When I found out that the Creator of cowboy bebop, one of my favorite series was releasing a new show and called it his masterpiece...I immediately added it to my watchlist. Unfortunately this show is not a masterpiece and cannot compare anywhere close to the quality of bebop. While the show was superbly animated, had good art, and a wonderful soundtrack... Unfortunately it's plot was just not good. The score I give it is purely because of that and how much of a sucker I am for good jazz. The op did that for me.
Ultimately the broad plot of this show is an over glorified Mcguffin chase that lasts thirteen episodes with faux high stakes attached. It also is unable to deliver a good ending but I will get to that soon. The world that we are set in attempts to be grounded in a supposed realistic idealized future reality, however it is very shallow in its implementation on close inspection. Technologies such as the hyperloop-like train equivalents are extremely inefficient methods of travel in terms of capacity. The writers seem to have fallen for the the fake future tech bullshit that so many people today fall for.
Most of the characters I do not have any problems with... Except for skinner who is a horrible antagonist. Lazarus fails completely at showing not telling when it comes to his character. For the entire series we do not see any of his actions from his perspective, only through others. Therefore the ultimate twist of the ending falls flat on its face because I do not care about him at all. It is fine to introduce a character off screen. Pulp fiction is I've of the best examples of this done well. However like pulp fiction you need to be able to actually see and introduce the character at some point before the halfway point so we can get a connection with them otherwise it will not work. Additionally skinner and his role as is explained in the last episode is completely unbelievable.
Lastly I want to talk about the series failure of religious imagery. Ultimately it seems that whoever was responsible for their inclusion has no understanding about Christianity and only wanted to include imagery because it had a cool name or it loosely had a plot point they wanted to take. For example take the city of Babylonia which has in it the tower of Babylonia. The writers mistook the tower of Babylonia for the tower of babel. They also tried putting it in a sort of half changed version of Babylon because the names sounded similar, ignoring that those two parts of the Bible are from very different time periods and have completely different stories accompanying them. Skinner claims to be acting as the seventh trumpet however his ideology is not compatible with someone who would make that claim. Pretty much all denominations and sects of Christianity which would interpret revelation in such a literal way are all very conservative in their interpretation of the Bible. Those kinds of people In America ( which is where this anime is set) are also normally correlated with these who deny climate change exists. This is a big plot hole in Skinner's character that is only due to the fact that someone wanted to include religions parallels because it sounded cool and without doing any proper research. Additionally, the sort of shallow reference to Lazarus... A man who Jesus raised from the dead was not lost in me... But the implementation of this in the plot was also just as disjointed as the rest. Because of this... Any critique or commentary about issues with Christianity that they writers could have been trying to to make just fell flat on its face.
That being said, if you don't care about these issues and are here for things other than a plot such as animation or action, this series is not lacking. The parkour is extremely well animated and within the city it gives off strong mirrors edge vibes. So you can enjoy the show for that. Just don't expect anything deep from the plot.
Rating: 5/10
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