Blue Gender (26 episode series)I've actually been thinking about this one quite a bit since I started to watch it, and now that I've finished watching it. It really isn't anything special per say, and in fact one could call it fairly derivative. It's a mostly standard issue post-apocalyptic fare, with the protagonist having slept through said apocalypse. That being said, I actually found it quite watchable and interesting. Especially in the start of the series, I found myself drawn in and I just had to watch the next episode to find out what happened after what was usually a cliffhanger ending. It wasn't until later on in the series that I found myself disappointed, and frankly at times annoyed with what the series was trying to say and how it was saying it.
The series opened right in the middle of things. I'm usually annoyed with openings like this, and this wasn't much of an exception, but I was just interested enough by it to not get too annoyed. Thankfully I didn't have to wait all that long for an explanation as to why the whiny, cowardly main character I was introduced to (he literally pisses his pants within the first five minutes) ended up in a cryo tube, and to an extent why there are giant bugs trying to kill everyone we've met so far.
I hate to say it, but the characters we meet at first aren't all that terribly interesting, including the main character, Yuji, who, for some reason, doesn't even think to ask how long he's been asleep. He
was only supposed to be asleep for a year or two while doctors literally tried to figure out what ailed him and apparently quite a few others so they could develop a treatment for it. Pretty much the standard excuse to turn someone into a popsicle in pretty much every show to ever have suspended animation that doesn't also include a prolonged journey across space. As it turns out in this case, bad things happened, and Yuji receives a very rude awakening, about twenty years after he was supposed to have been awakened originally.
What happened? Well, to quote
Starship Troopers, "BUGS!" Yes, as lame as that is, somehow giant bugs have taken over and turned all but a lucky few (relatively speaking) into tightly packed green balls that they never bother eating or doing anything with. Basically it serves as a body horror image until the "message" comes along and ruins everything.
Anyway, back to the characters, most of them are basically cold-hearted bastards, which is constantly rubbed in as the series progresses. Not only are most of the military personnel who were sent to recover Yuji and his fellow sleepers this way, but their superiors in the orbital stations that serve as humanity's last bastion are especially cold-hearted. As it turns out, if this recovery team hadn't managed to recover any sleepers, they would have been left planet-side for dead, which is what ends up happening to most of them anyway. That being said, while plenty of humans have managed to escape into orbit where the bugs can't get them, we're informed that only the select few seen as too valuable to lose were chosen to live on the orbital stations, which are collectively known as Second Earth. While that makes it all the more confusing as to why they would then treat their soldiers as completely expendable, what makes even those expendable soldiers complete bastards is that they've all been completely brainwashed into believing the humans who have by some miracle managed to survive and not get turned into green balls are actually already as good as dead. This means that while Yuji, and by extension most people, sees a little girl being attacked by a giant bug and wants to stop to help, none of the soldiers he's with want to completely ignore it. Oh, and if a "groundling" happens to get between them and a bug, the soldiers are supposed to shoot through them. While this does lead to some verbal exchanges, I kind of wanted to see Yuji and the beautiful blonde ice queen who initially rescued him, Marlene, come to blows and exchange a few punches, too, mostly just because I would have in his place given what happened and what was being said. Jury's still out on whether I would have pissed myself upon waking up and nearly being killed by a bug the size of a cow...
Only one of the soldiers really had any redeeming qualities, which was Joey. Unlike Marlene, Joey actually seemed human. He was compassionate and more than once stuck up for Yuji when Marlene was being a bitch to him. It was nice that this was a series so we could see the friendship develop, even though things were still moving along at a pretty fast clip.
We do see some of that development between Yuji and Marlene, but I feel it still could have used a little bit to explain why the two of them develop feelings. Marlene never really seems to be all that compassionate towards Yuji despite saving his life repeatedly; if anything she makes it seem like a pain that she has to keep doing it, since Yuji is basically her ticket back to Second Earth. On Yuji's end, it seems more physical than anything, because Marlene
is pretty attractive (and also nekkid in the end credits, FYI
). They do have some time to talk and argue with each other, but most of their time is spent running away from giant bugs. She explains how humanity has basically lost touch with emotions, which is why they all have pointless sex and why she's such a frigid bitch to him, and he basically goes on and on about how he was only supposed to be asleep for a couple of years and how he wishes he'd never woken up if this is the world he had to wake up to. This somehow equates to the two of them being in love with each other.
While it's pretty easy to tell I was unimpressed with how they got there, I kind of dug the idea of a somewhat unemotional woman and a somewhat emotional man falling in love with each other. The fact that Marlene had to figure out just what was going on with her, and started to see just how much the humans of Second Earth really were bastards also appealed to me, and I loved seeing her kick ass to find Yuji, even though it was against the standard idiot mooks that seem to make up the military in shows like this. It's after this that things kind of go south for me.
As it turns out, the Second Earth military scientist types seem to think Yuji's disease can somehow do for them what really any competent military should have been able to do at any point in the past twenty years – kill all the giant bugs. This being anime, naturally it features mecha, which seem to be about the most effective means of fighting the giant bugs, even though air support from some kind of gunship would probably work a lot better. What's worse is that while at some points the guns being used by the characters are quite effective, most of the time bullets seem to bounce harmlessly off of the bugs' armored skin. And way too many times soldiers freeze up and just let the giant bugs kill them. All of that was pretty annoying, but that actually isn't what bothered me the most.
So what bothered me the most about this show? Marlene and Yuji basically switch roles, for no real reason at all. While it's true Yuji had evil scientists abuse his illness in order to make him basically super-human, his obsession with another sleeper named Tony and the way he turned into the same kind of uncaring bastard that all the other Second Earth military types were just didn't ring true for me. Worse though was Marlene, who turned into a really emotional and frankly kind of useless woman. She went from cold and unemotional to really emotional without having much of any transition, and while before she was a very effective soldier in combat, she suddenly started freezing up. Basically she turned into the Yuji from the first few episodes.
Okay, I lied, that isn't the part that bothered me the most about this show. What did? Well, I hinted at the "message" in the beginning of this review, and this one is a doozy. The message? Earth is alive and trying to kill humanity, which it perceives as a cancer and therefore a threat to itself. And if that wasn't bad enough, it turns into a luddite message of how we can only peacefully coexist with the planet by giving up all technology and living in grass huts. No, really, that's the happy ending of the series is that Yuji and Marlene decide to join some random villagers they met in South America that was living in huts. This after a really quick WTF montage of the remaining Second Earther's killing the leader who has made it clear that if anyone wanted to leave, he wouldn't stop them, just so that they can fight over the last shuttle and somehow blow up the main space station. And it all happens in like a minute running time. Oh, and those green balls the bugs made out of humans? Apparently tree food, because at one point we see little tree plants growing out of them.
While there is plenty to rag on in this series, much like
Star Trek: Enterprise, I liked the basic concept. I also liked most of the character interactions and development, at least up until Yuji and Marlene trade roles. I would still recommend this series, even if it scores a little low at 6/10.