Typically, what Star Wars fans want is when all of the links on a new movie or TV-show’s
Wookieepedia page are already purple — familiar characters in familiar locations, the pleasurable spark
of recognition whenever a character, a name, is referred to on screen. These, of course, are empty
calories, but at this point the lack of nourishment seems to be by design. Keep the audience hungry,
Disney might reason, and they’ll eat gruel.

The problem arises when the creators of Star Wars have no inspiration but Star Wars, that all they
know is reference, with little interest in a text that gestures at something beyond itself. The
Mandalorian was fresh when it released, but the novelty of a live-action Star Wars show did much to
occlude the fact that all we were seeing were old characters squinted at until they blurred into
indistinction. Boba Fett? No, this is Din Djarin. Yoda? No, this is Grogu. Modern Star Wars is the story
of the plundering of cultural artifacts to be resold again and again.

Perhaps no show could have been more representative of this than Ahsoka, where the references to the
rest of the franchise reached a level of obliqueness that they began lose their ability to compel. Unable
to extort the presence of character unseen for forty years like Luke Skywalker, Ahsoka was forced to
rely on the gravitas of cartoon characters uncannily rendered in a physical space, whose flat colors and
lack of depth only served to remind me of how beautiful and stylized those original animated shows
often were.

It is very easy, as a Star Wars fan, to only focus on reviewing the internal universe when encountering a
new entry in the franchise. How do the events of this show affect characters, plots, events that are not
actually present here? The Star Wars universe is rich enough that we often fall into supplying the text in
question with a reality outside its own bounds. What is Luke Skywalker doing during the events of
Ahsoka? Where is Zeb and Kallus? Nothing, and nowhere. These questions are red herrings encouraged
by the show’s creators, which rely on them to be more interesting than the show itself and therefore
relieve it of the burden of having to be good.

To its credit, Ahsoka is the most mediocre of the new batch of Star Wars television series. If this review
seems harsh, it is because Kenobi, the last season of The Mandalorian and the The Book of Boba Fett
were simply not even good enough to critique. Ahsoka has many positive qualities. Kevin Kiner’s
score, predictably, is very strong, and is immediately the most memorable part of the show, though it is
merely building off of the great work he and his kids did on The Clone Wars and Rebels. The practical
design of Huyang was excellent and the Noti were strongly reminiscent of The Dark Crystal in a great
way. Natasha Liu Bordizzo and Eman Esfandi far exceeded my expectations. The appearance of
Hayden Christensen was able to tickle the nostalgic part of the brain far better than any of Disney’s
other recent attempts. The late Ray Stevenson was an incredible standout whose magnetic presence
energized and elevated whatever scenes he was in.

However, Ahsoka was in most respects not very good at being a television show, which is one of the
things that television shows often try to accomplish. Both the dialogue and the action choreography
suffered from the same problem of having the actors circle around one another and never connecting
until it was time to move on to another scene. Instead of conversations producing meaning, they refer
to events in the Star Wars universe as if the reference itself can substitute for character. Even when they
are devoid of references, the writing is often so clumsy and amateurish that scenes often spin in more
circles than an Inquisitor’s lightsaber.

“Part 5: Shadow Warrior,” the apex of the show’s potential, seemed to be the only time when Ahsoka
felt confident enough to allow its characters real conversations — of course, this is only because it is
entirely retrospective, a series of flashbacks and visions with old characters and old locations. Ahsoka
is only comfortable when swaddled in the blankets of past Star Wars.

For the rest of the show, it seems that showrunner Dave Filoni is mostly motivated by contriving scenes
around his samurai-fetishism, which at this point I suspect is inspired not by the Kurosawa films as
Filoni claims, but by the rendering of those films as they inspired George Lucas when creating Star
Wars, a level of abstraction that reduces meaning down to style. Dialogue that clumsily describes
Ahsoka as a “ronin,” Ezra as a “bokken Jedi,” and even going so far as to give Ahsoka a literal katana
in the finale are far too unwieldy and awkward to be as dignified as an homage, and instead feel like
they were introduced by a middle-schooler wearing a T-shirt of a wolf howling at the moon.

After eight episodes, what was Ahsoka able to succeed at as a work? A weak plot stretched too thin
across too long, characters like Hera with no real development. Few, if any, memorable lines of
dialogue, and a central drama that is utterly unconcerned with establishing tension because it knows
that the payoff will come later in some other future show. Even smaller elements disappoint, like the
astonishing waste of talented actors like Claudia Black and Wes Chatham — while both of these two
had little more than cameos, they had just enough screen time that something far more interesting could
have been done with them, two outstanding physical performers whose best features were hidden and
neglected, a running theme with Star Wars cameo performances.

Ahsoka is an inbred show, the result of marrying back up the line of previous works. The difference
between successful Star Wars shows in the Disney era — like Andor and the Visions anthologies — and
Ahsoka is the difference between having source material and idolatry.

I want Star Wars to be good because I love Star Wars — those pleasures of knowing that universe are so
powerful that when watching Ahsoka I was so excited by seeing characters that already had a place in
my heart that I forgot to ask myself if the show was actually good. But Star Wars can be about things,
have rich characters and deeper meanings without sacrificing the joy of its aesthetic and the wonder of
the world it imagines. Ultimately, Ahsoka fails to consider that someone might want something more
out of Star Wars than mere recognition.

Scavengers Reign, Primitive Technology, and Contextualizing the Fireworks of Creation.

I watched this video from the YouTube channel Primitive Technology where a man named John Plant (a
massive win for nominative determinism) silently gathered ochre slime from a creek and smelted it
onto iron slag using a furnace he built out of local clay, then turned that slime-iron into a knife.
“That’s just like Scavengers Reign,” I thought.

I was right. In a Collider interview with the MAX show’s co-creator Joe Bennett and supervising direct
Benjy Brooke, they make the explicit comparison themselves:

BENNETT: A lot of it was sort of pulling from things that weren’t so much science fiction.
There was a YouTube channel called Primitive Technology that I was just glued to and I
was so interested. It was this guy in New Zealand [sic] who every episode just builds a
different thing. It’ll be like a thatched hut, or whatever, that he will kind of go through every
step building it. At a certain point, if he’s got to make the roof for the hut, he has to build a
kiln to make each tile. Seeing that process, there was something that was very kind of
cathartic about it.

Both the animated television show Scavengers Reign and the YouTube channel Primitive Technology
are approaching the same place from radically different directions, just like the characters themselves in
the show. Considering Scavengers Reign alongside Primitive Technology offers a focus through which
we can greater understand how the science fiction show conceptualizes the uses and limitations of
technology as it exists within the natural world. While Primitive Technology is not a cipher for the
show’s ambiguity, it is a referent against which we might hold the show and perhaps better glimpse its
shape and contours.

Primitive Technology‘s videos have closed captions that offer the viewers a commentary that explains
what Plant is doing and why. Without the captions, however, the viewer is shown footage of a man
caught in perpetual montage, so reminiscent of so many scenes of survival from film that we might
more easily imagine him, with his athletic shorts, as the survivor of a Hatchet-esque plane crash in the
wilderness than the iron-age inventor the channel presents him as. Part of this is the loneliness of the
project. Plant films himself by himself, using a mix of static camera placements and handheld shots,
giving the impression of a combination of security footage and video diary. While Plant’s decision
never to speak to himself or the camera is a strong stylistic choice, part of the result is that he feels
more isolated than Matt Damon’s character in The Martian, that his daily life consists entirely of sifting
through creeks for iron bacteria, baking bricks and clay pots, collecting kindling and making charcoal.

Despite the ambient wildlife noise and the backdrop of the Australian jungle, the accuracy of the
channel’s title is inescapable. Weaving baskets out of reeds, drying slime into an oxidized mud, even a
task as simple as starting a fire in a pit — these are all fundamentally technological processes. If
“technology” is the application of knowledge, then we can see that the way characters interact with the
flora and fauna of Vesta in Scavengers Reign.

Much of why I enjoy the show is its attitude towards depicting “natural technology”, the dispensing of
metaphor in favor of striking literalization. These purposeful interactions with wildlife constitute
technological processes, and the show depicts them thusly. Sam manipulates the innards of a beast,
pulling on arterial wires and turning organic dials as if he was fixing an engine. In place of filtration
masks, he and Ursula fix gilled creatures to their mouths and noses. The world of Vesta is populated by
organisms whose biological processes are expressly technological.

Just like Primitive Technology, the characters here work in largely stoic silence, only infrequently
expressing wonder at this alien planet. With two exceptions, they generally behave as John Plant does
working in an efficient manner commensurate with their survival conditions.

These two exceptions, of course, are Kamen and Levi, two opposites who are nonetheless drawn to one
another. Kamen is one of the crashed survivors of the Demeter (and arguably responsible for the ship’s
destruction), but unlike the other survivors he was stuck in his escape pod for the first three months
after landing: he can only view the outside world through a locked porthole, unable to make the same
connections as the other survivors.

Kamen is rescued by Hollow, a small creature with telepathic abilities. Hollow’s species has a
symbiotic relationship with another small, tripedal arboreal species. Hollow’s species psychically
hypnotize these tripeds into retrieving fruit for them to eat, and in return are fed nourishing goop —
some type of nutritional waste — that Hollow’s species vomits up. When Hollow encounters Kamen,
this psychic hypnotism is, from Kamen’s perspective, bizarre and surreal as their alien minds first meet,
though over time the hypnotism becomes less dominating and more like conditioning. Kamen is
rewarded for behavior benefiting Hollow with pleasant memories of his past life with his ex-wife
Fiona, and alternately punished for misbehaving by being forced to recall their separation, the
egotistical decisions that led to the destruction of the Demeter and, eventually, Fiona’s death as Kamen
inadvertently left her on the decompressing ship while he himself escaped.

Unable to provide for himself and reliant on Hollow to survive, Kamen resorts to hunting the local
fauna — hitting animals with rocks and sticks and feeding them to Hollow. We see here the most human
of the technological processes depicted on the show. None of the organic circuitry that the other
survivors command, but in the prehistoric. There is no technology more fundamental than a big rock.
Kamen’s success with hunting means that he cannot comprehend the world around him, the intricate
ecologies of Vesta, as anything more than hierarchies of predator-prey relationships. There are the
creatures that he is strong enough to kill and those that can kill him. Within this paradigm, however, his
relationship with Hollow becomes complicated. Neither predator nor prey to the growing telepathic
beast, Kamen is not merely the symbiotic companion to the creature, but is himself the technological
object that Hollow uses to dominate the environment. To Hollow, Kamen is the rock. There is much
more to be written about their relationship and the ways that Kamen changes Hollow both physically
and emotionally, but this technological element is key to this understanding of the show.

At his lowest moment, Kamen is subsumed by Hollow, un-birthed into the enormous creature. Not
separated from his host by a womb, Kamen curls among pumping organs and intestinal tracks, his new
umbilical cord pumping him directly with nutrients. He has become vestigial, obsolete, as Hollow’s
telepathy now allows it to hunt on its own. Unable to connect with the rest of the world, he ends up
where he began, trapped inside a pod.

In contrast to this we have Levi, Fiona’s robotic creation (and speaking with her voice) and Azi’s
companion. Levi is the antithesis to the human characters’ thesis. Where they succeed at (or fail, in
Kamen’s case) to connect with Vesta’s environment in technological ways, Levi is a technological being
that connects with the environment in non-technological ways, through art and expression. Not
infected, but interfaced, with a ubiquitous native organism that slowly brings Levi to life, she begins to
experiment with her own modes of self-expression in ways unrelated to human survival. Humming
music, erecting geometric stacks and arches of stones, making gardens and art in the landscape, Levi
inverts the relationship to nature as exhibited by the other humans. As she becomes more and more
alive, she operates more on instinct, at first in strange and illogical ways, like burying Azi’s tools, but
increasingly in ways that allow her to express her growing sense of self, like through song and art.
When they first encounter one another, Hollow obliterates Levi, telekinetically dismantling her and
scattering her remains into a gorge. This leads to her rebirth as part machine, part organic matter, and
part avatar of the natural world. In this new form, Levi exists in a harmonic, almost fairy-tale-esque
relationship with nature. The local fauna bring her stones, bits of metal, anything that can be made into
art within Levi’s garden. In a way, she has become Vesta itself, finally given voice and the opportunity
to express herself, unconcerned with survival.

The second encounter between Levi and Hollow, however, is far more revelatory. At the climax of the
final episode, Levi departs her garden to rescue Azi, who is being hunted by Hollow. Levi arrives right
as Hollow is about to force its nutritional goop into Azi’s mouth, searching for a symbiotic connection
in the only way it knows how. When Levi interposes herself between Hollow and Azi, Hollow once
more tries to infect, this time reaching the goop into Levi’s empty eye socket and into her circuitry.
This backfires in one of the most spectacular scenes in television, and so is worth linking a video to
here, just so we can all take a moment to rewatch this scene.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upzkoHTjdr4

There is such pathos in Hollow’s expression as it tries to feed Azi. This animal is not how it should be,
and Hollow’s expression knows this, but it is too possessed of Kamen’s nihilism to act differently. It
tries to make a connection, and failing that, to destroy.

Levi’s defense against this is context, the fireworks of creation. To an impressive, sweeping score
composed by Nicolas Snyder, we see the creation of the universe, the formation of the stars, the debris
that formed Vesta, the formation of multicellular life, and all that follows: the strange, wondrous
creatures we have seen throughout the show, Levi’s birth into life, Kamen’s memories and
hallucinations. What Levi wields is the sublimity of life itself, contextualized within the world, within
the universe. This dissolves Kamen’s perspective of the purely hierarchical network he imagined and
literally it dissolves Hollow of all of the excesses accumulated from Kamen’s ego.

Crucially, understanding this natural context is not about Luddism — the violence, destruction, and grief
that Kamen / Hollow are able to inflict is initialized with the basic technological form of a big rock, not
with any of the more “advanced” (though still thoroughly natural) technologies employed by the other
characters. Rather, this empowered context is about understanding spaces and systems, ecologies and
communities, organisms and relationships.

This is a spiritual confrontation, but an atheistic one. The awe and grandeur that sweep away Hollow’s
monstrosity is that of the scale of evolution, of plate tectonics and ecology. What connects all of these
ideas together, for me, is the method and motive for understanding the world around us, what
Scavengers Reign believes to be true about our relationship to nature and technology. Kamen’s
predatory nihilism is dangerous and destructive, but the pragmatic technological interactions the other
survivors rely upon are also insufficient to repel him. Levi’s reborn synthesis represents the power of
connecting with the natural world through a technological apparatus, the same thing that Primitive
Technology offers an incomplete glimpse into. While all of the ways we interact with fellow organisms,
like Sam and Ursula powering their transmitter with an electric eel, or John Plant turning iron bacteria
into a metal knife, are fundamentally technological processes, they are also insufficient to
understanding the breadth of existence — which is not a claim they purport to make, but it is one that
Scavengers Reign believes is necessary to counteract the dangers of ego, the violence of innovation, the
hunger of endless growth. Hollow could not be defeated by technological means, but by Levi’s
transcendent expression of the continuity between Kamen and Hollow’s own lives and the formation of
life itself.

Ultimately, I believe that Scavengers Reign has many more layers of meaning, symbolic structures, and
complex themes and characters than this essay and myself are equipped to unpack. I haven’t talked
about Ursula and Sam, the lunar miners Kris, Terrence, and Barry, the heart parasite, or many of the
show’s other objects of fascinations. It’s a show I’ll be thinking about for a long time, especially
whenever I see a video of a silent Australian man making geopolymer cement out of ash and clay.