K Project (anime)

The K Project anime series has a promising premise and themes, but doesn't do a very good job of executing on that promise.

In the world of the K Project, superpowers have begun to manifest in a small portion of the population. Most of that power is concentrated in a few individuals known as Kings, with a larger number of lowered-powered individuals forming clans around the Kings. The effect is limited to a small portion of Japan (for reasons made clear as the series goes on). The first season of the series focused on a murder mystery that leads to a conflict between Kings, while the second season expands to a larger conflict between more Kings. There's also movie in between that fills in some gaps between the two seasons.

The problem with the K Project, in my opinion, is that it constantly undercuts its own story and themes. The logic behind the Kings alone is inconsistent and confusing. There's mention of seven Kings, but the story never tells us who they all are. Each King is associated with a color and theme (red for chaos, blue for order, etc) but some don't seem to have a theme (like the Gray King) and one has no color. Supposedly the death of a King leads to a new King being chosen, but sometimes that doesn't happen for no apparent reason (such as the Gold King). Each King has a giant "sword of Damocles" that sometimes hangs in the sky above, which are never explained except that we know it's bad if they fall. There are several flashbacks that fill in some of the history leading to the Kings, but they leave so much out that it feels like we're only given a few random glimpses.

It's not just the Kings, either. The visuals are beautiful and largely take the subject matter seriously, but occasionally veer off into ridiculous fan service territory with panty shots and bouncing cleavage.  Serious themes like abuse of power and order vs anarchy are raised in the story, but they're used only as excuses to get clans battling rather than explored as complex issues.

There are some manga serializations and novels that are set in the same world. It's possible that the missing bits that I've mentioned above can be found there. If that's the case, I think they really should have somehow tied that into the anime - a simple mention of the manga stories in a post-credits scene would have sufficed.

The K Project isn't a bad series, but it could be much better in so many ways. There are better things out there to watch.

The Americans (FX)

I'd considered starting The Americans a few different times over the last few years, but there was always something else available to watch. Figured I might as well just wait until the show finished its run, which happened earlier this year.

The Americans is a Cold War era spy thriller, set in the 1980s. A pair of Soviet agents comes to America under assumed identities in the 1960s and sets about living normal lives. By the 1980s when the first season starts, Phillip and Elizabeth Jennings have two kids and are basically indistinguishable from your average suburban couple. Using their travel agency jobs as cover, they perform various espionage missions right under the noses of American counterintelligence.

In addition to the deep-cover family, other characters in the espionage game fill out the cast. An FBI agent lives next door, there are various sources and informants, and several of the Soviet embassy staff become important figures. I enjoyed seeing focus on characters from both sides of the undercover conflict. As you'd expect, there's a high turnover rate...not a safe profession, the spy game.

Spy shenanigans take up about half the plot, and I found most of it to be well written. Sure, you have to suspend your disbelief about the premise of the super-deep-cover setup, and the main characters miraculously survive all kinds of danger on a weekly basis. But that's par for the course on almost any television series. A lot of the spy action is centered around development of personal relationships with individual sources, but there's also plenty of sneaking around and even a few gun battles and car chases.

The time period in the 1980s makes it easier to accept all the disguises and sneaking, although I suppose modern spy thrillers manage the same even in today's cameras-everywhere society. Each season has some kind of big theme for the spying, from stealth aircraft to improved food crops, drawn from the big stories of the time. It was fun to see how the writers worked with the time period, from those significant plot points down to minor references like classic video games.

The other half of the plot comes from all the emotional angst that you'd expect in this kind of situation. Who is sleeping with whom, what lies are being told, the stress of hiding activities from your family and friends, and so on. I found it all interesting at first, though eventually it starts to wear thin. I thought the writers did a pretty good job of showing how the stress of the spy lifestyle wears people down over time, but in so doing there's a ton of repetition.

After about three seasons, I was more than ready for the Jennings family to finally move on from spies to whatever was next, good or bad. I'd kind of hoped that would happen in the fourth or fifth season, but instead it just dragged on in more or less the same vein. Some significant changes did finally happen throughout the final sixth season, which was the best since the first in my opinion. The last episode leaves a lot of loose ends, but there was enough resolved to make it a good series finale.

I'm glad to have watched The Americans, though I think they let it go on too long. If they'd wrapped it up around 4 seasons, that would have been about perfect.

Macross Delta

Two and a half years ago, I watched a bunch of Macross shows (Plus, Seven, Zero, Frontier). Macross Delta came out shortly thereafter, which was the whole reason I'd watched the earlier ones, but I didn't have any way to (legally) see it and eventually I kind of forgot about it. Well, a friend finally got the series recently and I was able to watch it.

The first thing you noticed in Macross Delta is the two significant differences from other Macross series. Number one: Someone writing this series really likes the magical girl genre. There's a group of young women named Walküre that performs songs to combat enemies (this is standard Macross), who change outfits during songs and dance around the battlefield with some kind of rocket-dresses (this is definitely new). Think of the "magic" part as being singing and combat dancing, and this is pure magical girl style anime. Number two: The enemy sings too, and uses it as a mind control device. In prior series, the "magic" singing has always been the province of the good guys, using it to disrupt the enemy. Occasionally an enemy might convert a singer to their side (as in Frontier) but mostly it belongs firmly on the side of the hero(ine)s. This time, the enemies are on the offensive with their songs and our heroines are largely on the defensive.

The major differences end there, and the similarities to other Macross series are legion. Young "play by my own rules" pilot gets co-opted into military organization, check. Pair of ace pilots on each side meeting in battle after battle, check. Love triangle with singer girl and military girl after hotshot pilot, check. Giant transforming battleship with aircraft carrier arms, check. Three female bridge crew and a gruff old captain, check. Refugees in space fleeing from enemy assault, check. And so on and so forth.

I enjoyed the development of the enemies from Windermere, which are revealed very early on after just a few episodes. It seemed to me that the writers put quite a bit more effort into humanizing this enemy than in most of the earlier series. We see the events that shaped the Windermere leadership's aggression as the series progresses, and time is spent to develop characters for several of the Windermere fighters. It reminded me a lot of the way that the original SDF Macross series handled the Zentradi.

Other character development was all right, but nothing special. I'd have liked to see more interaction between Windermere fighters and the Delta squad, which didn't really happen until very late in the series. Mikumo's fate was telegraphed so much that it seemed anticlimactic at the end. And the reveal of the identity of "Lady M" was wasted, in my opinion, coming as it did as an offhand comment in one of the final episodes. Surely they could have milked that for a scene or two!

I kept watching Macross Delta in the hope that there would be some kind of interesting twist that set it apart from what one would expect in a Macross series. But that never really materialized. Those two major differences that I pointed out at the beginning are great, but they're also just about the end of the deviations from standard Macross. By the time the final episode rolls around, it's not hard to predict how true love will save the day from some terrible fate. Which is fine and all, but so predictable that it feels a bit disappointing.