A.I.C.O. Incarnation (or AICO, as I’ll call it from here on) is a near-future science fiction adventure where groups of mercenaries on roller skates infiltrate a river valley filled with hostile killer goop in search of valuables. This sounds like it should be completely creative and insane, but instead what we get is a fairly standard and small scale harrowing journey with forgettable characters and few strong ideas that it can call its own. The question is not whether it’s great or terrible – it isn’t. The question becomes whether or not it is sufficient.
The story centers on Aiko Tachibana, an
unfortunate girl who’s able to start school again after a long
hospital stay, only to run in with mysterious transfer student
Kanzaki, who isn’t actually Sagara from Full Metal Panic, but you’d
be forgiven for mistaking them given Kanzaki’s general lack of humor
or ability to pose as an actually normal student. Fortunately
enough, we ditch the school setting and never come back fairly
shortly in, as Kanzaki takes Aiko to some friends of his who are more
than happy to explain her nature, the nature of the world, and where
our plot is going from there.
The basis is that three years ago, the
lab where Aiko’s parents worked became ground zero for the release of
Malignant Matter, an artificial organism that quickly spread along
the river valley that was convenient to it, covering several
settlements along the way before being contained with a series of
gates. The reason this disaster happened isn’t widely known, but it
actually stems from Akio herself: to save her from a traffic
accident, her brain was transplanted into an artificial body while
the artificial brain was placed in hers to keep things going. The
burst of Malignant Matter is thanks to the artifical Aiko freaking
out at the transplant, and will be fully ended if Aiko can be taken
to the lab and the process reversed, restoring her real body in the
process. As an added bonus, her mother and brother are still alive
and trapped in stasis at ground zero, so she can rescue them to if
she goes along.
Naturally, Aiko agrees to go along.
They recruit a heavy escort of the roller skate mercs with promises
of vast riches (since Aiko’s presence is going to get the Malignant
Matter even more hot and bothered than normal, a fact they don’t tell
the grunts) and head into the danger zone ahead of an evacuation
order, since the government is getting pretty fed up with the danger
of the Matter and kind of wants to roast it all.
Form here, the basic plot of most of
the episodes is a simple if lethally dangerous trip from safehouse to
safehouse, fighting off the malignant matter in the way over a long
series of action scenes. Not much time is spared for character
building in the process, just enough so that you’d kind of prefer it
if they didn’t get obliterated by heaps of undifferentiated cells and
to move the story forward. Aiko makes friends with Kanzaki and this
little blob creature named Gummi that her father left for her, and
otherwise it’s a mass of fighting interwoven with an ever-deepening
web of conspiracies.
Perhaps the sole claim to fame of this
show is just how twisted the facts get. When we’re not shooting,
we’re typically having to clarify some new factor, something that
changed, or some lie that was told in the past, while also
introducing loads of side characters back in town who scheme this or
that about the Matter. The big one is a mad scientist doctor with a
comatose daughter, who wants to stop the leads because his daughter’s
duplicate bodies and possibly mind are trapped in there somehow.
There’s a lot more including some craziness about Kanzaki being a
brain transplant of a doctor Aiko knew, the inevitable reveal of the
extra danger Aiko brings the expedition, and so on. Finally, a big
lie is revealed when it turns out that we had Aiko backwards: the one
we’ve been following is the clone brain (with implanted memories,
courtesy of Kanzaki’s past self) in the original body more or less,
and Kanzaki’s plan involves terminating that brain when implanting it
back into the matter to kill off the matter.
At about this point we reach the lab
complex and, needless to say, all hell breaks loose. Aiko gets
swallowed by some Matter but it seems weirdly non-malignant since it
provides an opportunity for her to talk with her Other Self, who’s
rather friendly and thanks Clone Aiko for all she’s been through,
while wishing to resolve the Matter situation peacefully. The mad
scientist mucks with his daughter, whose mind is indeed lost deep in
the Matter network, animating the matter in a big way with her
horrifically mutated clones acting as especially dangerous forms. As
things go even worse for him, he ultimately logs his mind into the
Matter himself to become a big silly monster, but that’s for the
climax.
On the human side, Aiko Clone is set
loose, locates mom and brother Tachibana, and promises to save them.
Kanzaki has a change of heart, seeing Aiko Clone as a real person
worth saving, and promises to do his best to rescue both versions of
her. Mad Scientist does his rampage thing doing the typically
bellowing about being a genetic science god or some other white noise
while a half formed titan torso threatens to smash things, ultimately
getting the load of cascading cell death poison that was meant for
Aiko Clone and acting as ground zero for the total meltdown of the
matter. Aiko Original is saved by the surgery, and Aiko Clone is
rescued by Deus Ex Machina from her place in the horribly mutated
Matter that used to be her body with credit given to Gummi and
through it, in a roundabout way, her dad. The two Aikos are happy
because they’re each other and wish themselves the best, the mad
scientist is done, his daughter wakes up as soon as she’s
disconnected from the BS (I ask, “Have you tried turning her off
and back on again?” as that’s basically what works), and all is
right with the world. We end with Aiko Clone attending school,
introducing herself as… the show cuts before we hear what her new,
independent identity is supposed to be, but she’s got one so that’s
your happy ending.
That, honest to Haruhi, is it.
The story of AICO is dense, but it’s
not big. At its heart, I think it could be divested of enough
repetition and unnecessary subplots to fit comfortably into the frame
of a two-hour action movie, which is largely what it resembles. That
said, it doesn’t totally fail to utilize its running time. There are
way too many minor characters and miniature arcs but they’re all
passable enough. Some of the complications of clones, brain swaps,
mind uploads, and so on that goes into controlling the Matter is too
twisted for its own good, but it’s not actually that hard to follow.
The characters are kind of bland and forgettable, but they were all
given at least one note. The idea of an artificial person,
particularly a copy, being real and worthwhile or not is good
material, but it’s only really touched on in the final arc and has
been done better a million times before. I can’t hate this for being
time a million and one, but it’s also not too much to its credit.
That said, I do think the twists it
shovels in ultimately work to its favor. The mad scientist makes for
an actual villain while having something of a compelling motivation,
which is nice when the antagonist for most of the show is somewhere
between an unthinking monster and an environmental hazard. The
scenes between the two Aikos, and how they regard each other, are
honestly pretty good. The visual design is lackluster, with the
Malignant Matter realized as a lot of red-and-black goop strands in a
bleak, misty environment with only a few appearances of interesting
structures or the “humanoid matter” I can best describe as a
hybrid of Casper the Friendly Ghost and an extremely unfriendly
jellyfish to break up the monotony… but on the other side the
movement and technical action is good. The scenes of running battles
have a good sense of speed, and they even own and utilize the
dopey-in-concept roller skates. It’s not great, but its a little
better than bog standard.
Which is, in the end, about how I feel
about the show. It gets a B- from me. I offer it tepid praise and
lukewarm regards, but at the same time acknowledge that while its
strengths are few, its defects are even fewer. There are plenty of
better or at least more interesting shows to watch, but I don’t think
there’s any reason to recommend against AICO in the least.