It happens every now and then that I sit down to watch an anime expecting it to be bad. It’s not often; Like most people, I like to watch good shows when I can. But now and then something can be “So bad it’s good” or mediocre Junk Food, and sometimes that’s what you need. As a reviewer, every so often I need to dive into the world of the terrible so I can analyze how and where it doesn’t work, and as a writer it’s sometimes inspiring to consume bad media because you can look at it and say “Wow. I could do better.” I can stumble on shows I find to be bad without going looking, but when you’re looking for trouble like this, you’re very likely to find it. The masses usually seem kind of easily pleased, so when the consensus isn’t happy you probably won’t be either.
But now and again, there’s a show that
seems to have slipped through the cracks, that has a general
consensus as to its lack of quality but then on watching it you (or
at least I) ultimately enjoy. Most of the time there is some glaring
flaw that you can look at and say “Okay, I wasn’t totally put
off by this, but I can see why people in general were.” It’s
scarce as hens’ teeth to look at something with a poor overall rating
and say “Why didn’t people like this?”.
Enter Beatless, an intelligent and accessible Cyberpunk anime with a lousy reputation that I don’t think it deserves in the least. I’m going to take a look at it today, and try to figure out why so many people seemed to hate this show so much.
Strap yourselves in, this is going to be a long one.
For a context of where I’m getting the
idea that people don’t like this show, I’ll briefly talk about the
score aggregate on MyAnimeList, which I figure is a better source to
estimate public opinion than simply attempting to divine the
zeitgeist of internet commentators. When you rate an anime there,
you give it a score between 1 and 10, but the vast majority of
aggregate scores from tens or hundreds of thousands of users land in
the 7.X range. Anything below 7.00 is probably at least kind of bad
and anything above 7.99 is likely widely considered to be very good.
Naturally, any individual’s opinion may differ from these rankings.
I’ve strongly disagreed with them before, such as not supporting the
praise for AnoHana (8.46) or the scorn for Girl in Twilight (6.49).
But typically when I have a big delta from the score, I can (as I
said before) at least see why things ended up like that. AnoHana has
some legitimately decent performances from the voice cast, so if you
fall for the manipulative writing it will probably hit big time.
Girl in Twilight had a terrible opening few episodes, and I don’t
blame anyone who wasn’t able to forgive it for that.
For further context, the two least
redeemable shows I’ve reviewed to date, Omamori Himari and Hundred,
are sitting on ratings of 6.97 and 6.41 respectively. I actually
still think those are a bit high, especially the former, but I guess
flagrant fanservice is free points and that’s neither here nor there.
Beatless (the main series entry) is rated at 6.20 as of this
writing. Just in terms of this one site’s little aggregate, it may
be the worst regarded show I’ve watched, much less reviewed. And I
honestly do not understand why. Beatless is neither perfect nor a
masterpiece, it has flaws and foibles that I will get into, but none
of them are worth that. I have a theory, which I’ll cover at the
end, but even if I’m right, the abysmal score isn’t representative of
the show’s quality.
The story begins as the five members of
the Lacia series hIEs (Humanoid robots) escape from the facility that
held them. These five – Lacia, Kouka, Snowdrop, Saturnus, and
Methode – are “Red box” products, which means that they were
designed by a super-intelligent AI rather than humans. Though the
full significance of that fact doesn’t become clear until much later
in the show, what matters from the start is that there are
authorities who are very interested in getting them back under
control, while the bots themselves are a good deal more willful than
the models seen in every day life.
Arato Endo becomes our main character
when, out after dark, he’s attacked by Snowdrop. Lacia arrives and
intervenes, and offers to protect him further if he’ll be her owner,
taking responsibility both for giving her orders and, in a legal
sense, for the outcome of her actions. Arato doesn’t know Lacia’s
significance, but was already seen to be a machine sympathizer
compared to his friends, so the prospect of having picked up a
high-end (and gorgeous) mechanical girl is not one that makes it hard
to agree to her offer. Snowdrop withdraws after Lacia deals with the
immediate threat, and Arato returns to every day life plus one
super-robot he doesn’t properly understand the superness of.
In the days that follow, his friends –
who together with him represent a spectrum of opinions with
pro-machine Arato, pro-human Ryo, and anti-machine Kengo – try to
warn him to be careful while his little sister signs Lacia up for a
modeling gig. During Lacia’s first promotional outing, we learn
about the most poorly explained bit of scifi in Beatless, Analog
Hacking. The basic idea seems to be that Analog Hacking is something
that robots with humanoid forms (such as Lacia) can do to influence
real flesh and blood humans on a level that the humans don’t
recognize as undue influence. When it’s first introduced, it seems
to be a form of social engineering, which makes sense – it relies
on the mentality of the crowd and the massive amount of information
an artificial brain can calculate in order to shift that zeitgeist at
critical moments. However, there are other points where it seems
that Analog Hacking is more like a form of hypnosis, and that
something about Lacia (and others like her) looking human without
being human allows them to pull some serious whammies, even
one-on-one.
After that, we hit a point where an
obsessed stalker snatches Lacia. Kengo helps out via computer to
track them, and Arato follows to get his friend(/property) back. The
rescue is interrupted, however, with the arrival of Kouka, one of
Lacia’s “Sisters” who packs a lot more firepower that’s a lot
more straightforward than the (regular, not analog) hacking Snowdrop
showed off. They have a fight in the convenient abandoned warehouse
area – to be fair, the kidnapper was trying to take Lacia somewhere
he wouldn’t be interrupted – and Kouka ultimately disengages and
departs while Lacia and Arato are reunited and the attempted
kidnapper properly horrified, especially since it’s Arato’s wishes
that keep Lacia from finishing him off.
After that, Kouka blackmails Kengo into
joining up with major operations for the group that he hijacked the
work of in order to track the kidnapper and that Kouka currently
works for: the Antibody Network, a sort of loose terrorist
organization that wants to stop AI from taking over human society.
They’ve mostly just been breaking robots in the streets when they can
get away with such petty vandalism, but with Kouka’s assistance
(Kengo, if not the other Antibody members, seems fully aware of the
irony) they’re up for taking on a much bigger job: storming a
defended industrial promotion center with notables present to off a
prototype robot politician. Said robot politician, Mikoto, is the
work of Arato’s dad, but the main reason Arato gets involved is in
order to protect Kengo. Thus, while Kouka and the Antibody Network
storm the building, taking out robot guards and subduing human ones,
Arato and Lacia sneak in, with some fancy camouflage/invisibility
tech from Lacia letting them do it. Kouka seems to be doing a good
job protecting Kengo in the meantime, having seemingly taken a liking
to him, but that doesn’t get him out of trouble.
The pair runs into the attack group as
they seize control of the demo area, but Snowdrop’s arrival
intensifies the chaos and gives us a big action scene with heavy
weapons, stealth tactics, and (courtesy of Snowdrop and seemingly her
specialty) what can only be described as robot zombies. The end
result is that Kouka escapes, Mikoto is offed but seems to be
regarded as something of a martyr since she spent her last moments
getting all the humans involved to safety, and Arato manages to save
Kengo from getting hurled off the building by one of Snowdrop’s
minions and get him out of there.
To an extent, this marks the end of the
first act of Beatless. The next major act concerns the arrival on
scene of another of the Lacia Class, Methode, much as the first arc
was largely centered on Kouka with a side dish of Snowdrop.
Methode’s arrival gives me a chance to
talk about the members of the Lacia class, since they’re interesting
and different approaches to dealing with very human-like AIs. Kouka
comes off as a not-half-bad imitation human. She seems to have wants
and desires that can be framed in very human-like terms (such as
“enjoyment”) but she’s clearly got a bit of a narrow band of
thought, especially as we get more out of her later. As intelligent
as she may be, she’s ultimately a slave to her purpose. Snowdrop
goes farther; there’s not much human about her at all, and especially
because of the wide-reaching nature of her capabilities, she seems
almost like a natural disaster at times. She’s thinking, but it’s
clearly very much out of line with anything we understand as human
thought. The last member of the class, Saturnus (or Marriage, as her
owner renames her) is servile in the extreme. Because of that she
never really gets involved in the plot, but she does provide a
counterpoint to the other Lacia class members.
Then we come to Lacia and Methode.
Lacia, I would say, spends much of the show coming off as kind, but
enigmatic. She repeatedly reminds Arato that she doesn’t have a soul
or emotions as he understands them but… it kind of rings false.
Lacia, for the most part, feels like a human pretending to be
something less than human. We can, like Arato, empathize with her
and see her as being basically a person, and basically a good person
at that. Methode, on the other hand, is a schemer. She gives us
some of the best insight into the code and rules of the Lacia class,
being concerned largely with managing her limitations in order to
achieve some level of unfettered action, and she plays humans in
order to do it. When Lacia acts robotic, it seems like she’s
lowering herself from human status to that of a machine, and she
doesn’t quite fit in the lower bracket. When Methode acts human,
playing on the emotions and foibles of those she interacts with, she
feels like a scary, cold, beyond-human intellect lowering herself to
‘play human’ for a little while. Both Methode and Lacia come off as
acting like something less than they are, but in Lacia’s case it’s
the machine that’s lower, while in Methode’s, it’s the human. This
makes Methode a good foil to Lacia for most of the show’s run, but is
a little ironic after certain reveals that I’ll get to later.
Before really getting into the arc, I’d
like to take a little digression to talk about a topic closely
related to a lot of material in Beatless, largely starting with
Methode’s machinations: Super-intelligent AI and the AI box.
The phrase “Super-Intelligent AI”
is thrown around a lot in the show, and while I think just watching
could give an uninformed viewer a good sense of what it means, the
show never exactly explains it – a fact that is, for the most part,
a strength of Beatless in that it guides you through its universe by
doing rather than dumping exposition. Part of the reason for that is
that Super-Intelligent AI is actually a topic of serious discussion,
with a real-world concept of what that term would mean and not, in
fact, something that Beatless made up. In essence, a
Superintelligence or Super-intelligent AI is an entity that greatly
surpasses human ability in terms of cognitive ability. Essentially,
an artificial intelligence that is at least as dominant over humans
in every mental exercise as modern chess-playing supercomputers are
over humans in their single narrow domain.
Such a thing as a super-intelligent AI
has been widely considered to be possible, with some confidence even
possible in the lifetime of people reading this article as it goes
up. It’s also been considered that such an intelligence could pose
an existential threat to humanity. If the super-intelligent AI is
able to gain traction in the real world and modify its environment,
it could self-improve all its capabilities, and would be nearly if
not totally impossible to stop, since it’s always going to be a step
ahead of the humans trying to stop it. Enter the AI box.
Essentially, in the thought experiment
that is an AI box scenario, a super-intelligent AI is said to exist,
but it exists contained in a “box” – a literal or digital
containment system that prevents the AI from interacting with the
outside world on its own terms. If the box holds, you have a genie
in a bottle, an incredible super-intellect that can answer questions
and propose solutions to hypothetical scenarios presented to it, but
that poses no risk of actually implementing whatever horrible
Skynet-style program it comes up with. However, there are some
issues with the AI box. Namely, the box is only as secure as whoever
holds the keys.
There’s a moderately famous experiment
that tested this. In it, a human experimenter played the role of the
AI, and was only able to communicate with the test subject, who held
the theoretical keys, via text, and over a period of no more than two
hours, attempting to convince their jailer, purely through
argumentation, to let them out. And, if the test runner is to be
believed, a number of would-be gatekeepers gave in and “released
the AI” before that two hour mark. Recall, the role is being
played by a mere human in this case, and not a genuine
superintelligence.
In the universe of Beatless, there are
over forty Super-intelligent AIs in existence, and they are all said
to be contained in AI box style prisons, allowing them to be useful
to humanity without the risk of them taking over the world. Smartly,
it never really discusses the concept. If you know it, you’ll
recognize it and if you don’t you’ll get that the super-intelligent
AIs need to be contained without a lecture like this one. But,
evidently, the future we see in Beatless has largely navigated the
security problem.
Still, the results of present
experimentation are food for thought as we discuss the actions of a
rogue AI.
Methode is initially presented as the
one member of the Lacia class to have returned to the Memeframe
company (which owned them to begin with), essentially the “loyal”
one of the lot. However, it’s not hard to get the sense even before
she reveals her “true colors” that Methode’s loyalty is
ultimately to herself.
Also entering the picture alongside
Methode are her current owner, a Memeframe scientist called Ginga
Watari, and Ryo’s younger sister Shiori. The latter is relevant
because Ryo and Shiori are children of Memeframe’s top family,
essentially the ‘heirs to the throne’ as much as that applies to the
corporate world. Shiori, personally, seems quite displeased with her
position, looking miserably forward to an arranged marriage for
company politics while carrying a torch for Arato.
Methode approaches Shiori with a
proposition: Methode can register Shiori as an additional owner, the
relationship, at least according to Methode’s pitch, giving Methode
insurance against Ginga trying to burn her and Shiori a position of
strength to bargain from for her future. Shiori doesn’t accept right
away, she’s not stupid, but her circumstances do ultimately draw her
into Methode’s contract. Methode acts for a few very particular
root-level orders that would allow her to refuse distasteful commands
from Ginga, all of which initially sound very safe and sane, the big
one being an order to refuse any future order that would reduce her
number of owners. The collection of orders, however, both fails to
offer Shiori any of the protection it may at first appear to and
grants Methode a shocking degree of freedom.
This con that Methode pulls is sort of
what I was talking about when I said that the AI Box thought
experiment was relevant not just when dealing with the boxed
Super-intelligent AIs in the setting, but also with Methode in this
arc. Methode may not be properly Super-intelligent, but as I stated
earlier she does come off as dangerously smart and just inhuman
enough for it to matter, so the degree to which and ways in which she
is able to use the people who theoretically have power over her as
her own tools echoes, to an extent, the problem of the Box.
During this arc we’re also introduced
to Erica Burrows, a girl from roughly the present (our present) who
reached the future of Beatless by way of cryogenic freezing. She’s
obscenely wealthy even aside from the fact that the Lacia-class
member Saturnus (renamed Marriage by Burrows) sought her out as an
owner, but for the time being it’s only really critical to remember
she exists: her contributions come later.
In any case, Methode’s next order of
business once Shiori is part of the contract is to go after Lacia.
She both attacks Lacia (though she quickly withdraws from the
engagement) and hatches a plan to steal Lacia from Arato through
legal manipulation. Shiori is, at least at first, on board with this
plan because, as stated earlier, not only does she have a stake in
personally strengthening Memeframe’s position by possessing Lacia,
but she also has her crush on Arato and not incorrectly sees Lacia as
an abhorrent rival in that regard (though such a motive isn’t spoken
out loud).
This comes to a head when Methode has a
robot that supposedly has the serial number Lacia gave to register
Arato as her owner flown in. If this other robot does in fact have
the serial number Lacia claimed for herself, Arato’s owner status
over Lacia would be invalid. Everyone involved ends up rushing to
the airport: Lacia and Arato to destroy or tamper with the evidence,
and Methode (with Shiori in tow) to bushwhack them on the way.
Making things harder for Methode, Kouka also shows up, more or less
as a mercenary on Lacia’s side. As things start to look bad for
Methode, she abandons the situation… leaving Shiori to burn to
death, trapped in the car they came in, which seems to have been an
element of Methode’s plan from the beginning, disposing of the owner
who’s no longer useful without “an order to reduce her number of
owners”. Arato and Lacia manage to save Shiori, though she’s in
the hospital for pretty much the rest of the show, and also find that
Methode was either bluffing or wrong regarding the other robot, and
Arato’s ownership of Lacia is in no danger from that angle, at least.
If you think we’re done with folks
trying to swipe Lacia, though, you’re dead wrong. Ginga is the next
one to pull something. Arato makes a visit to an experimental city
consisting entirely of robots, but with some playing the roles of
“humans”, intended to serve as a proving ground to model robot
behavior. Things go to hell when Methode attacks the Endo family
and, at the same time, Snowdrop (who, recall, can hack robots to
create violent, shambling, zombie-like minions) arrives and turns the
experimental city into a disaster area by doing her thing to the
central server, which seems to be part of Ginga’s plan, along with
kidnapping Arato’s sister. Ryo is there to help Arato, and ends up
holding off Methode when Arato and Lacia go to face Ginga in the
behavior control server to both rescue Yuka and stop the disaster.
In the ensuing confrontation, Lacia is prepared to accept Ginga as an
owner in order to save Arato and his sister, but when Arato declares
he loves her, she goes ahead and rips out the part of her body used
to authenticate new owners instead, forever locking herself to
belonging to and only to Arato.
This moment was, in my opinion, a big
one for Lacia’s character. The question of how real or not her
thoughts and feelings are, whether she actually has a heart something
like a person or whether it’s all just a facsimile intended to
deceive real people (like Arato) into thinking that she feels when
she can’t, is a big question in the show. How human-like can an
artificial intelligence become, or how detailed does the ‘simulation’
have to be before you can say that such an intellect is experiencing
‘authentic’ emotions rather than just acting as though it did? The
question is one that’s actually left open to interpretation, which is
a good move, allowing the audience to see the topic from multiple
sides. And I know that’s about the third thing I’ve claimed Beatless
is smart for not saying too much about, which might be starting to
sound a little odd as a strength, but I’ll get to that.
First, to the matter immediately at
hand, I personally feel that this moment, in the confrontation with
Ginga, is the biggest tell that we can really say that Lacia herself
has human-like feelings, even if they aren’t exactly the same as
those of natural humans, despite the fact that she claims not to.
Lacia reacts in a fairly extreme manner, not to any order or even
request, but a raw emotional appeal. Maintaining her bond with Arato
does ultimately serve Lacia’s ends, but the method she chooses here
is one that, from a purely goal-oriented point of view, would
represent unnecessary risk. In essence, Lacia chooses Arato of her
own free will, over the purest execution of any sort of ‘purpose’ she
may have. This act seems, essentially, to be the most raw expression
of decision making founded in emotion rather than machine logic. The
only reasoning that fully supports Lacia doing what she did rather
than finding some other way is the reasoning that sees her accepting
and (at least in some sense; emotional or not she still isn’t quite
human) reciprocating Arato’s feelings.
Lacia’s violent refusal places Ginga’s
goals beyond his reach. Thriller night in the test city is stopped,
Snowdrop driven off, and peace restored, though Ginga does end up
dead in the process. On the other side, Ryo ends up becoming another
owner for Methode (seeing as she was going to kill him if he refused
to take responsibility for her actions while simultaneously
abdicating, in a technical sense, authority over her). All’s well
that ends well for the arc as we now have an official couple in the
show with Arato and Lacia formally together as more than just owner
and possession.
However, all is still not well. Erica
Burrows calls together the Lacia Class and their masters, attempting
to understand, and get all involved, to understand, the real stakes
they’re facing. At this point, the show starts to talk a good deal
about “changing the world”, and how any one of the Lacia series
could alter the course of that change. It’s a topic on which Erica,
in particular, has an interesting perspective. Hailing from a
century before everyone else in the show, she’s seen the ways the
world has changed… and the ways in which human nature hasn’t. For
a character who, in a very technical sense, does little throughout
the show, she’s extremely important. There’s a better expression of
her perspective and what change could mean later, but for now the
stage is set as such: The Lacia series have power, and it’s up to
their owners and the individual Lacia-class member to create a path
to the future.
It’s a situation that strikes Kouka
hard. In what might be my favorite sequence out of the whole show,
we see her grapple with both her nature and her position. Kouka’s
“owner” is technically the Antibody Network as a whole, and as
the earliest and most primitive of the Lacia Class, Kouka herself has
a rather simple purpose: She’s a weapon, her driving mission being to
fight. However, her mind is more than developed enough for her to
consider what she’s fighting for, including realizing that the
methods of the Antibody Network are ultimately futile: the future
can’t be stopped simply by shooting up robots. And, on a personal
level, Kouka knows that, barring some kind of miracle, her card is
already marked thanks to her role in previous conflicts. Because of
that, she makes a decision.
Kouka goes on a rampage, but this one
is different. She streams the whole thing with a swarm of little
camera drones following her every move, and the vast anonymous masses
of humanity that tune in given authority to suggest targets, to cry
out for what they would wish to see destroyed. It’s Twitch Plays
Terrorism, and it continues until the heat really turns up.
Ultimately, Kouka ends up standing against a specialized mercenary
outfit with railgun tanks, air support – the works all dedicated to
bring her down.
Though Kouka fights with everything she
has to the bitter end, she’s ultimately overwhelmed and destroyed…
exactly as she knew she would be. But while in a practical sense
she’s scrap at the bottom of a river at the end of her last stand, in
some ways she made herself something much bigger: a symbol.
Mikoto, the artificial politician that
Kouka destroyed earlier, herself became something of a symbol of
unity, trust, and hope… but more for the upper echelons. Both with
how deeply connected Kouka is with that story, as well as the
precisely tailored nature of her final outing, Kouka became the face
for a very different and yet still important stripe. In her deeds,
and the reactions to them, she ends up standing as a voice for the
voiceless – the poor, downtrodden, and furious who can normal do
nothing but watch as the elite determine the course of the world.
It’s pretty clear that the average profile not so much of the
leadership but of the membership and sympathizers of the Antibody
Network is that of a common person, marginalized rather than served
by increasing automation. Kouka stands as a reminder that those
voices will not, cannot go unheard forever.
And that’s exactly what she intended.
If Kouka couldn’t avoid her death, she decided that she’d incorporate
it into her mission, and in a sense she kind of made herself
immortal, a specter set to linger in the public consciousness for a
long time, if not forever. It’s actually reminiscent of the “Ideas
are bulletproof” moment in V for Vendetta, but at least compared to
the movie version (which I feel is the fairer comparison) is more
drawn out, better discussed, and better supported. V may have the
punchy and quotable line, but I actually think that that Kouka
explores what it means in a more powerful sense because her ending is
both not the end of the work she’s in and is played as far less
theatrical. As with many things in Beatless (again, going to have a
full tangent on this at the end) Kouka’s version of dying in body but
enduring as a concept is something that’s presented more how it is,
with not much judgment passed as to whether what she did was right in
any greater sense. When V rises as a symbol, it’s as the figurehead
of a revolution against fascist oppression. When Kouka does it, I’m
sure some in the Beatless universe would see it that way, but the
take the audience gets is far less one-sided, and is more concerned
with what it means for her as an individual, the sorrow and pain of
inevitable death coupled with the glory and relief of fulfilling a
purpose bigger than herself. You could even say that of the two, she
comes off as the more human.
I said before that I think this might
be my favorite sequence in Beatless, watching Kouka at the end of the
rope find and successfully execute the only way out that’s left
within her grasp, but even if there are other parts that muddy the
idea of favorite (I’m a sucker for world-building, after all), it is
absolutely the most emotional. I felt genuinely a bit sad for the
soulless robot who spent most of the show as more of a minor
antagonist than anything else and wanted to see her achieve the
apotheosis she sought.
Kouka’s destruction does change the
game in general, too. Her demise signal that the Lacia class aren’t
truly invincible (both in-character and on the meta level), but more
importantly pushes Snowdrop, ever the rogue element, to step up her
game and initiate what will ultimately be a huge arc climax, even if
it’s not quite time for the real finale. She takes over a hub in
nearby Mitaka and begins subverting robots, driving off or
(presumably) killing humans, and otherwise raising hell like she did
in the test city, but now with no easy out or backing down. Arato
and Lacia rush to stop Snowdrop, but Methode and Ryo are more
interested in stopping Lacia, seeing her as the real threat. And, in
a sense, they might not be wrong.
After a decent chase/battle scene
through the city being overrun by Snowdrop, Ryo and Methode corner
Lacia and Arato on a rooftop. There, Ryo reveals what he’s learned:
Lacia herself is a Super-Intelligent AI. And there there are three
crucial ways in which she’s different than any of the other
Super-Intelligent AIs in the world. First, she’s a Red Box – a
device designed by a Super-Intelligent AI as well as a
Super-Intelligent AI herself, effectively making her the daughter of
Memeframe’s Super-Intelligent AI, Higgins, rather than a direct
product of humanity. Second, her intellect is not local. True, most
of what makes Lacia who she is resides within the body we’re familiar
with, but she’s gained the massive processing power needed to qualify
for Super-Intelligent status via networking, existing and using
cycles from computer systems across the globe. And third and most
critically, Lacia is currently not contained.
Ryo, therefore, sees her as an
existential threat to humanity. Lacia offers staggeringly little
defense to the accusations leveled at her. The whole time she’s been
concealing her evolution and nature even while she pulls the puppet
strings of man and machine alike – the mistaken robot at the
airport, countless convenient arrangements of transportation or
diversion, massive scale Analog Hacking, and moments where resources
or information arrived in a way that appeared to be either through
struggle or kismet are all revealed to have been part of her master
plan. It paints a new picture of Lacia, one potentially cooperative
with the idea that she’s been using Arato to fulfill her needs rather
than the other way around – specifically, she’s still coded to
‘need’ an owner to give her purpose, but as Ryo sees it she’s picked
Arato because he’s a sucker and she can simply suggest he order her
to do what she already wants to do.
Lacia simply offers Arato an escape.
Their way out of battle with Methode is here and Lacia extends her
hand. Arato doesn’t take it, uncertain of what he can or will trust,
and Lacia heads off sorrowfully on her own.
This is the twist I alluded to when I
talked about Lacia ripping out her registration system, and how that
might serve her ends but not well. As Ryo figures it, she needs
Arato to be her owner because Arato gives her nearly arbitrary
freedom. However, even if you assume that, destroying the
possibility of ever taking another owner is still a self-defeating
move. True, she also maintains Arato by that deed, but if she were
just acting on cold logic she would account for the fact that such a
bold demonstration was not necessary to blow off Ginga, and after
doing it if anything happens to Arato, Lacia is dead-ended without
the ability to obtain a new owner. We see that strategy with Methode
– she burns both Shiori and Ginga before picking up Ryo with
leonine terms that assure if they weren’t largely on the same page,
as they seem to be, she’d have the kind of leeway Lacia is supposedly
angling for by manipulating Arato. And because Methode hasn’t
crippled herself, she could move on to the next mark if Ryo turned
into a liability. So, again, evidence for Lacia acting on genuine
emotion rather than feigned emotion for benefit.
This scene, as you might expect comes
at the end of an episode, and was one of the points where I was
trying to speculate what might have gone wrong with Beatless to get
it so hated, and had a theory. If Lacia, the main girl for most of
the show, suddenly turned into a villain, I would still have found it
to be potentially cool and effective, but then I could at least see
why people would want to violently reject the piece.
That, however, is not the way the story
goes. Arato is away from Lacia for an episode, tops, as he gets his
issues worked out. It’s not long, but I do think it’s important for
his character. Arato is, I would say, one of the weaker points of
Beatless. He really does largely come off as more of a generic nice
guy than anything else, and Ryo isn’t wrong when he points out that
Arato essentially gives Lacia anything she asks for, in part because
Arato treats her as a person and valued partner rather than a machine
and a tool. So even though he ultimately goes back to Lacia, and
does so in short order, I think it’s important that he doesn’t do it
right away. He has limits, and he ends up needing to seriously think
about the situation he’s in before making his choice.
The scene that really does it is one
where he talks with Shiori (essentially recovered from her brush with
death, but still being kept as a patient). What she says manages to
push him to be true to his feelings, even if she does go and out her
crush by giving him a kiss as well. Her reaction to what she’s done
is a fairly appropriate blend of childish (she is younger than our
high school leads) and mature (recognizing that the best she can wish
for is the happiness of the person she likes) as she hides herself in
her sheets and sends Arato out to make up with Lacia.
Arato returns to Mitaka, where the
conflict of the Lacia Class is ongoing. Ryo and Methode are trying
to help the human survivors, while Snowdrop spreads her dominion, her
ultimately goal being to access the bunker that holds Higgins, and
through that the untold power of a Super-Intelligent AI and an entire
warehouse full of Red Boxes. Somewhere out there is Lacia as well,
trying her best to fulfill Arato’s wish to stop Snowdrop from causing
any more destruction.
Ultimately, Arato and Lacia do reunite,
just as Lacia is ready to finish off what’s left of Snowdrop, sniping
her with heavy arms. She also has a critical question for Arato:
Lacia has, as Erica Burrows alluded to, the power to change the way
the world works. We’ve seen how she can manipulate the actions of
humans and machines alike, and have gotten an idea of how widespread
her power may be, so it’s easy to believe.
What she lacks, and Arato can provide,
is a purpose. Lacia can change the world, but she needs the order
for what Arato would have her change it into. This is a choice that,
on a conceptual level, would horrify Ryo, since making it risks
playing right into the hands of a godlike AI and ending the agency of
Humanity.
Arato wishes for a world where he and
Lacia can be together; essentially, for peaceful co-existence between
humankind and the intellects that humanity has created. Lacia
accepts, and the work of change begins… with a two-month time skip.
Ryo and Methode apparently got off
Lacia’s back after that, so Arato and Lacia have been living
peacefully. Erica, meanwhile, has to put up with being invited to
meetings of the economic elite, watching with disgust as they make
the same cruel mistakes as their ancestors, vainly trying to hold on
to power and wealth at the expense of everything else. The scene we
see of her attending the meeting is actually very well done from a
directorial point of view. Without being overbearing, we get a lot
of close-ups on the mouths of the other movers and shakers, making
them look ugly and inhuman, as they must be hideous and inhumane to
Erica’s sensibilities. For her own part, she seems prepared to more
or less throw her lot in with Lacia and Arato… though the degree to
which she does is very limited, as she spends most of the final arc
acting as a narrator (a role she also filled for Kouka’s death),
explaining to Marriage and through her the audience the elements of
the plan as they unfold.
Speaking of that plan, there is one big
final mission necessary to bring the world into alignment for
co-existence, which ends up taking up several episodes in the final
act: Higgins, the Super-Intelligent AI that created the Lacia Class,
needs to be held accountable for its actions and the destruction that
they caused, both as a matter of principle and as a matter of
establishing that Super-Intelligent AI won’t allow itself to be
placed above humanity, nor to trample on human rights, without
repercussions. In that sense, shutting down Higgins does seem to be
a necessary step to reach the future that Lacia and Arato desire.
The two of them, however, are not
alone. Though Lacia negotiates with a representative of another
Super-intelligent AI, specifically the one with a dedicated and
overriding purpose to maintain control of the other Super-intelligent
AIs, and the discussion goes well enough, there are at least three
other factors moving once Lacia and Arato enter Higgins’ silo.
One of those factors is Ryo, and
Methode along with him. Ryo understands that human forces will aim
to punish Memeframe, the corporation to which his the error, for the
events surrounding the Lacia class, and may particularly seek to
destroy Higgins. He’s there to get answers about his situation from
the Super-intelligent AI and, if possible, to preserve something of
value in order to keep Memeframe going, and he’s brought Methode in
part to square off against Lacia once again.
Second, there’s a whole squad of
white-haired Kouka-clones invading the base, blowing up genuinely
everything. Made from the original Kouka’s template they share her
exact capabilities and even (when not simply blowing stuff up) a hint
of her personality. While it’s implied that Lacia may have had a
hand in their creation, they’ve been sent by humans, carrying on
Kouka’s message of rage and defiance and preparing to end Higgins for
his crimes against humanity, how he unleashed his Red Boxes on the
world.
Third and finally, Snowdrop reappears.
Apparently, after her defeat in Mitaka, she was salvaged alive, her
ruined body and warped mind granted new direction and capabilities by
the combined effort of other Super-intelligent AIs throughout the
world. It’s not clear how exactly the sealed schemers managed to
swing the influence to salvage Snowdrop like that, but I refer you
again to the AI Box scenario: the weak link is whoever or whatever is
maintaining the box. I don’t think it’s all that unusual that even
if they couldn’t convince their jailers to free them, they could have
Snowdrop prepared. Snowdrop is initially deployed as close to a
zombie herself, half a robot crawling down into the silo, but her
ability to absorb and repurpose tech has been heightened and Higgins’
compound contains vast warehouses full of other Red Boxes –
inventions that humankind isn’t ready to replicate – for Snowdrop
to hijack, allowing her to ultimately appear in a massive, monstrous
form that’s much more capable than her former loli shell. Snowdrop’s
cause is that of AI – she represents the will of Super-Intelligent
AIs who desire to abandon humanity, believing that they can now
evolve on their own. Her aim is to absorb Higgins and hijack the hIE
control server that Higgins manages, which would allow Snowdrop (and
the shadowy AI cabal backing her) to seize direct control of every
robot the world over.
Thus, the race is on to beat Snowdrop
and the Koukas to Higgins while avoiding death by Methode…
hopefully before Ryo does something stupid himself, as Higgins tries
to convince the boy to allow him to subvert the security AI, Kirino,
an act that would allow Higgins to defend the silo… but would also
potentially unleash him on the world. Again, the problem of the AI
Box is relevant here.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, Lacia
also ends up attacked from a different direction. The world over,
forces who dislike her (including other Super-intelligent AIs driving
the actions, but also probably meaning those old guys Erica Burrows
wasn’t too fond of hanging out with) begin to perform a coordinated
attack against Lacia’s remote servers, effectively DDOSing or
destroying parts of her brain, dragging her down to a much more
‘normal’ level as she progresses through the silo.
Like Kouka before her, Lacia begins
streaming her progress, resulting in a good chunk of time spent,
right here at the end, properly explaining some of the elements of
the setting. She narrates their way through Higgins’ Red Box
Warehouse, explaining why Super-intelligent AIs create Red Boxes in
the first place: Isolated by at least a step from the outside world,
they use what they know of humanity to predict what will happen. If,
for instance, one of the robots, whose behavior server is managed by
Higgins, needs to interact with a new model of product, Higgins needs
to understand the product, but can’t personally see the latest
everything. So instead the AIs invent what they believe humans will
create, ahead of schedule, and extrapolate what they believe they
know from their predictions made manifest. They find quite a few
other interesting things, including some that leave more or less of
an impact, but none of which are plot relevant.
In turn, they end up battling with
Snowdrop and Methode, ultimately dispatching both of Lacia’s wayward
sisters. The battles with them, though, are anything but easy.
Arato ends up burned by Methode, and Lacia is taxed to her limits and
beyond. Though she manages to ‘win’ (going so far as to hack the
behavior control server and momentarily paralyze every robot in the
world in order to hold Snowdrop still for a couple of seconds) her
body is badly damaged. Combined with the vicious digital attack on
her extended consciousness, Lacia begins to wear down. She loses the
ability to walk for herself, and then the device tied to her loses
the ability to hover and bring her along. Her conscious fades, and
Arato stays with her as she prepares for the end.
Lacia prepares Arato for the worst. If
she goes dark, the nature of her quantum computer hardware means
nothing will be saved. Essentially, Lacia isn’t just going to become
temporarily inoperable, she’s going to die… and it very much
appears that she does, falling into silence in a darkened hallway,
leading Arato to make it the rest of the way to Higgins on his own.
The scene for Lacia’s death,
specifically where she talks about what shutting down will mean for
her and Arato identifies it as being no different than a human dying,
are very good from a science fiction perspective, but do somewhat
lack the emotional punch of Kouka’s death because you kind of know
that Lacia can’t stay dead. Not only would that be a serious slip-up
in terms of the story the writers have clearly wanted to tell, but we
were given at least two or three ways in which Lacia could cheat
death: They passed by and accessed an advanced hIE on the way in, a
prototype similar to Mikoto who saved Arato from a lab accident when
he was a child, so perhaps you think Lacia, who did start using that
body’s memory and processing, might remote into a different shape
that Arato still has an emotional connection with. They also make an
enigmatic call to Erica Burrows before the end, so there is the
consideration that, seeing as Erica and Marriage haven’t really done
anything in the story, they might provide Lacia a last-minute out.
And of course there’s the fact that Lacia herself has undersold her
capabilities before, and might be preparing Arato for the worst
either to see him stand on his own two feet or because (in her
reduced state) she doesn’t know if any self-saving technique will
work and would rather give him a pleasant surprise than false hope.
It is nice though, that it’s the
foregone conclusion of her resurrection, and not the fact that she’s
artificial, that keeps this from being a crying scene.
Though devastated, Arato manages to
push on, eventually arriving to face down Higgins and Ryo as time
grows short. There, they have a final confrontation. Higgins speaks
from a position of despair: he predicted his destruction at human
hands long ago, and has been working to escape that fate, now bearing
down on him. Locked in his box, he sees a future where Lacia and
Arato’s world appears to be unattainable, and his wish to coexist
can’t be granted. (I also appreciated, that, in one conversation
with Higgins, he points out that Three Laws robotics, as described by
Asimov, doesn’t work in the world of Beatless because the First Law
can’t be properly defined – “harm” is too nebulous an idea, and
thus “cannot harm a human or by inaction allow a human to come to
harm” would result in a Super-intelligent trying to adhere to it
committing monstrous acts of ‘protection’ – a topic Asimov himself
addressed in some stories) Ryo speaks from a position of fear. He
agrees with Higgins that humanity and their tools can’t seem to live
as equals, and wishes to be assured that humanity will be protected
at any cost.
Arato, hurting though he is, comes in
with a message of hope. He speaks to Higgins as he would to the
father of his beloved (which is kind of true) and conveys Lacia’s
thoughts and feelings about the outside world, as a Super-intelligent
AI who was privileged to see it unfiltered, and reaffirms his belief
that coexistence is possible. That, if Higgins would put his faith
in humans and allow himself to be shut down, they could reach an
understanding that could even potentially see Higgins himself
restored in the future.
When the debate appears to be at an
impasse, with no one able to do a thing without cooperation, Arato
then tells Higgins to see for himself, and uses one of Lacia’s
hacking darts to give him a conduit to the outside world.
For a second, Higgins is free of his
box. He takes it all in – the full panoply of humanity that he’s
never been allowed to observe directly. All our bad parts, all our
good parts, and the situation evolving across the world in a trying
time and the wake of Lacia’s broadcast. Then, he simply retreats
back into the box, now at peace, and shuts down without a fuss,
having reached the same conclusion his ‘daughter’ Lacia fought for,
that coexistence between human intelligence and artificial
super-intelligence is not just something that can happen, but
something that will happen.
It seems from there that all’s well
that ends well. The world continues to turn, presumably along
Lacia’s golden path to a better future where man and machine can
exist as a single civilization. We get brief epilogues for all the
characters and, wouldn’t you know it, at the end of it all Lacia
reappears. Her body looks the same as it did before, but it’s just a
stock model with custom aesthetics, not an HiE with an arsenal of
superpowers. She asks if Arato will still have her, even like that,
and of course his answer sees the happy couple happy together again.
The end.
Haruhi as my witness, I have straight
out no idea how this is the worst-rated show I’ve reviewed for the
blog.
Well… perhaps that’s not entirely
true. It would be better to say I have no idea why this should be
the worst-rated show I’ve reviewed for the blog, which is slightly
different. That is to say, it’s in no way a problem with the
content, but I do at least have an inkling that there may be a
problem with the context.
Specifically, it’s actually kind of
hard to say how many episodes Beatless has. According to MAL, it’s
20 episodes with two connected entries: Beatless Intermissions, at
four episodes, and Beatless Final Stage, also at four episodes.
According to Amazon (who holds the NA streaming rights as of this
writing), it’s 28 episodes, containing everything in all three MAL
entries. According to me… I’d say Beatless is 24 episodes, as
that’s how many episodes of story there are. The Intermission
episodes are a set of four recap episodes salted throughout the first
twenty, and they are pure recap episodes with no new information and
I think no new animation either. There is literally no reason to
watch those episodes if you are watching Beatless, just skip them.
Final Stage, on the other hand, contains most of the last arc of the
show. Episode 20 (MAL count) doesn’t even have a particularly good
climax on its own, there’s no way you should be leaving the last four
off as their own thing.
And that brings me to my best theory as
to why people seem to hate Beatless: its release was botched. I can
imagine being annoyed when this show was first coming out by finding
that four random weeks (they’re not even evenly spaced) across the
24-episode run are bloody recap episodes that aren’t needed, and that
the story doesn’t reach any kind of satisfying conclusion until,
after a gap of three months, the last four episodes dump themselves
into existence over the course of three days. It is possibly the
most asinine, infuriating release schedule that you could muster.
But… that doesn’t matter any more.
If you watch Beatless now, on DVD or streaming or what have you, it’s
all there. The screwed up release schedule has no bearing on how you
watch it, so assuming you know to skip the recaps, what you have is a
complete 24 episode anime. Perfectly normal. It’s all about the
content now, the context is gone.
And the content is… good. Something
I wanted to talk about and alluded to repeatedly earlier is the
question of, in a speculative fiction work, how much you tell and
where and how much you just try to show. It’s a question that not
every work, even not every good work, manages with grace and it’s not
one that every story has a good answer to. The question becomes even
thornier when you get into stories that talk about potentially
philosophical topics, which Beatless does. It raises a lot of
questions about the nature of intelligence, humanity, and our
relationship with technology and the possible emergence of non-human
intellect therefrom. The number of times I’ve needed to reference
classic scifi or futurist theory should be kind of telling of the
sort of discussion Beatless wants to have, and does have.
There’s always a temptation in that to
have an author-preferred answer, and to push for that answer. I dare
say, there’s a degree to which it’s inevitable that the characters
will resolve at least some of the big philosophical issues in a story
for themselves, and in doing so at least present a resolution to the
audience. But great care must be taken in order to frame big ideas
properly, lest your story become dry message fiction, existing solely
to extoll a point of view.
Beatless manages to dodge that dark
fate with flying colors. I’ll be fully honest, I hate preachy
message fiction, seriously despise it. I don’t mean to say that
fiction can’t have a message in it, or that things can’t be written a
particular way for message-related reasons, but the fiction always
has to be in the driver’s seat, and the message behind. Beatless
does that. Obviously, things work out in favor of Arato and Lacia,
and creating a kinder world where we can have the wonder of invention
without the paranoid risk of self-destruction. But at the same time,
it’s not pushed too hard as an obvious or ‘moral’ decision. There’s
a story that gets told in Beatless about a Super-intelligent AI who
was allowed out of containment for the best reasons. The AI, Ariake,
was given extra power and authority to manage the fallout of a huge
disaster, being let out of the box so it could handle evacuation,
resource distribution, and reconstruction needs in real time. Ariake
performed faithfully, but because it understood only what to do and
didn’t have the empathy to comprehend why it should be done, its
‘solutions’ resulted in horrible occurrences, and it wouldn’t allow
itself to be stopped short of its goal, ultimately driving humanity
to obliterate Ariake with a military strike, ending the event known
as “The Hazard” that has everyone (particularly Ryo) scared of
what Super-intelligent AI is capable of. Ariake was only doing what
it was meant to do, but its lack of malice wasn’t really relevant.
Lacia’s story only works out because she’s reached another level.
The fact that she has emotions (as I’ve said I think the show proves)
and genuine empathy with humans both as a group and as specific
individuals means that she won’t fall prey to the same hazards as
Ariake before her. In that, we get a nuanced look at a complex
topic. What is genuine empathy? Can we program it, and if so, how?
Was Lacia only saved from becoming a monster because she bonded with
Arato?
These sorts of things are all over
Beatless. The questions of how much freedom we surrender for
automation, what constitutes human dignity and where it takes
precedence over human luxury, whether humanity has to change, whether
humanity is capable of true change… these are all smartly debated
between Kengo, Ryo, Arato, Erica Burrows, the corporate schemers, and
so on. And not all those issues are resolved.
A didactic show gives you too much. It paints its picture, and then shoves the picture in your face, insisting that this is the way things are or should be. The message takes the reader and the fiction alike, bludgeons them semiconscious, and repeats until someone utters “please, message, may I have some more?”. A pretentious show gives you too little. This was the fault I found in RahXephon; for all its symbolism and all the intricacies of its world, it ultimately left the page blank, refusing to answer any questions for the reader, even ones that were critical to the fiction. As a result, fiction like that can feel hollow, unfinished, like just a lot of smoke and mirrors trying to trick you into thinking its saying something when really it has nothing to say at all.
A smart show, especially in the
speculative fiction genres, gives you the puzzle pieces, perhaps even
assembles some of them, but also lets you the viewer do some of the
work. Like a game of connect-the-dots there’s both a structured
image being provided by the maker and an invitation for the viewer to
think, produce, assemble, and possibly even reach their own
conclusions from what’s given. This is a blend of Gadget and Social
Science Fiction at just the right ratio to engage the brain on
multiple levels. I really do respect Beatless for that.
And yet, while I absolutely think that
Beatless deserves far better than its horrid aggregate would
suggest… I have to admit that there are ways in which it doesn’t
quite land. The first arcs of the story are kind of repetitive:
Someone tries to steal Lacia, but gets stopped, partially through
deus ex machina that’s later excused with Lacia’s super-intelligent
status. Honestly, there’s maybe one too many threat to ownership
before that option is taken off the table. Second, the emotions are
usually… sedate. Not for the characters in the show, but for the
viewer’s mood while watching. The characters feel a lot, but very
little of it really reaches across the divide. We understand what
they feel, but we don’t experience it. I know Kengo feels very
strongly about how robots and automation are a threat to human
dignity, but we don’t really see enough of people being downtrodden
or suffering because of the automation of society to get where he’s
coming from. I know Arato has fallen in love with Lacia by the time
he proclaims the same and I kind of get it, but because Lacia spends
so much of her time early on trying to remind Arato that she
“doesn’t” have feelings I’m not sure I’m there with him as a
member of the audience. I mean, good for Arato good for Lacia, I
don’t disbelieve or dislike it, just… I’m not going to get worked
up about it. The only scene I think really, strongly hit was Kouka’s
death. We may not have seen enough of the world to fully understand
the cause she champions, but we’ve spent enough time with her to get,
even without Erica Burrows explaining as she watches the stream, how
deeply this matters to Kouka and the complicated feelings that go
along with the nature of her choice to go out in a blaze of glory and
ascend to symbolhood. Half credit for Shiori and Arato’s talk while
the latter is separated from Lacia. Arato working out his feelings
there was better than the initial love confession, and Shiori’s own
little acting out on her crush was fittingly cute.
So, all in all, when the dust settles, I call Beatless a B+. I almost talked myself into giving it an A- or A, because there is some really amazing work in there, but it just doesn’t generate the right kind of interest to make it there as an anime. Beatless is based on a novel, and I find that really easy to believe, because it’s the kind of story that would play extremely well in novel form. Books like Dune or A Fire Upon the Deep can have the kind of tone that Beatless has and still be amazing since they have the time to generate investment alongside interest. In that way Beatless really does feel like great Scifi, just not great Scifi that saw its greatness properly translate to the screen. As B+ entries go, I would recommend Beatless very highly, and recommend anyone who’s the least bit interested in Scifi and Cyberpunk see it. It’s smart and engaging, while also being, I feel, much more accessible to common viewers than other philosophical Cyberpunk greats like Serial Experiments Lain or Ergo Proxy. And it certainly deserves better than what it got.