An imaginary planet that feels extremely real

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Speaker 16 I want you to try and picture something. It's pretty weird, but just stay with me for a minute.

Speaker 16 A middle-aged man is on this strange, lush, faraway exoplanet. He walks up to this enormous blue, kind of rhino-sized animal, slices it open, and he crawls inside.

Speaker 16 The blue rhino thing is still alive and fine, by the way, And its skin closes up behind him.

Speaker 16 Now the guy's inside the animal, and he grabs something that looks like a sort of tendon, which releases a sac.

Speaker 16 And then he reaches in and pulls something that looks like almost a lever made out of animal tissue, which then ends up releasing these two orbs.

Speaker 16 The whole thing is like a living Rube Goldberg machine.

Speaker 16 But it's not over. The guy presses down with his foot on one of the animal's organs and it spits him out along with the orbs, all covered in spittle.

Speaker 16 These little critters show up and they love that, so they start eating up as much of the spittle as they can. And then finally, the guy smacks the two orbs together, almost like cracking a glow stick.

Speaker 16 They light up and he uses them as flashlights as he and his friend walk off into the forest in the dark.

Speaker 17 Okay,

Speaker 16 if you're listening to this and just going,

Speaker 16 what in the world?

Speaker 16 You're not alone. That's exactly how I felt when I first saw this.
It's one of the first scenes of Scavenger's Reign, this show about a group of people marooned on an alien planet.

Speaker 16 And when I first saw it, I kind of lost my mind. Or I guess I didn't really know what to think.
The scene had no dialogue, no explanation.

Speaker 16 You're just thrown into this blue alien rhino Rube Goldberg machine along with this guy you don't know.

Speaker 16 But the whole thing immediately sucked me in just because of how alien the whole thing felt. Like alien in the truest sense of the word.

Speaker 16 Planets in sci-fi shows or movies, they're usually places like Tatooine and Star Wars or Arrakis and Dune.

Speaker 16 You know, it's just like, oh, here's a desert planet or here's a big animal with a weird name or an extra eye or something.

Speaker 16 But the planet in Scavenger's reign actually feels like something new.

Speaker 16 Something I couldn't have dreamed of, which I think is what an alien planet should feel like.

Speaker 16 And what makes all of this even weirder for my broken brain is that at the same time, this planet almost feels feels real.

Speaker 16 Like it has its own evolutionary history, like it's got legitimate ecosystems that are built on consistent rules.

Speaker 16 It feels like I'm getting a small glimpse of an actual, fully formed world out there somewhere.

Speaker 16 I've watched Scavenger's Reign twice now, and it already feels like one of those things I'm going to keep returning to. and probably talking about forever.
I'm sure you've had that feeling before.

Speaker 16 When something something hits your brain in exactly the right way, when a movie or a song or a book or an idea seems like it was created just to make you happy.

Speaker 16 You try to tell your friends, maybe some of them get it, but not the way you do, not the way they should.

Speaker 16 And it leaves you with a personal unexplainable. What makes this thing so good?

Speaker 16 And why can't I stop thinking about it?

Speaker 16 So today on the show, we're going to try something a little new. Every once in a while, one of us is going to pick something we can't get enough of, and we're just going to ask, why?

Speaker 16 Why does this thing hit me like nothing else does?

Speaker 16 So I'm Noam Hasenfeld and my unexplainable is Scavenger's Reign.

Speaker 16 I want to know how it's possible to create something this alien that still somehow feels

Speaker 17 real.

Speaker 16 All right, let's just

Speaker 16 jump right in. Why don't we introduce both of you, your names, and the best way to introduce you on the show?

Speaker 18 I'm Joe Bennett. I'm one of the co-creators of Scavenger's Reign.

Speaker 17 And I'm Sean Buckaloo. I'm one of the writers and a co-executive producer.

Speaker 16 So tell me about the planet these people are marooned on in Scavenger's Reign, Planet Vesta.

Speaker 18 So yeah, Planet Vesta is like a mirror to planet Earth. Like this is a planet that just happens to to fit in that little Goldilocks window.
It's got the right habitable zone.

Speaker 18 And so I think as far as storytelling, we wanted to make the planet almost feel like a character in and of itself, you know, like as we're making up these ecosystems and everything, really trying to make that feel as real and grounded as possible.

Speaker 18 And as much as we could, try to find,

Speaker 18 I guess, significance and utility out of everything that you see, that it's it's not just eye candy. I want people to really feel like they've been so immersed in it that you could smell the mud.

Speaker 18 You know what I mean? Like that's a, that was a really important thing.

Speaker 17 Yeah. How did you do that?

Speaker 16 How did you make this place feel super alien and also like it had its own set of rules or something?

Speaker 17 Well, I felt like we had a rule in writing it, like, think through what the entire kind of closed loop of any ecological thing you're seeing is. Like,

Speaker 17 for example you see these creatures that will fall from the trees and then splat on the ground

Speaker 17 and their bones become this like smelly fruit and our characters kind of get in the middle of it

Speaker 17 but then i think for us it was thinking through like what is this cycle how would it work so that it's sort of a closed system right i mean that was sort of a closed loop that isn't really even explained in the episode.

Speaker 18 In fact, you find out later on that there are these little holes in the canopy. And the idea is that, like, these birds that exist up here, sometimes they fall through.

Speaker 18 And that's how they die. And this is what kind of creates the cycle.
Their bodies decompose and create the fruit. And then you have the sort of like slug creatures that eat it.

Speaker 17 And another thing, too, another kind of like rule was or just way of thinking about the nature was that like it's totally neutral there's no evil villains it's a very merciless neutral place yeah it's like these things would happen without any people there and it would be fine and it would be nature and then what if you plop a person right in the center of it what happens they get scooped up they get killed they get you know but you're like it's only strange and crazy sort of to the eyes of a human perceiver who would find this all inexplicable and exotic and blah blah blah but for the planet it's just this is the same as getting pricked by a little thorn or other weird stuff that happens on Earth.

Speaker 18 Yeah. And a big source of inspiration was Werner Herzog.
This was in Burden of Dreams, and he's standing in front of just thick vegetation and there's birds and he's talking about like,

Speaker 18 this sounds pleasant, but this is a violent place.

Speaker 19 The trees here are in misery and

Speaker 19 the birds are in misery. I don't think they sing.
They just screech in pain.

Speaker 18 There's predators, there's prey, but they all are kind of like dependent on each other. This is all part of the whole circle of life, and this is all a necessary thing that has to happen.

Speaker 19 There is no real harmony as we have conceived it. It is the harmony of

Speaker 19 overwhelming and collective murder.

Speaker 18 And it's funny, you brought up tattooing earlier. I felt like that kind of came up a lot too, where it was like,

Speaker 18 you know, you never really see this, but like, how great would it be if like Luke goes on tattooing and we spend just a little moment on this incredible planet like what if he just like decided to go for a hike yeah

Speaker 18 or or i mean i don't even remember the name of the planet but where like yoda lived and luke was

Speaker 17 what is it

Speaker 17 dorks nerds over here

Speaker 18 but like that was as a kid it was exciting to see that where it felt like you were the deepest in that kind of nature than you usually are in these movies.

Speaker 18 Because I don't know, there was something so uninteresting about being in these kind of big sterile ships, but you know, getting into the dirt and the bark and the mycelium and all of the stuff that's part of this planet.

Speaker 18 I mean, there was a big kind of like ASMR element to this too that we wanted to do. There's a scene where it's like...

Speaker 18 One of the people that got ruined on the planet is rubbing his hand against the bark of a tree. And I was like, I really want to hear that.
I want to know what that texture is.

Speaker 18 So it's like, let's build this out, but then not explain it. Like we wanted to be very careful about not using a lot of exposition.

Speaker 16 Yeah, there was like no dialogue in that entire opening blue rhino scene.

Speaker 18 Yeah. I mean, I think a big thing in sci-fi stuff that turns me off is like everything has like names and it doesn't feel totally real.

Speaker 18 If you were walking in nature on another planet, I mean, there's just going to be so many things that are hitting you that are just totally new.

Speaker 18 And I think that especially in the world of like TV animation, a lot of exposition is kind of given through dialogue.

Speaker 18 And I thought as much as you can, just have it just be more of a visual thing, kind of watching a process and you pick things up as you go.

Speaker 18 I mean, I was really into this YouTube channel called Primitive Technology.

Speaker 16 Oh, I love that channel.

Speaker 18 It's such a great channel.

Speaker 18 And yeah, so it's this guy that sort of, he lives out in new zealand and he doesn't talk he doesn't say anything the whole time but he's just sort of building a thatched hut or a kiln or a bone arrow whatever and you watch him go through those stages but the nice thing about it is that you're really kind of watching him figure it out and by the time he finishes making it it's so satisfying you feel like you've like made it with him I think also just, I mean, this is a testament to that there were, you know, scripted natural phenomena in the world.

Speaker 17 But then I think we had such an amazing team of artists that I think like when you gave people scenes, it was like they would do such a good job of just adding little guys everywhere of like,

Speaker 17 there are these big things, there are these predators, there are these whatever.

Speaker 17 But then it's just like, there's just a hundred little insects that do little funny.

Speaker 17 There's a scene in one episode where one of the characters leans up against a tree and there's just a little thing that vibrates and then like flies away.

Speaker 17 And it wasn't in the script. It was just added by the the storyboarders.
And I think the point was, like, you just need to get a character's attention to the sky. How do you do that?

Speaker 17 A little dude who, you know, like Spider-Man's around and he's a little shelled creature. And whoops, you just accidentally leaned into him because he like camouflages against the tree.

Speaker 17 Stuff like that. That just is artists getting to flex their imaginative abilities that makes it, I think, it feel like there's just living things all over the place.

Speaker 16 There's a sense in which, just listening to you talk about this, it feels like this show was almost like a documentary on planet Vesta, that there happened to be some people involved.

Speaker 17 I mean, another reference point, too, for us was that movie Koyana Scotsi,

Speaker 17 where there's sort of moments where it feels like you're seeing human systems being depicted as nature.

Speaker 17 And I think that was also really interesting to us of like this question of unknowable versus knowable. And it feels like at some level, everything is kind of understandable as movement patterns.

Speaker 16 I mean, Koyana Scotty, I love that you bring that up. That's one of my all-time favorite movies.

Speaker 16 Because it looked at Earth and somehow made it feel alien.

Speaker 17 Yeah, I mean, I feel like we had a feeling like everything that you think is crazy on Vesta is sort of derived from a real thing that happens on Earth.

Speaker 17 Even if it's just like, I mean, Joe had this interesting image back when we were working on the pilot that was sort of like, if you take microphotography, like microscopic images of like fingernails and like dead hair cells or skin cells, but then you put two little people into that and make it a landscape.

Speaker 17 And it sort of reorients your sense of scale and your sense of whatever. So I think there was a lot of like, here's an observation of something that happens in.

Speaker 17 real life, but what if you just manipulate the scale? That alone can make it feel like, whoa, this is now this totally alien experience. Right.
Yeah.

Speaker 16 Yeah. It makes me think of my dad used to say, like, a star looks brighter when you look just to the side of it.
Like, if you look right at the star, it's kind of dim.

Speaker 16 If you look just to the side of it, the star looks a little bit brighter.

Speaker 16 And there's a way in which you can get at a question better if you look just to the side of it or use something a little different as a comparison. That's great.

Speaker 16 It sort of feels like maybe that's what you're doing with Vesta. It's like Earth.
It's just to the side of it and it actually becomes completely alien. And it makes us realize how alien Earth is.

Speaker 17 Yeah, you can't outdo Mother Earth in terms of strangeness. Like, I think if you landed and you saw an angler fish on another planet, you'd just be like,

Speaker 17 I'm in hell. This is the scariest thing I've ever seen.

Speaker 16 So, what does it mean to live in the scariest place with the scariest things you've ever seen?

Speaker 16 That's next.

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Speaker 16 Okay, so we've been talking about how you guys made Planet Vesta seem real, but also alien, but also somehow familiar.

Speaker 16 Did you have any rules or guidelines when it came to the people that got marooned on the planet?

Speaker 17 Well, I would say that there were rules about character sets having different relationships to nature. And I think there's a feeling of like,

Speaker 17 do you want to conquer nature? Do you want to live in harmony with nature? I mean, to the people who want to control nature, you will be sort of punished in X, Y, and Z way.

Speaker 17 And to the people who want to harmonize with nature, that doesn't work so well either because nature doesn't necessarily want to form your kind of version of harmony.

Speaker 17 So it puts you through the ringer in that way.

Speaker 16 It's fascinating to me that you say that because that's kind of one of the biggest reasons I wanted to talk to you because I feel like our show, Unexplainable, when we relate to science, we're trying to look at the things that are really, really hard to explain, that are maybe fully unknown, that are slippery.

Speaker 16 And one of the things we like to talk about a lot is humility in the face of the unknown and just sort of look at things that we can't fully understand with clear eyes.

Speaker 16 And I wonder, were you thinking about similar themes in your show, about humility in the face of the unknown?

Speaker 17 Definitely.

Speaker 17 I think, well, in the writer's room, I remember we had that Cast for David Friedrich picture that's like the guy standing at the edge of the cliff, this kind of like staring out into the void and the idea of like the sublime, that it's sort of like

Speaker 17 people looking at a tidal wave that's going to destroy your entire world. And it's, I think, putting people into a context of

Speaker 17 everything is just this overwhelming unknown, you know? And

Speaker 17 I think we talked a lot about like.

Speaker 17 Is this a prison or is it this pastoral paradise or is it this other thing? And how do you relate to that?

Speaker 17 If you were told, okay, you have to live the rest of your life on this planet, could you form meaning in that or would that just be hell?

Speaker 17 And I think that nature is a big part of that, that your understanding of earth is a lot of how you form meaning.

Speaker 17 And I think that, you know, this might be more personal than the theme of the show, but to your question, how do you explain the unknowable? Do you understand it as

Speaker 17 there is a rational scientific principle behind this and we will eventually know it if you observe it well enough? Or there are unknowable elements of human experience.

Speaker 17 And whatever you want to call that, you have to just live in not knowing. And, you know, I think that this is in some ways the basis of religion is how do you find meaning and explain the unknowable.

Speaker 17 And I don't know.

Speaker 17 I think for our characters, they're on these sort of like spiritual quests within that of formulating meaning around consciousness, around being alive, dying, you know, how they live in the environment.

Speaker 17 I don't know. So that to me is part of it.

Speaker 18 Well, also in regards to the planet, I think it was like really thinking about the like the fragility of this planet.

Speaker 18 And, you know, there's moments where it kind of feels like it's getting sort of untethered and you start to realize how delicate it all is.

Speaker 18 But then there's also this kind of resilience, this like heartbeat to the planet that feels so incredibly strong.

Speaker 18 I do think that like we're,

Speaker 18 especially now, dealing with things that like the ocean, we have, we don't know how this ocean works and we're destroying it.

Speaker 18 And there are so many different kinds of

Speaker 18 aspects to this that I feel like we have no idea what we're doing, but we're utilizing these things for our benefit. And now we're obviously seeing the repercussions to that.

Speaker 18 And I think it was just kind of like thinking about Planet Vesta as sort of a similar thing.

Speaker 18 There's a harmony and there was a a balance, like a homeostasis that existed before these characters got there.

Speaker 18 And just like, how quickly does it take for like six characters to just completely unravel that

Speaker 16 sean joe this was such a pleasure oh amazing thank you thanks so much for coming on the show thank you thank you for having us

Speaker 17 yeah and just to say i mean it means a lot that your perspective on the show i think is you know, for some people, I think it's sort of an action sci-fi show.

Speaker 17 So it's so nice to, even if we're inarticulate with our answers, it's so refreshing to just be able to have this kind of conversation about the show because it's so what we wanted people to pick up from it.

Speaker 17 And, you know,

Speaker 17 it means a lot, just, just your perspective and questions.

Speaker 18 100%.

Speaker 16 I kind of have a sense that a lot of our listeners will have seen this show, knowing our listeners.

Speaker 17 But if they haven't, highly recommend it.

Speaker 18 Cool. Thank you so much.

Speaker 16 That was Joe Bennett and Sean Buckaloo. Their show is called Scavenger's Reign, and you can find it on Netflix.

Speaker 16 Season one is finished, and as of now, season two has frustratingly not been picked up yet.

Speaker 16 But they made a teaser, which they put out, and they've got tons of ideas for whenever it finally happens.

Speaker 18 Yeah, we do. We have a ton of stuff.

Speaker 17 And let's just say it's really tight.

Speaker 16 This episode was produced by me, Noam Hasenfeld. We had editing from Jorge Just and Meredith Hodenot, who runs the show.

Speaker 16 Mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala, production support from Thomas Liu, music from me, and fact-checking from Melissa Hirsch.

Speaker 16 Julia Lingoria is feeling a little delirious, and Bird Pinkerton stepped outside the ruins of the octopus hospital, away from the torn cables and shattered glass, when suddenly she heard something.

Speaker 16 A pigeon wearing a fedora dropped another note at her feet. It cooed ominously and flew off into the distance.

Speaker 16 Thanks, as always, to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show. And if you have thoughts about the show, send us an email.
We'd love to read it. We're at unexplainable at Vox.com.

Speaker 16 And you can also leave us a review or a rating wherever you listen. We love hearing everything you think about the show.

Speaker 16 You can also support this show and all of Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today.

Speaker 16 You can go to vox.com/slash members to sign up, and you'll get all sorts of things like unlimited access to Vox's journalism.

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Speaker 16 Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll be back on Wednesday.

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