Kris deflects the accusation with a transparently false excuse, and Azi pulls out a knife. “They’re alive! And we’re waking them up now!” she says. Kris’s friend is flabbergasted, but Kris is dismissive: “This is a waste of time.” Then, almost unnecessarily, he adds: “I wanted to kill you, but your ‘guardian angel’” (Kris’s friend, named Barry) “is the only reason I didn’t.”
Despite his taunting, Azi does not, in fact, have the guts to kill Kris - or even to stop him from leaving. Instead, she begs: “Please, please don’t do this.”
What she’s begging him not to do, it seems, is take the shuttle and leave her, Ursula, and all the frozen people behind to die.
“This’ll toughen you up,” says Kris. That was the wrong thing to say; Azi punches him in the face.
Back in the suspended animation chamber, Ursula starts the reanimation process, but the screen only shows “CRITICAL FAILURE”. That’s when the creature bursts out of the vents, a sort of crawling whale with a really tiny Noh mask for a face. Ursula hides behind the terminal, connects to the ship’s loudspeaker and cries out, “Azi! Help me!”
And Azi runs off to save her, with Kris mocking her yet again.
Things go from bad to worse for Ursula: the creature has telekinetic powers, it seems, and uses them to tear apart the terminal.
Meanwhile, Kris and Barry have reached the shuttle, but Barry finally puts his foot down. “We’re not leaving.”
Kris pauses, annoyed. He’s not thrilled that Barry has suddenly learned to care about strangers, but he relents. “I guess I can’t stop you,” he says. “We’re not leaving.” He tells Barry to go help. But of course the moment Barry is gone, Kris closes the airlock and prepares to take off without him.
The creature chases Ursula through the corridors1, using its telekinesis to tear apart walls and, finally, drag Ursula herself towards it. Luckily, Azi rescues her just in time by using a power crane to throw an enormous crate at the creature. She tells Ursula to go back and wake up the crew.
“I can’t, the power’s been cut!” she says. Which doesn’t make sense. Shouldn’t they be waking up if there’s no power? What’s keeping their animation suspended?
“Wake them up manually,” says Azi. “There’s a lever on each pod.” While Ursula and Barry head off to do that, Azi confronts the creature. “Do you hear me in there, Kamen?” she says to it.
This momentarily distracts the creature, which has a flashback to some past time when, it seems, it used to be a human named Kamen and fell to Earth from space.
Ursula and Barry have reached the pods and begin pulling levers, waking them up one by one. But then they hear the noise of the shuttle taking off. “She’s leaving without me!” cries Barry, dismayed, and runs back to the shuttlebay. He bangs on the doors, begging Kris to stay: “I trusted you!” But Kris doesn’t care.
It seems I was wrong about Kris being male.
Elsewhere in the ship, Kamen is chasing Azi through narrow corridors, using its telekinesis to widen them and fire bolts from the sides of the walls at her. Eventually, Azi leaps out of a porthole, and Kamen follows. They land on the surface of the planet outside, and Kamen headbutts Azi, then uses its telekinesis to pin her against the side of the ship. It presses her against it, stronger and stronger - but then they both look up and see the shuttle take off without them.
Azi shouts: “Noooo!” And Kamen, too, is dismayed, momentarily releasing her from its telekinetic grip. I guess it, too, was trying no less than the others to escape this planet, and without the shuttle it can’t do so…
Ah well, no use crying over spilled milk. Kamen stomps on top of Azi, brings its mouth close to hers, and starts to release some sort of black bile…
Then, for the second time today, an enormous metal thing smacks Kamen away just before it can (do whatever it is) to its pray. This time it’s a strange humanoid-shaped metal-plant creature which Azi recognizes as her friend “Levi”.
“You’re alive!” Azi cries, embracing the creature. “How?”
“I’m not sure,” says Levi - who sounds like she’s talking through the plant creature via radio.
“But you came back for me,” says Azi. She moves out of the way, so that Levi can fight Kamen properly.
Kamen charges, and again releases black bile - this time forwards, and directly into what passes for Levi’s mouth.
That’s when a redbearded man falls out of the sky and lands on Kamen.
Whaaaaat.
Fireworks. Images of galaxies, the surfaces of stars. A montage of evolution, from amoeba to plant to landwalking creature, interspersed with images of volanoes and landmasses moving. This isn’t Earth, though; the creatures are decidedly alien. We’re following the evolution of some kind of alien life, from the beginning of the universe and up to the moment it becomes the Kamen creature.
Who is, it seems, still standing there up against Levi. No redbearded man fell out of the sky on it; the black bile has reacted with Levi to emit some sort of enormous energy pulse that disintegrates Kamen, leaving only, at the center, the redbearded man.
He is holding a tiny version of the monster that he had become, which wakes up and starts to crawl away; Azi tosses a rock at it to persuade it to move faster.
Maybe she should kill it so it doesn’t take over another human? Or was it, too, not responsible for what happened?
Azi returns to the suspended animation room; a lot more pods are red than there were before. And Ursula apologizes: “I couldn’t get to them all.”
“They should all be dead,” Azi reassures her. “Everyone that’s alive is alive because of you.” At least those in the white pods will wake up safely.
Barry is in a corner of the room, sobbing at Kris’s betrayal.
Levi enters, carrying human-Kamen. Ursula asks what happened to him; Azi doesn’t know and doesn’t care.
It feels like we’re not really getting answers here, are we?
There’s one specific pod that we’ve the characters approach a couple of times. Azi now approaches that pod and opens it, awakening “Mia”, who is horrified to see how many of her shipmates have died. But they proceed to wake up the remaining few who survived.
Some time later, in a plant nursery on board the crashed ship, a woman (possibly Ursula?) thanks Kamen for helping her out, saying he’s a “natural” at this. Kamen just looks at her and doesn’t respond; I imagine he feels guilty for what he did as the Kamen-monster. Over a montage, we see how the rest of the crew have begun to build a home on this planet, exploring and cataloguing the alien flora and fauna. We then see Levi, uprooting a plant creature to find a globe in its roots, from which she extracts a miniature Levi-monster. Her child? Another member of the species that ‘merged’ with Levi to create the Levi-monster? What is going on here?
It just gets weirder. In deep space, Kris’s shuttle is collected by an enormous vessel…
The mummies, whose faces are Kamen-monster-like Noh masks, enter the shuttle to find it overrun with plants, and find Kris, who begs them for water. A tiny Levi-monster is there too, and it reaches its hand out to them.
Lingering questions
How did Kamen and the alien creature merge? Why did it turn evil? Was that Kamen’s fault or the alien’s? Why didn’t Azi treat the alien as a threat and kill it?
How did Levi and the alien plant merge? Why wasn’t it evil like the Kamen-monster was?
What was the Kamen-monster trying to do with its black bile? Why did its interaction with the Levi-monster cause it to disintegrate? Why did we see all of evolution when that happened?
Why do those aliens worship a human skeleton holding a censer? What is the tiny Levi-creature going to do to them?
Will the crew survive on the planet? Will anyone come to rescue them?
Ratings
I evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. This will likely differ greatly from how the episode works in its proper context. And it should go without saying that the following does not apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.
The rating system is from 0 to 10, where 5 is considered average for television. These are intended to be measurements, not judgements; a low rating may reflect low quality, but it may also reflect a deliberate choice. For example, a strong character piece may have no plot, or a finale may intentionally provide no closure - neither of which makes an episode bad.
Story: 2/10. A simple plot that is unfortunately marred with a few plot holes.
It’s not clear, for example, what the Kamen creature was trying to do. At first, I thought it was trying to eat (or in some other way absorb) Ursula. After all, if it was merely trying to kill her, it could have just telekinetically torn her head off - or, barring that, collapsed the corridor on top of her. In tearing the corridor apart to get to Ursula, it’s clear it’s trying to accomplish something more specific than murder. This is of course supported by whatever it was trying to do with the black bile.
But then, when it attacks Azi, it shoot bolts at her with deadly force, then pushes her against the side of the ship in an attempt to crush her to death. Did it give up on its black-bile goal temporarily, then switch back to it seconds later? Why?
Similarly, the power has been cut in a very specific and convenient way: only the mechanism that revives the crew is no longer powered, but the pods themselves are still working perfectly. And then it turns out that there was no reason for this plot contrivance in the first place: Ursula and Barry could still go back to the room and reanimate the crew manually. There was no need for this detour; the episode could just as easily the awakening process be successful, with Ursula needing to return to open the pods from the outside (just as Azi herself ended up doing even though Ursula had already pulled the levers). Ultimately, all the running back and forth to the pod room felt like padding.
Writing: 4/10. Perfectly fine as it goes, but the writers relied too much on the unexpected, coincidental, last-second rescue. Ursula is being helplessly dragged towards Kamen’s nonexistent maw? Unexpected, coincidental, last-second flying crate. Azi is being pressed against the ship until she explodes? Unexpected, coincidental, last-second distracting shuttle. Azi is pinned to the ground about to be (whatevered) by black bile? Unexpected, coincidental, last-second flying tackle from Levi.
It was like they had written Kamen to be far too powerful and didn’t know how the characters could possibly defeat it. Notably, the one time somebody is up against Kamen and they don’t use the UCLS trope, they just cut away. We don’t have any idea how Ursula escaped from it to even reach the point where she was fleeing.
I’m not taking points off for Levi’s defeat of Kamen, despite it seeming like a deus ex machina. I choose to assume that whatever she did to disintegrate and separate him into his component parts was a well-established ability from previous episodes. But that’s a big assumption, given how often the characters state outright that they don’t understand what was being done to them.
Production: 5/10. Good music, average animation, average editing. The acting was fine, except for one really awful line read from Barry, where one moment he’s sniffling about being left behind, and the next moment he states “I think I broke my wrist” as though it were a weather report.
Characterization: 4/10. There’s a good moment, near the end, where Kamen is tending to his tree-creatures and you can see that he is mortified and withdrawn after everything he did as the Kamen-monster. I liked that; I felt that I got a brief glimpse into his soul.
Beyond that, however, I wasn’t able to get much of a read on the characters.
Azi’s characterization seems the most inconsistent - she’s clearly the most physically and emotionally tough character, able to face down monsters with aplomb, yet Kris expressed absolute certainty that she would not be able to do anything to stop her from reaching the shuttle. And Kris turns out to be right. This clashes greatly with the self-assured, determined Azi that we see fighting Kamen for the entirety of the rest of the episode.
Is it just that Azi isn’t a murderer? Because that doesn’t mean much.
Accessibility: 6/10. The basic plot was easy to follow, and the characters used each others’ names conveniently early. Of course, I have no idea what created the Kamen and Levi monsters, nor do I understand what the black bile and the evolutionary montage were about. And let’s not even get into the creepy spaceship at the end…
Closure: 4/10. The Kamen-monster might be defeated, but the crew are still stranded on this planet, and the episode set up multiple explicit and implicit cliffhangers. There’s not much closure here at all.
Do I want to watch the series now?
I’d need some convincing that the plot holes have greater justification in context, or that I missed something important. The latter, of course, is always a possibility - nay, probability - given that a third of my attention is devoted to trying to learn the plot and characters from scratch, while a third of my attention is devoted to taking notes. So even if something is explained in the episode explicitly, I’ll sometimes miss it.
Is there a series finale you’d like me to try? Join our Discord or leave a comment below.
When the last scene ended, they were facing one another at point-blank range in the center of a large room. How did she get far enough away from it to even start fleeing?