“Here we go again.” That’s honestly what I thought when loading up the first episode of Pilot Candidate. Mechas versus space monsters, protecting what’s left of humanity from certain annihilation, some weird imagery and the expectation of, probably, bland characters and a lackluster story. There are probably a million shows like that, but, I thought, I can only address one coprolite at a time so here we are. What I found was… well, it was at least a little more interesting than that, so let’s take a look.
As the show opens, the first thing you’re likely to notice is the dated CGI. I say “dated” and not “bad” because, while it’s certainly not high quality, it is at least just used for the mechas and space stuff, and we are talking about a show that first ran in 2000. True, you could probably render most of these models and motions on a Gamecube, but the Gamecube wouldn’t be out for another year so maybe I can cut it a little slack. It doesn’t match up to Knights of Sidonia but with the gap between their productions I wouldn’t expect it to, and the hand-drawn stuff is surprisingly decent. I’ve seen a lot worse.
So, the opening narration explains our story: it’s the year 4000 and change and something horrible has happened, causing an enemy, gribbily biological space monsters called Victims, to appear and try to wipe out mankind. They’ve done a pretty good job of it, too, since we’re down to one planet, Zion, and an unknown assortment of non-planet colonies that are hinted at. We get to see a group of mechas fly in formation and fight off a Victim, setting the bar for the action pretty low, and are then introduced to our lead character – Candidate 88, Zero Enna, an annoying little ball of energy and ego who’s sure he’s going to be piloting one of the five super-mechas that defends Zion soon enough. He reminds me a little of Daisuke from Revisions but thinking about it he is, compared to that guy, harmless enough in his introduction, which also sees him running in with mysterious brooding boy Hiead Gner and showing off his personal superpower, which looks like some degree of short-range teleportation.
After the shadowy council of vague threat clarifies that Pilots can’t serve for very long without burning out, our idiot gets separated from the group thanks to his freaked out flailing at being given a haircut, and then gets himself lost on the way to the admission ceremony, wandering into the mecha dock where one of the mechas opens up for him, confirming him as its new pilot, particularly when he gets knocked into the machine’s esoteric pilot seat, which works out despite the engineer’s fear that the machine, normally only attuned to one pilot, could cause quite a bad reaction.
The imagery for what the pilot’s interface is like is extremely reminiscent of Evangelion, but less subtle in every way. The mechas are basically shaped and designed as robot women, and as Zero enters the watery dark space that is the ‘cockpit’ he’s addressed by a ghostly female figure. Go ahead and hum the Twilight Zone theme while recalling Eva’s twists, you know you want to and it’s clearly borrowing there, in spirit if not in substance.
The experience of bonding with the mecha continues for quite some time as we get an extended flashback to Zero’s past, how the Victim attacked his space colony and was defeated by the mecha pilots, one of whom even saved little Zero from getting sucked out into space. Before even resolving that, we flip back to Hiead, who the shadowy council decides they need to discuss, pointing out how they have some pointed similarities but are opposites in mental affairs. The one legit teacher we’re introduced to tries to use the computer to ctrl-f for Zero when he’s late for his introduction, and on not finding him intuits where he might be. We get more weird visions so over-scored you’d think you were watching Fantasia, ending up with Zero, of course, being ‘accepted’ by the female spirit that is also the mecha, and of course he’s not let out of the cockpit before a Victim arrives. The robot lady doesn’t want to take no for an answer, but Zero’s sudden reticence and confusion actually gets him zapped by lightning and allowed out. I guess it would hardly be “Pilot Candidate” if our lead usurped the role of Pilot right at the start.
While he’s out, we get a fairly extended sequence where the Victim is fought. The Pilot that Zero almost took over for does particularly badly, the cannon fodder trainees are sent out in their useless mechs, he has some more flashbacks/meaningful dreams while unconscious in the infirmary before waking up with a bad case of the lost and confused, babbling about the woman and getting into a fight with Hiead over it. Before we get any resolution to that we also cut to the engineer candidates, and some other pilot candidate who’s moping and doesn’t want to fight… and frankly a major issue with this show starts to become apparent. We’re three episodes in to a show that’s only thirteen and we’ve split to waiting on at least four lines with the hero and rival having a meaningless fight in one place, the wimpy kid leading the expendable squad, the real mechas fighting, and some catgirl engineer we’re supposed to expect to be important, all going through the motions of material that, frankly, probably should have been covered just getting us the hook in episode one. In other shows that follow this same super-mecha pattern, we typically launch with greater haste in order to get the audience hooked, and then work on adding all the million subplots that make those shows go, especially since they tend to be longer. That doesn’t mean we resolve the lead’s role, but we at least give them a role, have some inciting action, and then back the hell off to do exposition and character building at a more reasonable pace.
In RahXephon, a show that’s twice as long overall as Pilot Candidate, we do spend three episodes to escape Tokyo Jupiter, but during that time we’re focused fairly tightly: Ayato, the mysterious appirition of Reika Mishima, and Haruka are all introduced, but we pretty much just follow Ayato’s experience, using the time to make it feel grand and wondrous. In Neon Genesis Evangelion, Shinji gets in the robot and kills his first Angel in the very first episode. By three, we’d have gotten him recovered from his first excursion, getting to know his classmates and Misato, and taking a second swing – again, with more episodes to burn than Pilot Candidate. Darling in the Franxx? Episode 1 gets Hiro his first ride with Zero Two and has a contained setup and payoff, a little pocket of action. By episode three we’d have handled two more significant events while building up the cast in a very clean and effective way, by seeing them interact rather than following a bunch of literally whos on their separate journeys. Even Eureka Seven, a show with fifty whole episodes (nearly four times the run time of Pilot Candidate) and that could because of that often dwell too long on some arcs managed to get through the obligatory intro, all the way to Renton, Eureka, and Nirvash first triggering the Seven Swell, in two episodes, with the third getting the Gekkostate cleanly away and ending the ‘opening’ arc. When Episode 3 of Pilot Candidate ends, it feels like we’re still doing… this. The show does calm down somewhat, but it really needed to focus better and present a tighter opening.
Finally we actually start to get our idiot oriented, receiving a revelation that he’s different in some important biological science babble way, but we still don’t have time for it, exactly. We cut to the current crop of pilots and the injured funny big eater of the team and his worried tsundere engineer chick, and cut to the new crop of trainee engineer chicks. Then it’s back to Zero and his insane rivalry with Hiead largely distracting from any answers about how he’s supposed to be special that people don’t know, that people do know, or anything like that. We slack on how the Ingrids and their less super magic mini versions work, or what an EX is, or what’s the deal with Zero not having any “Atomic”, or his near pilot experience just to hear him shout like the complete moron he is. That wastes more time than tripping over future characters (Catgirl) and the main characters of other shows (our visits with the current pilots and their circle) but that doesn’t mean it’s not all wasteful.
Speaking of the catgirl (Kizna, as she’s introduced to us), it is finally time to meet up with her – a mere five episodes in for the person built up as a partner for our main character. They get off on the wrong foot, with Kizna slapping Zero to the ground for noticing and commenting on her ears, which she’s severely self conscious about here even though she never covered them or seemed disturbed in any of the short cuts to her before, and we get this extended moping scene interrupted by Zero literally hauling her back to the partner testing over his shoulder. Brownie point, that’s kind of a funny way to deal with existential angst, but minus a few points for puttering around with that for essentially no reason. We get to see Hiead’s turn in the simulator, with some exposition that’s not really what we want explained, but at least it’s something that tells us how the immediate action is arranged. And, combined with Zero and Kizna making up and some more scenes from Cast B, that’s another one down. I’m sorry to keep harping on episode cuts like this, but I really think that much is essential to understanding where the show is going wrong, and a big part of that is the pace and waste.
We follow up with Zero training in the simulator, which takes up most of another episode, and along the way establish that Hiead is more of a general jerk with how he treats his mousy little engineer partner, basically terrorizing her. I guess he’s the closest thing we’re going to get to a villain so they need to have him kick a puppy or the equivalent. At least we start to get some decent chemistry between Zero and Kizna, but the key word is start. At about the halfway point. And then the next episode is pretty much just getting ready for something to happen rather than anything actually happening and she’s barely in it, meaning that we just sort of table that the way we tabled the otherworldly experience in the real mecha before.
I’ll be a little more circumspect with the description of the story, or what passes for it. The critical problem is that we have a really draggy arc for one show, the one actually about our Pilot Candidate, and then we have fragmentary scenes from at least two other shows worth of material, the one about the super team who all have their instantly recognizable character archetypes, and the one implied by all the 30 second cuts to a shadowy council or other RahXephon-esque moment that comes out of nowhere and returns to nowhere just as quickly.
And okay, the main character is a Candidate. He is in training. But, and I hate to reference a show I haven’t reviewed yet, in Infinite Stratos the characters are all in training, and futzing around with mostly being in a harem show rather than a serious action show to burn time as well, and they still give us far better story movement for our characters than this. They do far more there with a far better structure, so it’s not the fact that we’re dealing with a school/trainee scenario that makes this such a chore, it’s the fact that this show doesn’t seem to get the point that time is a factor in storytelling for an anime series and, further, has no idea what to focus on. There’s no excuse.
In any case, we properly meet the soft spoken senior candidate who disliked fighting, who’s an telepath and the brother of one of the real pilots, and have a mock battle where he’s Zero’s doubles partner, intercut with the real pilots fighting another battle against the Victim. But, since we don’t really know that cast, there’s not as much drama there as there should be. It gets all the time to be a real meaty part of the episode, but by emotion it’s basically a background event we’re dwelling on. I guess the lead pilot (the only female pilot we see) being weird is something, but otherwise where’s our connection with what Zero is doing or going through? Don’t just get bored of your main character and wander off.
When we do finally get back to him, we have a full mock battle and a weird moment where Zero seems to get a flashback to Kizna having her human ears destroyed which is I guess why she has cat ears now. I don’t even know how he was supposed to be in that since Kizna is at a control panel and not psychically bonded, but whatever.
We then get an episode technically focused on another space battle with the secondary cast in which the telepath’s pilot brother gets dead rather than the shouty one, which means promotion for the guy we spent marginally more scenes with and who Zero actually met to replace him.
I hope you weren’t hoping to follow up on that, because Zero has some weird hallucination dream with an extended sequence about him being in some period boarding school with all his friends. There’s an attempt to recreate the circumstance, which results in his psychic powers running wild and nearly destroying the space station while he has a weird dream conversation with miss top pilot, who seems to know him.
Maybe. The show jumps feet-first into a mess of dream-in-a-dream, powers, and time and memory abnormalities. For a show that had up until this point been as straightforward as it was badly told, this is a heck of a jump and adds basically nothing that we didn’t already get out of the earlier “weird visions in the big robot” scenario. And then we just sort of go back to bog standard scenarios.
And then we jump back to Hiead. Yeah, remember him? After being out of focus for several episodes and a tight-lipped puppy-kicker before that, he comes back to remind us that if you thought Kunato from the first season of Knights of Sidonia was a cardboard bully with less personality and depth than you’d find on some Pokemon rivals… he was, but he still could have been a lot worse. So, what does he do to get back into the show? Demands to have a sparring match and then goes totally “threat to the ship” berserk with his psychic powers during a match that we don’t even see in a show that had been hell bent on showing us everything, resulting in him being tranquilized and restrained. Fail, Hiead.
Hiead’s terrorized engineer girl seems to blame herself, the nerdy classmate starts to detect some conspiracy and tries to talk big plot about past lives and space colonization, Hiead broods some more once he recovers, and his poor mistreated engineer stoops to sabotage in the rivalry between him and Zero (which is now one-sided on Hiead’s side) to take Zero out of a fight test when, of course, they end up called to provide support in a real battle instead. Oops.
This is our climax, by the way. Outline wise, it’s not a bad movement. I referenced Knights of Sidonia before in part because the lameness of the rival isn’t the only similarity; the situation here is, in a constructive sense not dissimilar to the situation in episode 6 of Knights of Sidonia where Kunato sets up the main character for an embarrassing failure, except there it was intentionally potentially lethal and certainly malicious while here it’s… still sabotage, but more of an accident that things went so far. While we don’t care too much about the abused little puppy dog engineer we do at least get her emotions and care a little, so we understand why she did it and why she’s having trouble revealing the problem once it goes farther.
While waiting for the sabotage shoe to drop, we get more hints about the conspiracy we have no time to actually address, and the weird things in the setting like asking why the Victim are attacking or why they’re called Victim. Finally it does go, screwing with Zero’s controls and sending him into a tailspin. He adapts eventually, sending him into the main battle with the swarm. Hiead gets into the action too, and acts a bit tsundere saving Zero, and the poor engineer girl breaks down trying to confess what she did before Kizna gets it and covers for her. I guess they were established as friends but we spent so much time with other things we didn’t see them interact much. But, whatever, the show plays us out like this is the end… probably because it kind of is. The technical last episode is a bloody flashback, showing us the current pilots’ time as candidates and to a lesser extent pilots from the perspective of the telepath who died. Or at least that’s the new material; it also serves as a recap for the main show. Which is, of course, kind of easy to do given the pacing of the mess.
Because of that, it’s basically like the show doesn’t really end as much as stop at a fairly arbitrary point.
Let me break down how this show probably should have gone: Episode one, we meet Zero and the other candidates briefly and he takes a trippy trip into the robot. Episode 2, we meet Kizna and do the stuff with the simulator while episode three gives us a mock battle where we meet the telepath and Hiead’s EX goes crazy, prompting the engineer to then, fairly shortly after, do the sabotage thing. You could space it out a little more, especially if you want to layer on the conspiratorial stuff, but all in all the current content of the show should take about six episodes. And then, given the scope of the mysteries set up in this thing, there should probably be eighteen (not six) more after that point to actually tell the story. Instead, we get that pointlessly stretched out over way more time than it needed to take, telling very little story in thirteen episodes with no real ending.
And, in a sense, it’s a shame. Pilot Candidate is not a good show, but it could have been. Hiead and the nerdy friend (Clay) are very archetypical characters, but Hiead serves his purpose and might have been able to be developed going forward into more of a fun rival, and Clay was at least usually entertaining when he was on screen. Zero was annoying on his own, but he got somewhat less annoying over time, so it’s easy to imagine that he’s got a bad case of the “just starting out” blues. He’s still an excitable idiot towards the end, but he’d far less a bleating moron who in the first episode struggled against a haircut like a cat being threatened with a bath. A lot of this is probably down to Kizna, who’s a good and fun character and who has a very legitimate “bickering couple” chemistry with Zero. That dynamic can often be done very poorly, but for those two you really do feel that they’re both just high strung sorts and don’t really get on each others nerves or take offense at the yelling, which is supported by some actually quite good quiet scenes with the two of them. I could watch them slow-burn evolve into the unstoppable duo they’re presented as having the potential to be for a long time. The mysteries of the setup and the shadowy vague council and the female ace pilot are all never addressed, but at least they have something of a hook that could get you speculating about past lives or dark twists down the road.
There’s a real passion and energy to Pilot Candidate that makes it all the more tragic that it’s wasted on a show that failed on the structural level. It’s got ideas and it’s got heart, it just doesn’t have time or pacing. If you were to tell me that this was meant to be a much longer show that just got randomly canceled, I’d believe you. And, assuming that it could recapture the good sides like Zero and Kizna’s chemistry, I’d love to see a remake of this show come out with a well-planned run and less of the tragic CGI that probably torpedoed what hope this thing had the first time around.
But, while I’d love to see the energy and ideas taken and polished into a finished show somewhere in the band between RahXephon and Eureka Seven, I have to judge the show we have. It’s grotesque, malformed, and cast onto the screen before its time. The story wasn’t ready, the script wasn’t ready, the visuals weren’t ready… it’s not up to snuff as a finished product. Despite all that, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it, especially more than some of my other recent reviews like DearS or Koi Koi 7. In the end, the grade I have for it is a D; it’s no kind of quality but it’s inoffensive enough that if you’re looking for an enjoyable bad anime to spend some time with and maybe make fun of, this one certainly fits the bill.