Eureka Seven is, in my opinion, a
rarity in that it’s a show that gets the long, escalating epic
journey just about right. Because this show is no doubt a marathon.
At 50 episodes it’s not the longest anime I’ve watched start to
finish, but it is in a high tier that most shows don’t go for, and
you do feel the weight that time investment can bring to bear. So I
suppose the question is if Eureka Seven uses its time well, and if
it’s worthwhile.
Because it’s not always wrong that something feels long or weighty. Depending on what a narrative does, it can be important to get a feeling of weight and scale, whether or not you’re actually spending a lot of time on the matter. For other stories, it’s important that the narrative feel light on its feet, even if it’s actually long. Toradora! has basically the same running time as Neon Genesis Evangelion but from a subjective point of view Evangelion feels like it is and should be much longer. Assassination Classroom (a show I’ll have to talk about in depth some day) is basically the length of those other two combined, similar to Eureka Seven, but the pacing is such that I think you could fairly easily be tricked into thinking it’s not much longer than Toradora!
In the case of Eureka Seven, the show
is long and feels long. I hesitate to say that it’s like Evangelion,
because the two shows have very little in common at all, running skew
or counter to one another far more often than they’re on the same
wavelength, but in terms of the raw experience of being brought into
a saga that has gravity and staying power, they do operate on fairly
similar levels.
But, as I said, they otherwise couldn’t
be much more different. Evangelion was a show about pain and
isolation. It strays into horror, and places its characters in
positions that lack power and agency despite said characters piloting
giant robots. Eureka Seven is a show about healing, love, and
community. There can be dark times, but it’s always firmly in the
spectrum of adventure and/or drama and its characters continually
find ways to gain agency and push forward even when the situation
looks too big.
So, there’s a lot to get through when
it comes to a summary. The story begins with Renton Thurston, 14
years old and hating his life with his mechanic grandfather in their
small town as he dreams of something more, like a life with his
sky-surfer/activist/rebel heroes, the Gekkostate. He kind of gets
his wish when a big robot owned by the Gekkostate crashes into his
house. The robot in question is the legendary Nirvash typeZERO and
its pilot is a strange, pale girl named Eureka. Renton, naturally,
falls for Eureka pretty instantly, and manages to help her and escape
with the Gekkostate when the big bad military comes knocking.
Life in the Gekkostate, though, isn’t
everything Renton hoped it would be. Few of its members give Renton
the time of day, and others are downright nasty, the worst offenders
being Eureka’s adopted children (who don’t want their ‘mama’ being
stolen, fair enough.) and Renton’s big hero, the leader of the
Gekkostate, Holland.
Meanwhile, strange things are
happening, and our eventual villain, Dewey Novak, starts to gain
prominence. His machinations first intersect with the Gekkostate
when they both encounter a phenomenon known as a Coralian, the
Gekkostate sending in (in the end) Renton and Eureka in the Nirvash,
while Dewey sends his hand-picked mecha pilot, a pink-haired lunatic
named Anemone, in her anti-Nirvash known as typeTheEND (and yes, that
stylized name does hurt me to type out, thanks for asking). Anemone
and out heroes are both drawn inside the Coralian to a surreal
experience simply known as The Zone. I wish I could say that there
were brilliant visual metaphors in here, but in one of the show’s
failings (and I’ll be saying that surprisingly little in this review
when you get down to it) most of the imagery we see in the Zone
doesn’t really tie all that much into what we’ve seen before or what
we’ll see after. There are a few moments that are prophetic and much
of it feels like it should be highly symbolic, but it also feels like
you’re not quite supposed to know what to make of it and maybe the
writers didn’t either. In any case, the Zone and its dream world is
pretty spectacular, I just wish it was more relevant.
Once they emerge, both girls are out of
it, and Renton has to team up with Anemone’s handler and love
interest, Dominic, getting us to know them and that many of the
members of the ‘enemy’ faction, the government and military, probably
aren’t evil. Full disclosure, in a show that has loads and loads of
secondary characters, Dominic and Anemone might be some of my
favorites. Their arc is very well handled despite how low it is on
the priority of things to do right.
After that, the Gekkostate is forced to
go to ground for a while, spending a lot of time repairing the ship
in a dismal gray mine of sorrow (where we learn that mechas are
extracted from the ground in this world, seemingly produced by the
“scab coral”), where Eureka’s condition and relationship with
Renton both enter a downward spiral, culminating in her nearly being
absorbed by the living Scab Coral in the depths of the mine. The
experience leaves Eureka bedridden, and Renton is both wracked by his
guilt over her condition and the fact that situations force him to
come to terms with the fact that fighting in a big robot means
killing.
In the depths of his despair, Renton
leaves the Gekkostate, leading to a period where our characters are
apart. Renton wanders the world, for some of this time ending up in
the care of Ray and Charles Beams, a pair of mercenaries who treat
Renton like the three of them are a warm and loving family. When
Renton learns they’ve been hired to hunt down the Gekkostate, he
leaves in a surprisingly heartfelt but rancor-free parting. Eureka,
meanwhile, comes to terms with having human emotions, particularly
for the missing Renton, and her loneliness helps crack the shell of
robotic indifference to the universe she often exuded up to this
point. The two reunite when Charles, Ray, and the Military do their
best to bring the Gekkostate down, a sequence in which both Charles
and Ray end up killed.
A point in the show’s favor is how it
handles the lives and deaths of these characters. It would have been
easy to make Charles and Ray just a slightly quirky pair of generic
enemies, maybe a Bonnie and Clyde duo to be menacing and get
dispatched. But Eureka Seven instead chooses to write them as living
and breathing people – they have their own hopes and dreams, their
own sorrows and grudges, and are mostly seen as legitimately decent
human beings driven to their deaths in battle against other
legitimately decent human beings by circumstance.
At this point, we are 28 episodes in.
That’s similar in length to a lot of shows (a little past the 24-26
bracket), and it already feels like Eureka Seven has done more with
that time than many try. The show has gone through a lot of
movements, and each of them felt big: The small town, the Gekkostate,
the Coralian, the mine, the separated arc… the world has been
growing slowly but steadily around all of these, stories have been
started and finished (including many single or few episode side arcs
that I didn’t feel the need to go into detail on), but Eureka Seven
as a whole keeps striding forward. I dare say, by this point in the
show, it hasn’t even revealed the true nature of the plot. However,
this is about where it turns around and actually tells the audience
something of what the bigger point actually is.
The struggle is defined by the truth of
the world that we learn from a group of scientists the Gekkostate
goes to in order to get their airship repaired and the Nirvash
upgraded. That truth is thus: “Coralian” refers not just to a
gigantic, cloud-like phenomenon. Rather, it describes life that
manifests from the Scab Coral that seems to form most of the planet’s
crust, including the aerial form, “Antibody” Coralians that
appear briefly to raise hell when the Scab is damaged (which we see
in action to horrifying effect during this sequence) and… the
human-type Coralian, which might be an attempt by the Coral to
comminicate with humans. This last type is especially relevant,
because that’s what Eureka actually is.
Tied into this is an idea called the
Limit of Life. Essentially, the setting runs with the concept that
if there’s too much life (especially intelligent life?) in a
contained area, it will somehow rupture space-time and cause an
apocalyptic disaster. The Scab Coral is itself over the limit, but
is constrained from violating the Limit by its Command Cluster
keeping most of the coral asleep. In the meantime, the Scab Coral
may present a less esoteric danger if it’s convinced that humans
represent a deadly threat, something that Eureka’s existence and
friendly association with humans is hopefully avoiding. However,
Dewey Novak seems to know at least some of this but not know or
believe all of it, as he’s antagonizing the Scab Coral and hunting
for the Command Cluster in order to kill it.
Essentially, the race is on to stop
Dewey from dooming all life on the planet with his myopic war against
the Scab Coral while simultaneously trying to find a way to
communicate and live in harmony with the Coral. The first step on
the journey Eureka and Renton have to make is to rescue the monk
Norbu – a worldly slob and also a high-up priest of the persecuted
Vodarac people, with whom the Gekkostate has quite a history
(including Renton with arcs around them previously in the show).
Acquiring Norbu brings Holland into direct confrontation with Dewey,
allowing us to learn that the two are brothers, and while Norbu’s
personal habits might leave something to be desired, he does a decent
job of mentoring Renton and Eureka and preparing them for their
passage through the phenomenon known as the Great Wall.
As is often the case in this show, just
getting there takes some doing, involving a journey to the Vodarac
holy land (where Norbu is no longer welcome) across a whole lot of
world. At the Vodarac Holy Land, Eureka is able to meet with her
predecessor, Sakuya, who was Norbu’s partner back in the day before a
failed run at the Great Wall left her in a more esoteric state of
being. She sends Eureka on with renewed purpose and a better
understanding of the love she and Renton have built, which is good
because Dewey’s forces (spearheaded by Anemone) have the Great Wall
in their sights as well.
At that confrontation, though, it’s the
Nirvash that breaks through, complete with Eureka, Renton, and
Eureka’s adopted kids who stowed away at the start of the arc. Yeah,
one of the other issues with the show is that those kids I mentioned
earlier? They get a ton of screen time, and a lot of it isn’t
endearing or well-used. They have a good purpose in Eureka’s arc and
we do need them to exist, but Eureka Seven is a huge, sprawling show
with a huge, sprawling cast and I do think that maybe some other
corners of the cast could have used some of that time. All the same,
they’re with us here at the end.
For the rest of the show, the team is
split up: Eureka, Renton, and the kids are in the world beneath the
world. Under the Scab Coral there’s a remarkably preserved planet
Earth, after all. Yeah, in another “Make sure you’re following,
there will be a test later” turn, the planet this takes place on is
actually Earth, the home world of humanity. Humans, however, are
unaware of this: they abandoned Earth in the face of the initial
growth of the Scab Coral overwhelming the surface, and colonized the
world that formed on the Coral’s back thousands of years later, not
knowing it was the same place with an extra couple miles of radius to
account for what we see in the “World Below”.
In any case, down where Eureka and
Renton are has light, fresh air, and everything else you would expect
of the surface. It also has oceans of water (not really a thing on
the outer surface) and none of the “trappar” currents that all
the mechs and airships in the show use to surf or fly through the
sky, so the mobility of Team Nirvash is severely hampered and they
don’t have a clear goal in sight. What’s more, Eureka’s condition
starts degenerating down there, as she develops spreading Coralian
mutations.
While they try to survive and maybe
locate the Command Cluster down on Earth, Holland and the rest of the
Gekkostate attempt to harass Dewey’s military, fighting to buy time
for those below to pull a miracle. Meanwhile, Anemone’s condition
worsens, and Dewey even attempts to discard her, a sequence of events
that greatly displeases Dominic. We learn where she came from in a
fairly good sequence, with a visit to a medical facility that
performs some twisted (and in the cases we see other than Anemone,
fatal) experiments on young girls to create ones with Anemone’s
abilities. All this leads to Dominic defecting to the Gekkostate
(with his own kind of quirky “underlings” as well) when sent to
capture them, after learning the full truth. His goals are coming
late in the show, but his persistent desire to save Anemone (and the
world. But mostly Anemone.) is both dramatic and kind of adorable
Renton, Eureka, and Dewey discover the
location of the Command Cluster at close to the same time: The kids
manage to communicate with it, while Dewey initiates the final
battle, using his laser satellite to punch a hole in the Scab Coral
and send in Anemone to mark the Cluster for more precise targeting.
Dominic rushes in after Anemone, and though he manages to save her
from moving forward with her essentially suicide mission, she places
the targeting beacon before she can be talked down. Renton and
Eureka, in the Nirvash, try their best, but Dewey’s giant space laser
fires an on-target shot and disintegrates the Command Cluster.
We have two episodes to fix this.
Dewey comes down and engages in a
proper final battle with and on his gigantic command ship, including
a good showdown with Holland where we learn that Dewey, as much as he
seemed like a smooth and tactical villain, was actually crazy enough
to intentionally provoke an end-of-the-world scenario out of pure
nihilism. I should be frustrated that his motives decayed to
omnidestructive spite, but his portrayal is well done enough that it
actually works here. Eureka, meanwhile, seems prepared to sacrifice
herself to become the new Command Cluster, going so far as to give us
a visually stunning climax when the Scab Coral grows a giant black
tree to space around her. Renton, however, won’t let her go without
trying to find a better way, and with the help of the Gekkostate
pilots the Nirvash up to the top to see her. This last run has all
the over-the-top anime tropes, like a laser shooting out of the
Nirvash’s chest because Renton believes in himself and the power of
his love for Eureka, blowing away countless disposable minions, so
many cheesy speeches, so much flashy flying… but you know what?
It’s actually earned. Often times, when a show goes really big, it
doesn’t fit because it escalates out of nowhere. It’s funny, and not
dramatic at all. In Eureka Seven, because of how huge and operatic
the show as a whole has become, the excess of the ending is more or
less fitting, and is a lot of fun to watch.
In the end, it’s the Nirvash that
sacrifices itself. Having learned enough from Renton and Eureka, the
Nirvash (speaking in a way the audience can hear for the first time,
despite Eureka claiming to hear its voice from the beginning) will
take half of Earth’s life, human and coral alike, to esoterically
ascend to some sort of higher plane of being, where they’ll continue
to live and the remaining half will be safely under the Limit of
Life, crisis averted with a vast new world opened up.
Good grief. If you think that summary
was long, you should see all the subplots, character arcs, and minor
details that I had to leave out in order to get it as manageable as
it is. This is absolutely one of the show’s strengths, but it does
make the darn thing hard to talk about.
As I’ve said before, Eureka Seven is
epic and operatic. It feels big, heartfelt, and iconic. Its action
is sweeping, but its character moments present and pleasant. The
journey the characters go through is grounded in extremely iconic
material but at the same time the presentation is unique enough that
you kind of allow it. In a sense, it’s similar to Star Wars: you’ve
seen something like this a million times before, but at the same time
you’ve never seen this before, and the familiar elements make it feel
comfortable and help you accept the novel or especially strange
elements.
The show is visually impressive as
well. If you’re a fan of flying scenes, gorgeous strange landscapes,
and fancy movement off of fancy robots you’re going to like this
show. The designs are stylish and evocative, and the world
Starfox-style aerial battleships and men and robots alike surfing on
waves of shimmering light can be, at its best, reminiscent of
Miyazaki’s love of the skies.
The show does, however, have its
faults. While some of the major characters (particularly Eureka,
Anemone, Dominic, and Holland) get good exploration and development,
most of the cast ranges from static characters like Matthieu and
Norbu, to one or even zero dimensional characters like Ken-Goh and
Mischa that pretty much exist to fill rooms and, if they’re lucky,
pad scenes. This is part of what I was talking about when I said
that the show could have used the time spent on the kids better.
Despite the show’s length and awesome scope, so many of the
characters don’t have time dedicated to tell their stories that you
almost wish there was more, or that there had been some rebalancing.
Then again, stories need extras
sometimes. Ken-Goh’s character is pretty much having a cool
mustache, but does the narrative of Eureka Seven really need him to
be more than his facial hair? I’d contend that while it might be
able to be bettered if at least some of the flat characters were more
dimensional or the static characters more dynamic, it isn’t strictly
a necessity for the story.
The villain is another… questionable
subject. Dewey Novak spends most of the run being a very cool
villain. He is rather hands-off, but he has a charismatic presence,
a threatening intellect, a refined and controlled demeanor, and an
iconic style that makes him out to be a potentially amazing bad guy.
However, he somewhat falls apart in the final act, and not in the way
that you want him to. He does have a powerful rivalry with Holland,
but Holland is ultimately a secondary character, and Dewey is
basically nothing to Renton and Eureka personally. Further, Dewey’s
motives suffer a complete collapse. I don’t mind nihilistic
villains, but Dewey Novak was a visionary who seized power and
manipulated both the upper echelons of society and the masses to
support him via fear of the Coralians. I really do wish he had a
better endgame than “destroy the world because I actually hate it”,
something that could bring him into conflict, philosophically and
literally, with Renton and Eureka rather than just Holland. Again,
though, the story works as it is, I just think this is a point where
it could be stronger.
On the whole, though, I would rate
Eureka Seven at an A. Out of all the mecha shows I’ve reviewed this
month (or, spoiler alert, will review this month), Eureka Seven is
the one that I liked watching the most. It’s not artistic in the
same way as Evangelion or RahXephon, but it’s an immensely enjoyable
ride that I’d recommend to just about anybody. I know I’m probably
going to ruffle a few feathers giving Eureka Seven a higher letter
grade, but I do think it’s important to weigh how well a show works
as entertainment and not just how well it works as art, so I’m
sticking by my decision here.