Series Spotlight: The Genesis Orbs

Five spheroids fall to Earth and every species within reach starts tearing the planet apart to find them. A human strike team holds the line. A rogue robot soldier flips a switch it probably shouldn’t. Thirteen episodes later, half the galaxy is at war over five glowing orbs nobody agreed on the rules for.

The Genesis Orbs comes from Shaqwan Henry Sr, who wrote, directed, produced, scored, and voiced one of its central villains without handing off a single one of those jobs. His question isn’t really about the orbs themselves. It’s about what a person becomes once they’ve decided they’re the one meant to hold that kind of power.

Where the war started

Henry didn’t start with the fight. He started with peace, and then took it away. “Before earth was at peace until the demonic leader, Asmodeus, sent the spheroids down to earth to corrupt to humanity so he can have their souls,” he said. The orbs aren’t just a MacGuffin five factions happen to want. They’re bait, dropped by something that wanted human souls before it wanted human territory.

The title itself came later than the mythology did. Henry originally called the project Terror on Earth while he was writing it, then renamed it once he’d worked out why the aliens actually wanted the planet. “I changed the name to The Genesis Orbs to have a more pacific reason why the aliens invaded earth,” he said, tying the whole invasion back to a creation myth instead of a straightforward land grab.

The chosen one wasn’t chosen

One of the season’s stranger figures calls himself the original chosen one, and claims thirty years of study on the spheroids before Colonel Freedom and STRIKE ever find him. He isn’t a mystic. He’s a survivor of a program. Henry built him as one of the military scientists who found the spheroids when they first crashed down from space and used their power to build advanced combat warriors for the U.S. military. The test subjects weren’t volunteers in any real sense. “The subjects that we’re choosing were prisoners that had 30 years or more, and we promise freedom if they agreed to be part of the experimental program,” Henry said. Thirty years alone in that war starts to make more sense once you know what thirty years bought him.

A father who never came back

Armstrong, the ape known as Jamaigadi, has sons with Queen Nguvu from before Earth was even invaded. He gave her half of a golden spheroid to build her own empire and told her he’d come back for her. He didn’t. “He stayed on earth doing experiments on both his sons and other individuals with the spheroid,” Henry said. That personal betrayal sits underneath the larger war the whole time, quietly explaining why two of the show’s most dangerous soldiers, Blitz and Barrage, turned out the way they did.

Tracking loyalty across thirteen episodes

Major Apex breaks from Wormhole. Lilitu and Malachi cut a deal that won’t hold. Daybreak sets his own rules on what he calls a new Earth. Rather than lean on exposition to keep it straight, Henry says he leaned on motive. “I wrote clear dialogue, explaining why each person makes their decisions to pick a side,” he said. Every defection gets a reason attached to it, even when the reason is ugly.

The physical world had to carry some of that weight too. Realm 27 and the Golden City, where Queen Nguvu rules, needed to feel nothing like the ruined cities STRIKE is defending back on Earth. Henry wanted something that looked like it belonged to a different order of power entirely. “I needed to have a place that was like a futuristic heaven with advanced technology to link the war into different galaxies,” he said.

Wearing every hat

Henry directed, wrote, produced, scored, and voiced Lord Malachi in the same production, and only one of those jobs actually slowed him down. “Lord Malachi was the hardest, his voice is very raspy and deep, finding the right pitch and effects to flow with my original voice took a while to figure out,” he said. The spheroids themselves got the same kind of granular thought. They’re fought over and traded like currency across the season, and Henry gave each one specific properties to justify that value: cellular regeneration, climate shielding, mobility allocation among them. It’s a small detail, but it’s the reason the orbs read as worth killing for instead of just glowing plot devices.

That same logic extends to how the show treats its factions. Daybreak’s new Earth promises protection but punishes anyone who steps out of line, which is the same trade Malachi is offering under different branding. Henry’s own framing of who counts as an enemy is blunt: any human or species that isn’t about peace qualifies.

What to know before you press play

Henry doesn’t see this season as a finished story so much as a door. “The Genesis Orbs is just the introduction series to introduce characters and galaxies of many different movies to come, showing the backgrounds of characters and what’s taken place on their planets,” he said. Thirteen episodes in, most of the major players are still standing, still armed, and still convinced they're the ones in the right.

Animation

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Streaming now on Relay.