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[series:3345#628] | ||||||
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(Three episodes watched): Well, this show initially had me excited as it was looking like a psychological science fiction thriller. What do you do when your mind has been separated from your body, and there's no telling if you'll ever be able to reunite the two? Would the back-up program which was mentioned as a safety precaution be used to create an exact duplicate of Maya's mind--leaving a sort of duplicate mind in her physical body and the original one entrapped in a robot? All sorts of intriguing possibilities leapt to mind. But apparently that wasn't what this show was interested in. Somehow Maya's mind and body are reunited at the end of the episode, which has the effect of deflating our expectations of sophisticated sci-fi. If that is not going to be the problem, what will be? Will this be nothing more than a Wild West in Space shoot-'em-up tale of lawless prospectors struggling to strike it rich with Orichalt? Surely the reservations about the safety of Orichalt wouldn't have been mentioned at the beginning if something wasn't going to go wrong. In episode two, a couple of strange things happen which revived my interest somewhat (though I still think a massive opportunity has been missed). It turns out that one of Maya's coworkers, who appropriately operates the mecha ID-0, has suffered the fate of mind separated from body. I had sort of guessed this before the shocking revelation was made, since this guy never appears outside his mecha. One problem is that this whole system of sending your mind to a mecha while backing it up in case anything goes wrong doesn't make all that much sense. It's never explained how this is possible or necessary--why not send the backup copy to run the mecha instead of putting the original at risk? Any way, another even more bizarre cliffhanger comes when a strange girl somehow appears from a chunk of high grade Orichalt. WTF? I decided that must watch another episode to see what the explanation for this is. ...and episode three somehow manages to completely avoid the obvious question of how in the world this strange girl has materialized. Instead, the characters get into a fight with the military which distracts them from this mind-blowing occurrence. But this was exactly what I didn't want to happen, and the message it sends me is that this show isn't going to be particularly deep, and instead considers shoot-'em-up action to be of a higher priority than sophisticated storytelling. The revelation that ID-0 isn't the only 'evertrancer' hardly drew any interest from me, and how exactly the crew made their escape didn't either. Thus, this episode managed to take me from feeling eager for an explanation to feeling that quitting ID-0 as a whole might not be a bad idea. The animation, by the way, has a sort of crude computer-generated feel to it. Not terrible, but a little annoying. Last updated Monday, November 16 2020. Created Monday, April 17 2017. | ||||||||
