An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Mine Transfer – ID-0 Spoiler Review

It should come as no surprise, but I tend to enjoy science fiction. Don’t get me wrong, I like a good fantasy setting or even a hybrid with both magic and technology, but there’s just something about visions of the future, dealing with such topics as robotics, AI, and transhumansim that tends to hit a different way. And while there are some good examples in anime, it’s generally something that sparks hope to see another. Enter ID-0

ID-0 takes place in a space future driven by this show’s unobtanium, a mineral called Orichalt. Orichalt enables FTL jump drives, and also is used for technology that allows humans to transfer their consciousness into machinery, most specifically the large, humanoid robots known as I-machines. As humanoid robots go, the I-machines seem rather sensible as they’re applied in the military and industrial sectors as effectively super-drones, and they do have to be driven with roughly 1:1 control (lest a human be forced to adapt to an extremely different body, which would probably be harder).

The story begins with Maya Mikuri, a graduate student in space geology, out on an academy-funded mining operation in order to preserve her scholarship grant and continue to survive. However, an accident mining (natural or manufactured) gets her, in I-machine form, stranded from her ship. She is rescued/abducted by a group of claim jumpers, who loot the Orichalt and then inform her that if she wants to get back to somewhere she’ll likely be in range of her body, she’ll have to work for her keep.

After, with her help, clashing with corporate goons over another lode, it turns out that Maya has been framed for leaking sensitive information (likely by her professor, who actually did it). This somehow affords the crew the chance to pick up her body, but means that she’s in with the quasi-criminal group in earnest since she’d just be arrested if she tried to rejoin polite society.

We briefly get to know the rest of the crew: ex-military captain Grayman, his daughter Clair who acts as handler when they’re out mining, cunning dealer Karla, excitable hotshot Rick, team pet Fa-loser (a semi-sentient cat/dog sort of I-machine), and of course the brooding loner with a mysterious past, Ido. Other than Clair, these characters are not seen in their human bodies (Grayman and Karla get digital avatars of their human forms, Rick and Ido do not). The reason for this is eventually revealed to be that the lot of them are “evertrancers”, individuals who have abandoned their human bodies entirely and exist only in the I-machines. Becoming an evertrancer is illegal according to the main government body and seems to disturb some characters on a moral level as well, but the mining crew here all seem fairly happy with their existences.

The next target is a teleporting planetoid with the largest Orichalt seam yet detected. Maya and Ido manage to collect it, with Maya overcoming her own fears when she learns that Ido is an evertrancer, and will die for real if his mechanical body is toast. They recover the giant vein from the depths of the hollow planetoid, but once it’s aboard the ship it’s found that it came with (or, once excavated, spawned) a mysterious little girl.

They don’t have much time to figure that out though, as (presumably resulting from a conversation between our likely villains, a weird ancient guy who appears in Asian-style rooms and a weird masked corporate suit on a water world) the government has sent a fairly large warship to arrest everybody and recover the giant Orichalt score, claiming that their mining operation was illegal, which they actually didn’t think it was this time. The government forces do manage to overrun the ship, in the process of which the Evertrancer nature of all the characters is properly revealed, along with the fact that Ido appears to be a virtual ghost that no one has any information on, even when they’re able to pull very specific details on the others.

The group escapes from the capturing ship by taking advantage of a crisis where a barrage of small asteroids start warping in at high speed, but in addition to saving the little mystery girl they find they’ve accidentally picked up the strike team leader who had some decent philosophical banter with Ido, both her I-machine and the pod with her body being caught in the jump and pulled away, far from her support.

As our main team deals with their captive, and a mysterious teleporting moon and its attack meteors (seemingly tied to the little girl), our villains recap previous episodes and babble about some goddess, which is a little annoying in how uselessly cryptic their scenes are. At the end we find out that Ido is amnesiac, remembering nothing of his mortal life (and is called Ido as a riff on ID 0, per Grayman), which is clearly trying to set up a new mystery.

That isn’t addressed for the bulk of next episode (we get one scene where we learn, from the circumstances of how he first woke up, he was some manner of convict), which is concerned with the angry moon’s attempts to get at the little girl. It is apparently intelligent and cunning, teleporting dust-specs of itself into a cloud that can seep into the ship and form up to go after her. Ultimately, the intruding bit of moon is flushed out the airlock, but it grabs the girl as it goes. That’s okay, though, as she can evidently breathe in space and, when Ido retrieves her, she also seems to trigger one of his lost memories, of her as a normal girl named Alice.

The attack rocks keep trying to get them, though they have a temporary reprieve when rescued by a group called the Observers, who rank the fleet that previously attacked them. The wormy Observer representative tries to make them an offer too tempting to refuse, and while they deliberate on it goes ahead and kidnaps Alice. The moon rocks attack again, and the wormy guy gets killed, but not before recognizing Ido with dread and no specific details.

Ido, Maya, and Alice are also imperiled, but rather than being squashed they’re entrapped in a hollow sphere of angry moon rock which then teleports, where Maya has only about 2 hours of life support and Alice’s magic field is predicted to last three. Fortunately, Rick and the Lieutenant are outside with one of the mining drills (teleported with the rock), and there’s a derelict ship to explore on the inside.

On the derelict, Ido and Maya find fragmentary data that suggests powerful people know the truth of Orichalt and have encountered and covered up the encounters with teleporting angry rocks before, the cover-up and lack of transparency regarding the nature of Orichalt being to preserve human expansion in the cosmos.

The main ship arrives just in time to pull the rescue in earnest (a little late, actually, but Alice shares her magic field with Maya and barely saves her) and, realizing that it’s coming for Orichalt more than anything, jettison their supply with a detonator to take out the attack moon, at least partially or temporarily. At this point, the crew has some spooky information and the name of a scientist who might know more.

The information identifies the attack moon as “Rajeev”, the product of an unknown alien civilization that teleports around to collect Orichalt, in what the scientists entrapped in it presume is a garbage collection operation, removing the miracle substance as a dangerous obstacle. And, of course, this autonomous system doesn’t care when it sweeps up a few humans as well. In order to avoid attack, they keep their remaining Orichaly (like the drive element) heavily shielded and take the slow way back to charted space, evidently taking two months. Sci-fi writers take note, space is big. Two months doesn’t cover interstellar distances unless FTL or something stranger (like time dilation, which would make it only two months shipboard and much longer planet-side) is in play. If you’re two months out and not experiencing either of those you’re really not that far off. But, whatever, two months adrift and we’re back in the known corner of the cosmos.

Once back in normal space they resolve to hack government top secret servers, which requires taking on a military fleet (by teleporting a solar flare on top of them. It’s quite destructive) and, while they’re in disarray, infiltrating a satellite base. This gets them little of interest, but does draw the attention of the villains, a mysterious I-machine that appears before Karla (revealed to be the villain, who tries to buy her off with her body), and some hint about the inventor of Mind Transfer, Kain Arisugawa, being related to all this. We’re also told that Rajeev has appeared and actually attacked a human colony world, likely dooming the 100 billion people living there.

In some ways, the failure to have a sense of scale in this is almost comforting, hearkening back to raygun gothic scifi. In other ways, it’s still kind of a mess.

While we deal with the fallout of that (the colony being eaten by Rajeev being largely covered up), we get another slower segment where we’re able to learn about the characters and their pasts, like how Karla was separated from her body by an accident and was once much more arrogant as a person, or how Rick is the backup of the original, who experienced actual death, leading him to question, when actually thinking, whether or not a digital ghost like him counts as being alive. It goes by quick and isn’t given all the weight in the world, but it is there and it’s decent material.

As it turns out, Karla’s desire for her body back was enough to sell out Ido, and she leads him (and incidentally Alice and Maya) into a trap. Ido defeats the goons who challenge him, but the weird villain with the weird mask that makes him impossible to take entirely seriously are there with Karla’s body as well. He uses the dorky mask to mind transfer into his robot form, and in the process manages to reveal that both he and Ido are Kain Arisugawa, with the human body having been Ido’s in the past and the villain (who introduces himself as Addams Fort-Chevalier in the end, a former co-worker of Kain) now playing the role of Kain, having bodyjacked three of Kain’s clones.

For a villain who had been fairly cool and composed in his previous (if brief and fairly meaningless) appearances, Addams goes into full scenery-chewing mode really quickly, shrieking at Ido to remember him and acknowledge his name. He forcibly transfers Karla back into her body, and then Ido into the Kain body and then gives Ido/Kain a crash course on his backstory. They (and their other co-worker, Jennifer) tried to save the original Alice from a strange condition by transferring her to a mechanical body, but she got stuck halfway in the Orichalt and woke up there before teleporting away, presumably resulting in the language-deprived Alice we have now. He used what was left behind to develop a theory behind the existence of Rajeev. He tried to shut down all Orichalt use until the Human Orichalt (Alice) could be found, as part of a plan to… do something for which he was willing to glibly write off 90% of the human race. I’m not sure how stopping using something that had evidently not been in use that long would cause such numbers, but sure. The sheer horror of Kain’s plan caused Addams to backstab him and stuff his mind in a robot with very loose safety tolerances, which explains how Ido was first found.

Ido rejects being Kain despite reclaiming the data of his past self and transfers back into his robot (really should have turned the mask off, Addams), and fights Addams, with Karla transferring back into her I-machine for just long enough to get it blown up protecting Maya and Alice from the mad scientist giant robot duel. They talk about theories and that there are, apparently, ways to end the threat of Rajeev, but nothing concrete is established in this encounter. Ido blows up Addams’s robot and then meets up with everyone in the Kain body just long enough for Addams (in his human body) to show up and shoot Ido in the back and kidnap Alice for good measure.

This sounds complicated, with the bodyjacking and stolen identities, but it’s actually fairly easy to follow in episode.

As Addams begins to enact his plan, having the military gather all Orichalt they can and move it to the vicinity of Old Earth, Ido states that he can’t defeat Rajeev as he is, and transfers back to his I-machine even at the cost of his newly acquired human body. They decide to make for Earth and the confrontation with Rajeev based on his knowledge

Meanwhile, the battle begins at Earth. The fleet fights bravely against what’s now a legion of Rajeev attack moons, teleporting them into a black hole elsewhere in the cosmos with Orichalt warheads. However, the Rajeev second wave turns things against the human fleet until Addams arrives with his super-dreadnought space battleship and warheads loaded with clones of himself that are also patterned after Alice to inject into the Rajeevs, hijacking their cores and suiciding them. It even looks like it’s working at first while Addams (having permanently placed himself in an I-machine by way of suicide) raves and gloats like the absolute madman he is.

In his moment of glory, Ido appears to warn him that Rajeev learns and grows, and indeed, the “destroyed” Rajeevs begin to put themselves together, now immune to what amounted to really weird hacking. As the two prepare to fight it out, Addams determined to win his way and Ido to save humanity by abandoning Orichalt, Alice finally speaks, telling them to stop.

The completed Alice consciousness is revealed to be her mother Jennifer, who mind-transferred into the Orichalt in search of Alice, and she begs them to find the real Alice. Ido nabs her and gets away from Addams who is busy raving about his ten motivations, because we’ve gone from him having no point to having too many. He then goes and tries to master the final conglomerate Rajeev himself by transferring his mind to it and blows up.

The main character squad then gets their own crazy plan, which is just about the same thing. They deliver Ido and Jennifer-Alice to the Core, where they integrate their minds with Rajeev.

In the Core, Ido encounters the real Alice, and also Addams. Addams thinks they reached the same conclusion, and wants to forcibly take control of Rajeev, but Ido has a different plan, using the bond between Alice and Jennifer to teach Rajeev what it means to be human, essentially, hopefully, convincing it to value human life.

If, like me, you’ve played Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, you might be a little giddy at this climax.

Anyway, Addams has to accept that Kain, who his entire persona is warped around, is basically gone rather than Ido being him, Jennifer and True Alice reunite and diffuse into Rajeev, inviting Addams along with them. Addams, having reached epipheny himself and now at peace with Ido, Kain, and their past, absolves Ido of Kain’s sin and sends him back to his (machine) body, which was teleported out of Rajeev’s interior as Rajeev started to leave.

Rajeev departs, The Earth is saved along with the spacefaring future of humanity, everybody gets pardons, Maya goes back to school, Karla (formerly a hedge fund manager) takes over the company Kaine and Addams built, Grayman and his daughter go on being miners, the Lieutenant joins them, Rick and Fa-loser go on vacation, and they and Ido go back to doing dangerous crazy mining operations on Maya’s intel. The end.

I have to say, I enjoyed the hell out of ID-0… but I’m a little torn as to its quality. It’s a deeply flawed product from both a science fiction angle and a storytelling angle, but at the same time it’s fun, its got the high-flying feel of classic sci-fi, it’s got layers and dimensions to be interesting… there’s a lot to like here.

On the bad side, let’s talk about the villains. Rajeev is not a compelling villain for the show. It’s an acceptable threat, but it’s a mindless attacking force; there always needs to be something else to support that even when it’s not also saddled with being a pile of rocks. The sinister old guy never amounts to anything. Addams, while appearing plenty before, doesn’t really make himself known until episode 10. Just because you check in with a character to confirm they exist and are probably evil doesn’t mean they’re set up. He spends so much of the show with screen time but no theme or presence, and then suddenly in the last quarter has to wear so many hats. He’s the corporate scumbag manipulating things, he’s the self-important would-be messiah who wants to be remembered for saving humanity, he’s the backstabber who resulted in Kain becoming Ido for good reason or not, he’s the jealous third wheel who was in love with Jennifer when she loved Kain. He’s a cruel schemer, a jabbering megalomaniac, and a tragic man trapped in the shadow of another turning friendship into envy and hate. Any of these arcs could be leveraged well, but Addams tries to play all of them in such a short time that it doesn’t quite land. If he had a few more episodes, it could make for an amazingly deep and complex villain, but as is he’s… a fraction of that. A good fraction, maybe, and still a kind of cool character, but too little too late.

In a sense, that last sentiment kind of describes the negative read of ID-0. My review is amazingly back-loaded, with probably more of the summary spent on the final three episodes than the first seven. The last three or four episodes are amazing. But a good finish didn’t save Revisions and can’t completely save a show in general.

However, Revisions was patently and flagrantly annoying before the turn, ID-0 was just… not as engaging as it became. Maya starts out a bit of a whiner, but really that’s not a big issue. The early bits, doing weird mining and fleeing from magic space rocks, were still filled with decent character scenes and at least a couple cool moments, they just didn’t really have a strong central thread to hold them together. I guess the mystery of Alice was probably supposed to be it, but we had no clues, were distracted from it by the military showing up, and… yeah, until it’s revealed that she was actually Jennifer the whole time, Alice never says a word, she just laughs and squeaks. I guess the idea is that her mind isn’t complete, and only proximity to the final Rajeev allowed her to fully connect her consciousness, but there’s only so much you can do with a pet character who just makes cute noises. You can get attached to them, but you don’t build a plot on their backs; Alice is equivalent to Fa-loser, and that’s not a great place to be.

That is, however, far more forgivable than being annoying. Even if our plot is shuffling along uncertainly, if you’re engaged watching the other characters, you can keep going with the show and get to the good stuff. ID-0 would be an easy one to drop, but it also wouldn’t be hard to keep on going. It doesn’t make you suffer for watching the starting bits, it just doesn’t reward you until you get through them, at least to the midpoint with the Observers if not to episode 10 and the reveal of Addams.

And, yes, the space stuff in this is a hilarious mix of random accuracy and absurd misestimations. We’re never let in on any FTL other than Orichalt, but based on the dimensions and times given it clearly exists. Basically every number is wrong, even if the zero-g and vacuum are handled acceptably. But… I think you’d come to expect that from softer Sci-fi. Don’t get me wrong, I love it when a science fiction story uses actually space science well, but especially in visual media there’s a reason why it takes a back seat to what looks good and sounds OK to ears that aren’t amazingly familiar with cosmology.

All in all, my final grade for ID-0 is a B+. Which, when I consider how much talk there is about this show, makes it something of a hidden gem. If you like sci-fi and are willing to take CGI anime, I’d strongly recommend looking up ID-0 and giving it a watch. Just be sure to always watch through the credits. The show always puts a scene after them, and some of those scenes are fairly meaty and not repeated precisely at the start of the next episode.