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Digital
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Wednesday, 21 September 2011 11:32 |
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Future dystopias - gotta love 'em. No. 6 may be utopia on the surface, but it's very much not underneath, as conspiracies, control and experimentation on their own population seem to be the order of the day - something that young Sion is about to find out the hard way after helping someone that the city authorities see as undesirable...
The world of the future has been mostly destroyed by war, but with little left in the way of habitable land, the survivors finally saw sense, with the Babylon Treaty being the agreement that finally ended hostilities and laid the foundations for a great rebuilding. From the ruins grew six city-states, and Sion is a bright teenager living a comfortable and promising life inside the imaginatively-named No. 6. He has a potention love interest, in the cute but rather strange Safu; he's smart enough that he's been selected for the gifted stream that's reserved for No. 6's finest; but he's also a little too curious for his own good, so when young boy Nezumi, on the run from the city's authorities, breaks into Sion's bedroom on a stormy night, Sion's decision to shelter him will have repercussions for years to come.
Nezumi, you see, had escaped from the clutches of the city's Correctional Facility, were malcontents and those deemed undesirable were dealt with, and helping him sees Sion stripped of privilege and his family relocated to a far less desirable area of the city. Four years later, the discovery of a plague of parasitic bees that the city would rather wasn't made public sees Sion again on the wrong side of the city authorities, and when he ends up on the run it's Nezumi who comes to his rescue and helps him escape to the Western District, the violent slum outside the city walls. From there, Sion gets involved in Nezumi's dream to bring down No. 6, while inside the city Safu also becomes entangled in the city's plans in a frightening way...
I got hooked on No. 6 quite quickly, I have to admit. The setting of the series, and the rather catchy opening theme, both worked their magic on me to heighten my interest in the series before I'd barely seen any of it, and that feeling stuck with me through what is admittedly some messy story-telling. Like most noitaminA shows, the series runs for 11 episodes, and tries to cram quite a bit in - the plague, the truth about what No. 6 are up to, Sion's attempts to be reunited with Safu, and a relationship between Sion and Nezumi that, despite feeling tacked on and largely irrelevant, grabs most of the time on offer. Go figure. Nezumi, you see, grew fascinated with Sion during thier brief initial meeting, and seemed to have been electronically stalking him for some time until Sion lateer found himself in need of rescue. Convenient. I'm a bit ambivalent on the whole boys-love thing - I'm not interested in BL for BLs sake, so if that's all a show has on offer (hello, Junjo Romantica), I'm not interested. In No. 6, it's fanservice gravy for the fangirls on top of an essentially separate plot, and that I'm okay with - or I would be, if it didn't steal so much time from the real events.
No. 6's big problem, you see, is that it spends so much time mid-season following the boys around doing very little that the Big Picture - the control state that No. 6 has become, the trouble that Safu finds herself in, the threat of the parasitic bees and the emergence of Elyurias as a force that could destroy the city - gets pushed into the background for too long, so that come the final 2-3 episodes when it all has to be tied up, there's just not enough time to do it all justice. Some aspects of the show could certainly have been scaled back to make room, but we have to make do with what we've got.
Those flaws were enough to put quite a few people off the show. A quick trawl of the internet after the airing of the final episode revealed that the disappointed far outnumbered those (like me) who were generally happy with how it turned out, and I can certainly understand where they're coming from. But to my mind, there's just so much good stuff in here, even if it's not used to its full potential, that it lifts the series enough above the average to make it worthwhile watching.
Yes, I would've liked to see more about the city and Elyurias; yes, the sight of Nezumi in drag in his drama queen persona was a sight I could have done without seeing; and yes, the ultimate conclusion is rushed to the point of rudeness. But dammit, I liked the city itself; Safu's quirkyness; Sion's mother Karan and her efforts to deal with her separation from her son; and some of the ways that the series went about portraying a utopia that was rotting away from the inside. The plusses outwiegh the minuses by enough to make it worthwhile checking it out. Just expect to deal with a feeling of missed opportunities.
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