So, we’re going to form a rock band and save the universe with the power of music and… oh dear Haruhi I’ve stumbled into the offspring of Macross 7 haven’t I?
I was pretty hard on Macross 7, and I don’t think transitioning it to “modern” Earth is going to make it any less absurd. The pitch is a rough one, but the proof is in the pudding, so they say. Let’s watch it.
So, we start with a bunch of spaceships having a rave… or maybe a battle, but the lasers don’t seem to do a whole lot until the big screen-clearing one. We’re then delivered from that scenario, by way of an intro that does its best to convince me that I’m having a bad acid trip despite having not now or even ever partaken of recreational psychoactive substances capable of creating such imagery, to the every day Japan of 1999, where a pretentious monologuer waxes poetic about his dissatisfaction with what appears to be a life of moderate success including at least a wife and child.
At this point, not five minutes in to the first episode, you are liable to suspect that the spectrum of possibilities for this show is a pair of antipodes and nothing in between: either it’s going to take nothing seriously and probably be a lot of fun, or it’s going to take every molecule of ink used to draw it as seriously as your average zealot takes his or her religion of choice, at which point you’re in for a very different kind of treat. Perhaps there are less extreme possibilities, but the peak 90’s everything loudly welcomes extremes.
The show reveals it’s a comedy pretty quickly, as we learn that our poetically despairing salaryman, Oji, is a former rocker who settled down into a comfortable rut that crushes his spirit, and that he’s now being watched by a bunch of eccentric weirdos who think he might be their messiah. One of these is a dangerously attractive new coworker, Layla Yuki.
After Oji comes home and discovers that his wife has literally trashed his last, precious guitar from his rocker days (foul move, btw), Oji ends up getting drunk out on the streets. This is where Layla catches up and pretty much draws him into what he has every expectation will be if not an affair at least a one-night extramarital fling. Gratuitous sex-fantasy scene aside, this turns out to be a dream come true of a different sort, as he’s given a rather surreal opportunity to rock out.
The next day, it seems like it was all just a dream, just in time for the wake up call being Oji’s son, Gen, getting his prized signed album of his musical hero destroyed by treating it like a frisbee. His wife shows no sympathy.
At work, after a false start, Layla manages to get Oji alone and reveal that not only did something happen the previous night, but that she is an alien and that the ultimate weapon upon which the survival of her species is predicated depends on the power of rock and roll – his rock and roll – to function. It gets out there in an incredibly concise fashion and also seems to get Oji his groove back.
His wife initially chews him out after he once again stays out all night, but this is initially patched over by the fact that he’s got his spirit back rather than being a soulless husk of a man, able to show affection and attention since he’s not busy with 24-7 despair monologues inside. She also starts to suspect an affair in pretty short order and… yeah, they may not be screwing but her husband is meeting up on the sly with a pretty lady to participate in activities that are a shared secret and which the wife would probably not approve of, due to the husband in question having been unfulfilled and miserable and thus vulnerable to temptation, the situation is pretty affair-like.
And while Oji doesn’t seem inclined to actually cheat on his wife (when sober and understanding that this is reality, at least) the intentions may not be entirely innocent on all sides at that.
This is basically the crux of the first arc: Oji happy to recapture the joys of his younger days, but incidentally neglecting his wife and child over it, while his wife is torn between trust and suspicion, and even comes to introspect om the role she’s played and the steps she’s taken.
I’ve been a little harsh on the wife in the intro for this, because she does some real bad relationship things, but to the credit of both her and the writer, when she’s faced with neighborhood busybodies and this threat, she does introspect, both helping us understand how she got to this point and having her realize she may not have been very good to her partner, which she tries to make up.
This arc comes to a head when, due to a new song failing to do the thing, Oji finally realizes that Layla wasn’t kidding in episode 2 when she explained the whole alien space war thing. Realizing that his musical return has been nothing more than a weapon in a conflict that he knows nothing about puts Oji quite out of sorts, even when he’s given good reason why this is his problem.
Hitting an emotional low on realizing that none of the people he thought believed in him actually liked his music for its musicality, he ends up dropping out. Since this is the middle of the series, it’s for about an episode of soul searching that ends up leading to the show’s second arc.
That arc is getting the band back together. After the mad scientist of the aliens helps get Oji back on board (sparking some jealousy from Layla, for whom things are getting quite complicated), he comes to the conclusion that this would work out better if he could jam with his buddies. He quickly finds four of the original five members of Black Heaven but… they all have lives, and don’t exactly jump at a random mid day call to have a jam session in space.
This leads to a brief diversion trying to form a new band before the old crew all decide they’d rather relive their glory days up in space. Their spouses are, evidently, more understanding than Oji’s. However, there is one party member missing: the keyboardist, who is unfortunately deceased.
That proves to be a temporary imposition, though: Layla can learn to play the keyboard off screen.
Actually playing with a human band is harder. It takes her a whole episode to work out, failing along the way until a spot of soul searching (with Oji acting as a bit of a sage) leads her to the ability to jam like a human.
However, there’s one more spot of trouble. That keyboardist? The enemy aliens go ahead and graverob his body, using it to create a six-armed biomechanical clone capable of playing against the whole band and winning.
This leads to the band being prepared for one desperate final battle when the cyborg-led fleet comes again. Oji’s wife, having not received the tutorial nor proof of his talk about space, decides to be very harsh about this. As we see the rockers in space trying their round one, we even see her moving out of their apartment, leaving divorce papers behind.
Oji phones home when, after a disaster in the first round, he gets the idea that what they may need could be an audience, asking his wife (herself a former groupie of the band. You think she’d be more enthusiastic about band stuff.) to bring everyone she can to the secret teleporter room. It’s given a lot of hang time, but somehow she does, being done up in all her old groupie gear at that. They explain how she got the message – their son left a doll he likes behind so they turned back for it – but don’t bother to give any insight into her having a change of heart, finding all the other old fans of Black Heaven, or doing herself up in full fangirl mode. Did the sounds of explosions convince her it was real? Never explained!
With an audience, Black Heaven Plus Layla is able to turn the tables on the clone, busting out songs he can’t keep up with and eventually blowing him to kingdom come. Evidently, this is the decisive victory in the space war, so all is set to be over. Layla gets a private moment to give Oji a deep, romantic kiss to remember her by and they say their farewells. That is, until an epilogue (that confirms Oji and his wife are still a thing) reveals that she found her way to Earth to meet up.
Whatever, show over.
So, there are some really interesting things about Legend of Black Heaven, and I think the most critical among them is the tangled web of romance at its heart. Oji and his wife clearly have feelings, but they start out on the rocks because they don’t seem to communicate or share interests anymore. Oji clearly develops some pretty major feelings for Layla after she drags him out of his funk, being willing and able to help her soul-search and willing to stand up for her when things are hard, but at the same time it’s unclear if these feelings are anywhere close to romantic. Lustful, in episode 1, sure, but other than that moment the connection doesn’t feel particularly romantic… on Oji’s side.
On Layla’s side, she clearly develops feelings for Oji that are pretty clearly romantic, if the big damn kiss and her getting hideously jealous of the mad scientist even suggesting a seduction gambit weren’t enough of a hint. This is complicated for her, though, as it’s clear that her species don’t process emotions quite the same as humans and don’t have the same social mores. It’s also made more complicated because the commander of the fleet, Formalhaut, is her fiancee (by arrangement). She clearly respects him despite him usually being forced into the role of the shouty military idiot, but there’s no interpersonal passion on her side of that equation, while Formalhaut takes her for granted for too long and has to just sort of watch as this starts to turn bad for him.
It’s a fantastic web for drama, because there is no win to the core triangle. On one hand, you could argue pretty effectively that Layla would be better for Oji, at least after her character growth lets her feel the way humans do. But on the other hand, even leaning that way would be a black mark for Oji And while I’ve been pretty hard on his wife in this, it’s a pretty big deal that he constantly chooses to keep secrets when the option to loop her in clearly exists, meaning the wronging in that relationship is anything but one sided even if limited to deeds actually done (or not) by choice. But, credit to the writing, you don’t want to see them break up and Oji lose his normal life.
The love polygon subgenre is where Legend of Black Heaven really shines. As a music thing, they can’t exist on the level of something like Macross (LINK 7 AND DELETE). I gave Basara a hard time for needing new material, but the twangy instrumental number Black Heaven puts on, while good, may get even older relative to the episode count than Planet Dance.
Speaking of Macross, the Sci-fi is also pretty thinly sketched in this show. We’re somehow using music to power an ultimate weapon that exists for unclear reasons with the goal of fighting off an enemy space force that we never see other than the exteriors of their ships. They don’t even try to give a reason why the sphereoids are the bad guys, they’re just the enemy. I guess when they decide to snatch the keyboardist and resurrect him as a technological abomination, that’s pretty harsh, but it’s also at the end. A little lore would have gone a long way, but I’m not sure a lot would have been able to salvage this from the cream cheese hardness level. Sci-fi hardness isn’t a quality thing most of the time but in this case it’s kind of indicative of using space without thought just because space is cool. Which it is.
Still, it’s a tight little journey, intensely flavored with its origins in 1999, at once a snapshot of an era and a functional tale with moving parts to enjoy.
For all that, I’ll give Legend of Black Heaven a B-. It’s not one of the greats, but it’s certainly entertaining, with enough unique and interesting stuff to make it significantly recommendable. All the same, it’s sometimes hard to watch and has its fair share of flaws. A B-class grade is still above average, but in this case only just. I’d recommend it for those looking for a rockin’ little time capsule and open to some alien soap opera.