There are some credits that you really have to sit up and take note of. I’ve talked at length about Studio Trigger and their particular brand of madness, but I have, perhaps, been remiss in mentioning Gen Urobuchi as well. He’s primarily a screenwriter, responsible for a number of original concepts, including shows like Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet and Madoka Magica. The former was something of a divergence from what he’s more famous for, while it’s said (though perhaps apocryphal) that he had to have his involvement in the latter concealed until after the third episode aired.
Why? Because this guy is nicknamed “Urobutcher”, and is well known for his dark, tragic, and often nihilistic stories, as well as his habit of slaughtering the casts of his shows, often including even likable characters to whom other writers would give a great deal of plot armor. He does have other offerings, including things like Gargantia and the film Expelled from Paradise that don’t exactly follow that pattern, but there’s a reason that Urobuchi has that reputation. 2008’s Blassreiter is no doubt part of his bloodthirsty reputation, a tortured and apocalyptic story in which Urobuchi actually manages to get more death moments for named characters then there are named characters in the show.
It’s also a show about robot zombies who sword fight while riding motorcycles.
We begin in a world menaced by creatures known as amalgams. These are biomechanical humanoids that can arise from human corpses and have (in addition to stock abilities like being strong and tough) the ability to merge themselves with machinery, most often seen when one becomes fused with a motorcycle in order to “ride” it into battle. For our inciting incident, an Amalgam attacks a motorcycle race where ultimate racing champion Gerd Frentzen is competing.
In the struggle on the track, Gerd is horribly injured. While this means he loses much of what he lived for, as he can no longer ride a motorcycle, his friends try to keep his spirits up. The most relevant of those friends is Hermann Saltza, an operative of XAT, the para-military task force that deals heavily with Amalgams. Hermann has a co-worker, Amanda Werner, who we are introduced to. Amanda herself has a(n adopted) little brother, Malek, who idolizes Gerd when he’s not busy being bullied to hell. While Gerd in his lowest state he’s approached by a shady doctor lady named Beatrice, who offers him a pill that will cure his incurable injury, allowing him to walk (and ride) once again. However, there might be some side-effects that Gerd was not made aware of.
So, briefly, who are these people?
Gerd doesn’t get the worlds’ greatest development. He’s central to the plot, at least for this act, but that’s because of his role and not because of who he is as a person. We get what little we get of who he is pretty quickly – he’s the champ, and he’s built his identity largely around his success racing. He rides a motorcycle better than anybody, and probably has at least the image of a decent positive role model, as he seems to be a decently beloved figure even aside from Malek, but we don’t really get the greatest chance to know him. This actually hurts some, because Hermann’s appreciation for his friend often ventures into the realms of the excessively fawning. I get it – Gerd was both his friend and his mentor, but the idolization of the “champ” is a bit much.
Speaking of Hermann, what’s he like? Most critical to Hermann seems to be his inflexible worldview. If he believes in someone, like he believes in Gerd (or Malek or Amanda for that matter) he believes in that person absolutely, even if signs suggest he shouldn’t. If he decides someone’s evil, he sticks to that too, and won’t let himself be convinced otherwise. Of the two, we see much more of the faith in others, meaning he’s a much more positive influence in general.
Amanda doesn’t come into her own right away, but overall, to be brutally honest, she’s “the chick” – the female character who’s there to be pretty and kind so you feel sympathy towards her and don’t want to see awful things happen to her. And as “chick” characters go, Amanda does actually have something of a personality. She has moments where can be sharp or harsh if she needs to be, even if what she does is mostly stay out of things.
Malek on the other hand… Malek is a little complicated. I’ve discussed in some previous reviews the depiction of bullying, particularly the more brutal forms. Malek is subjected to some pretty appalling treatment and… it actually lands. In general, the main “issue” in Blassreiter, for bullying, is that Malek is from a foreign racial group, making him an acceptable target for a band of reprehensible little worms who make themselves feel bigger by beating and robbing someone they can get away with abusing. At the same time, it’s fairly clear that they have the tacit sanction of their parents and other authority figures – perhaps someone would step up if they actually saw this as naked villainy, but it doesn’t take much to avoid that. It’s painfully realistic, but that doesn’t mean you hate the perpetrators any less.
Then there are other XAT operatives. They’re fairly minor characters, but they are named and defined, the most relevant being team boss Wolf Goring, who has the unenviable job of keeping Hermann in line.
In any case, those side effects? The pill turns Gerd into an Amalgam – a special kind of Amalgam known as a Daemoniac, an individual who’s still (in some sense) alive, being aware, capable of using strategy and tactics, and more worryingly for XAT capable of assuming human form. Gerd initially keeps this secret after his miracle recovery, but eventually the facts are what they are. Hermann, of course, vouches for Gerd still being Gerd, while the rest of XAT would really rather stop there from being an amalgam-driven catastrophy. Still, there is at least some evidence for Gerd still having humanity, so it’s not a matter of killing him immediately and with prejudice.
However, when Gerd finds out that his girlfriend was cheating on him with his manager, he kind of loses it, and ends up attacking them both, shifting into Amalgam form when he does. Frankly, it’s clear to the viewer that the rage and violence here are the rage and violence of the man and not of the monster, but that’s not clear to the world, resulting in the hunt for Gerd becoming a done deal.
During this, the hunt is interfered with by another Daemoniac, called Blue by XAT (for obvious reasons). Blue skirmishes with Gerd when his humanity is slipping, and in the conflict helps Gerd retain more of his self while clearly also being prepared to kill Gerd off if he descends entirely into a monstrous state. Of course, most of their conversations take place while sword fighting in robot zombie monster shape on top of rooftops and the like, so it’s not as though Hermann and the others hear; they assume at first that Blue is an ordinary enemy, and later that Blue is an exceptionally powerful and canny enemy.
The audience, however, gets to know “Blue” as Joseph, a drifter with a brooding mysterious manner and a blue motorcycle loaded with an AI devil girl hologram called Elea who helps him out. He also encounters Malek, and they help each other out briefly without Malek realizing what Joseph is or Joseph catching on that Malek is (however tangentially) related to the Gerd case. Exactly why Joseph is involved as he is or what his story is will have to wait quite a while.
In the last pursuit, after his altercation with his manager and girlfriend, Gerd ends up taking a “no one could survive that” fall off the road (which of course he actually survived – rules of storytelling), temporarily redirecting us to a subplot where Gerd’s manager goes violently insane, and then transforms into an elite Amalgam at the crux of his mania, whereas the girlfriend seems to be fine. It takes the characters a while, but viewers are liable to notice that only the manager (who ineffectually stabbed Gerd) was touched by Daemoniac blood. When he goes insane, he ends up spreading the affliction to the girlfriend character, who then transforms as well after a long period of feverish insanity.
Gerd reappears and defeats her amalgam form before getting involved in more general fighting. This is as good a point as any to mention that the action is fairly decent in Blassreiter… but at least in this arc there are a lot of stylish combats that don’t really add a whole lot to the story, and instead just try and fail to make XAT look competent.
While Gerd’s state is bad, Hermann manages to deliver a fan letter from Malek, which helps Gerd regain something of his senses. He encounters Joseph properly and is able to make a certain request. Thereafter, Hermann takes Malek to help reason with Gerd, and at a place important to the two of them manages to have one last motorcycle race as friends. Towards the end of the race, though, Gerd’s Daemoniac nature starts to run wild. Joseph appears (as Blue, of course) and kills Gerd off, which we know to be a matter of both fulfilling his promise to Gerd (who wanted Joseph to kill him if he lost his way, before he hurt anyone else) and protecting innocents. Hermann, however, doesn’t see it that way, and instead believes he’s just witnessed an evil amalgam murder his friend and idol when said person was on the shaky road to recovery. Hermann will hold this grudge against Blue/Joseph for the entire rest of the show.
For the record, the current death toll includes the Manager, the girlfriend, and Gerd. You could even count Gerd twice, whether from the fakeout death or from transformation. I might not, but there are some more proper double-kills later on, which is how we get an over 100% kill efficiency.
So, this entire show had seemed to be about Gerd, and now Gerd is gone. What do we follow?
Well, for one, we can take a look at Malek’s story. He’s still being viciously tormented, along with his friend, Johann. The bullies eventually make Johann (who is targeted for his poor family, but more than that his association with Malek) an offer he can’t refuse, and he ends up beating down Malek once in order to join team bully. The regret of betraying his friend eats away at him, though, and as he feels nothing more than continued isolation as the unwilling jester for the bully trio, he tries to make things right. Unable to really do so and unable to conscience his own status, Johann ends up committing suicide. This ends up shaking Malek’s faith, both in God and in his big sister’s promise to keep him safe. The fact that the school bribes the families to keep quiet about the situation in order to protect the bullies (who are from ‘good’ families) doesn’t help, nor does the fact that the malefactors are utterly unrepentant.
This is about when Beatrice (the sketchy doctor who gave Gerd the pill that cured his paralysis and turned him into a Daemoniac) emerges again from the woodwork. She seems to be aligned with XAT, or at least to have infiltrated them. She approaches Wolf and both seduces him and convinces him that she’s the woman with the plan, corrupting him and getting him on board with becoming a daemoniac himself, though Wolf doesn’t get transformed right away. She also approaches Malek when he’s at his low point and offers him the same pill she gave Gerd, promising that it will bring him the power he desires to change his wretched position.
This results in Malek, of course, becoming a Daemoniac, with all the powers that entails. His first order of business is to absolutely butcher the bullies who have tormented him endlessly and who drove his friend to treachery and suicide and had themselves a laugh about it.
And I know that I shouldn’t be rooting for someone who has basically been a good kid to suddenly go in for a cold-blooded triple homicide, but it is hard to express just how awful this trio has been, and that remarkably without breaking suspension of disbelief like some over-the-top bullies can. In a real sense, it’s absolutely the wrong thing to do, but from a storytelling perspective, it comes off as justice – especially when Malek turns their own words (accusing him of being unclean, like a Daemoniac) and actions (they once used a thrown can to ‘time’ their beatdown of Malek as a “game”. He turns the game around entirely to kill them before the same object hits the ground) against them.
A Daemoniac appearing at a school and painting it red (or at least slaughtering the three worst students), however, doesn’t go unnoticed, resulting in a response team (including Amanda and the team sniper, Brad) going in. Joseph also shows up, alerted to the emergence of a new Daemoniac, to once again attempt to salvage the newbie’s goodness and sanity. Blue is wounded protecting Malek from XAT, and Malek breaks out of his nihilistic frustration to protect him. Amanda steps up as well – she realizes that the new Amalgam (“Yellow”) is actually Malek underneath the transformation, and protects him from what would have been a deadly snipe, allowing him to flee with the wounded Blue.
Malek hauls Joseph to an abandoned church outside of town. XAT hunts for him, while Amanda and Hermann break ranks to try to save him. Before either side finds the two, though, they’re confronted by a new character known as Xargin. Xargin is every smug blonde douche villain you really want to see get humiliated and destroyed if you’re used to the archetype. Essentially he’s like the evil-from-the-start (and therefore more tolerable) version of Gai from Guilty Crown. He’s less prescient than Gai, but makes up for it and then some with a triple dose of self-righteous ego. In a sense, I feel like the degree to which Xargin is this excessive version of his archetype (walking around barefoot, riding a white horse, talking about himself as a holy savior, and so on) is actually intended to promote the desire to see him beaten in, but of course that’s not going to be happening in short order, as Xargin spouts cryptic bullcrap and, despite being in human form, effortlessly trashes Malek before strutting out of the scene. This results in Amanda and Hermann finding Malek and Joseph in an even worse state than they escaped in, with Malek only able gasp out that he’s sorry for what he did before falling into a coma for most of the rest of the show.
Malek and Joseph are then both hauled off to a secret lab controlled by XAT while Amanda and Hermann are, quite reasonably, detained. We spend some time then with the rest of team XAT, getting to know them and their interactions. This is, of course, in time for the next major arc to be the fall of XAT.
Amalgam uprisings are scaling up and getting more common, resulting in the team deploying with extreme prejudice and new tech – mechas called Paladins that transform into weird heavy sealed motorcycle things to go fast. The web of relationships here (a gunner, his old flame, the sniper doing investigations, and so on) is well-explored, enough that you could probably be fooled into thinking they might last as a significant cast. Instead, the outbreak starts to turn XAT members. Those still cogent, led by mission control girl Mei Fang, try their best to evacuate XAT headquarters. Mei Fang is more interested, though, in reporting to her boss Victor, who recalls her alone. The team gets Amanda and Hermann out of prison, and the fate of Malek is assured while Joseph escapes and has his own fights to deal with. The XAT officers realize that, because of tainted water, they’re all infected other than Hermann and Amanda (who were in the detention center and didn’t share the same vectors of infection), and sacrifice themselves to get the two out via helicopter, facing off Daemoniac Wolf in the process. The lot of them are slaughtered, and when the headquarters is bombed to contain the infection, the helicopter is damaged. Hermann gets Amanda to bail out and goes down with the vehicle himself, crashing in a massive fireball. As the city burns, Amanda and Joseph manage to meet up and escape together, and at this stage we presumably have the two of them and not much else alive.
This gives us an opportunity, at last, to get both Joseph’s backstory and the origin of this whole mess in a two-episode flashback. And it hurts. The Malek-bullying was real and it was bad. What Joseph went through is no less ‘honest’ in its brutality and even more painful. Essentially he was an “Outsider” (like Malek) who grew up in an orphanage arrangement run by a small church. The priest was kindly, but the rest of the world wasn’t, giving him a childhood of fairly constant abuse from the people in town. He tried to be a good and moral person, but was even made a criminal, forced to confess to misdeeds he didn’t commit (or even tried to stop) in order to protect others from unfair retribution. When he got a bit older, he devoted himself to working at the church. Eventually, the old priest died caring for refugees from a flood, shaking Joseph’s faith. Before all hell could break loose, though, Xargin arrived.
Xargin, at this time, was not an apocalyptic douche on his pretentious (literal) high horse: he was a scientist and humanitarian, bringing a voice to organize the survivors and loads of humanitarian aid to whoever might need it, awing and inspiring the young Joseph. An anti-outsider mob set fire to the shelter, getting Xargin hurt, but not killed. Visiting Xargin in the hospital, Joseph met a woman named Sasha – an Outsider who had become a notable researcher at the local college, making breakthroughs in biomedical and nanotechnology fields. She also happens to be Jospeh’s long-lost sister, recognizing the cross that his dying guardian left with him as being a distinctive family heirloom for the missing brother she knew she had but never knew.
Things temporarily look up after Victor (the man who would go on to be the mysterious man behind XAT) allows Joseph and Xargin to take some medicine for the remaining survivors. However, because Joseph probably should have been named Job for all the hell he goes through, this quickly becomes worse than before: kids from the colony sell some of the medicine to black market dealers rather than taking it, resulting in a massive death wave among everyone Joseph cared about and, to make matters worse, Sasha, who Joseph had actually been bonding with as family, is straight-out murdered by racist hooligans who took exception to her success.
This turn of events also displeases Victor, who it turns out had been using Xargin and Sasha’s research as part of a project to create living weapons – essentially, the unrealized seed of the Amalgams and Daemoniacs. Xargin goes off the deep end, finishes the research, applies it to himself to become the Patient 0 Daemoniac, beats up Victor, and turns Joseph (who stopped him from doing more damage at the cost of bodily harm) before heading off to use his new power to end all suffering in the world or whatever messianic bull he’s up to by the present.
Thus, we have the actual story of Blassreiter, to which someone like Gerd was always little more than an accessory. Kind of odd, telling it this way rather than cluing us in on who our main character is, where he came from, what our villain wants, or anything like that before episode 14, but still, we’re there now and do have quite a bit of show left to go.
After Amanda is told this amazing story, Mei Fang appears to bring her and Joseph in… and she’s not alone, instead being joined by a mysteriously not dead Sasha. Presumably Victor brought her back with his version of the nanotech that Xargin used to create the Amalgams (a version that better preserves one’s humanity), but it’s not explicitly explained.
We learn from this that Victor is the head of an organization called Zwolf, supposedly a survival of the Knights Templar. Amanda is brought back to Zwolf castle to train to join them in the fight against Xargin’s amalgam army. The elites of Zwolf are the three Apocalypse Knights with their custom mechs – Mei Fang in the flying Scale Rider, Sasha in the long-range artillery Bow Rider, and a new character, a gruff man named Shido in the canine close-combat Sword Rider. Joseph would be #4, of course, covered by the name of the show being “Blassreiter” (Pale Rider) to finish the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse motif.
The bad guys aren’t taking all this laying down, though: Wolf resurrects Al, Brad, and Brad’s old flame as Amalgams, though Brad and the paladin lady spite him by willing themselves back to death, leaving Wolf with merely a bonus sniper… and his legion of less-elite former XAT Amalgams.
Speaking of bringing back the dead, Hermann is also back! He’s a Daemoniac now, but he’s actually doing a good job of retaining his humanity, as evidenced by the degree to which he’s able to infiltrate Zwolf’s castle in an attempt to rescue Amanda. However, he gets outed late in the operation and hunted by Zwolf security forces, which results in him stealing the super special transforming flying motorcycle-thing that was being prepared for Joseph and making a break for it.
His flight isn’t directionless, though, as Wolf has appeared, taking over an air base in an attempt to lure out and destroy the Apocalypse Knights. The first part works just as planned, but even with Amalgam fighter jets, Al skulking around to snipe, Wolf’s own vast strength as an Amalgam, and the presence of Beatrice (who now takes her Daemoniac form to fight, and is pretty good at it too), the second bit proves to be something of a tall order, making it a hard fight rather than a decapitating operation.
At the airbase, Amanda and Hermann show up to fight Wolf, but so does Joseph, power increased but sanity decreased by Zwolf’s treatments. Hermann loses it seeing Blue, and the two of them end up fighting causing collateral damage to clear the area until the battle ends in chaos. Amanda tries to find Hermann, and in the process encounters a new character, Snow.
I specify that Snow is a new character because watching through this, I thought I had missed an episode with how suddenly she’s introduced as someone important. Snow is someone that Joseph saved in the past by turning her into a Daemoniac, and now she wants to save him in his hour of need. This is what she does, appearing to the berserk Joseph and sacrificing her life to have a tender moment that snaps him back to sanity. Meanwhile, Amanda finds Hermann and they go to face off against Wolf.
The fight against Wolf initially goes kind of poorly, especially since he has Al supporting him as a sniper. However, when Al sees a memorial to Amanda’s fallen comrades (himself included) she painted on her Paladin bike, it snaps him back to himself and he snipes Wolf instead. After Wolf goes down he chats with Amanda and Hermann before deciding to return to death rather than accepting his unnatural revival as a Daemoniac. Thus dies Al (again).
Thereafter, we have a showdown at Zwolf Castle. Xargin attacks the front with tens of thousands of amalgam robot zombies where Joseph confronts him, while Amanda and Hermann break in from the rear in an attempt to find and rescue the still-catatonic Malek. Shido helps the rescue attempt on the sly, proving he’s kind of a softie despite his gruffness and allowing it to be successful. The defense is less auspicious. Joseph manages to take on Beatrice, only to get his rear handed to him by Xargin, which allows Xargin to march in pretty much uncontested. Sasha isn’t able to kill him, and nobody else has a realistic chance, meaning he’s able to pretty much march his way down to Zwolf’s computer mainframe. Victor goes down to take care of something before Xargin can get it, and confronts Xargin there. For his trouble, he’s not exactly killed at once, but does get forcibly and physically merged with the computer database. This is especially horrifying to Mei Fang, who was both rushing to save Victor, and saw him as a father figure rather than just a boss. Xargin then, presumably, just sort of lets everybody go: when we next see them, the Apocalypse Knights are still based out of the remains Zwolf’s castle and Xargin has taken his army onward. For all his pretentious capering, he sure doesn’t know how to destroy his enemies.
It turns out Victor didn’t die for nothing, though, as Sasha brings Amanda (who, with Hermann, took Malek to a nearby church) the file that Victor was protecting at the end: a plot device called Isis that, if spread properly, will counter the Daemoniac nanomachines, pretty much deleting any Amalgam that Isis tags. Beatrice figures out as much and goes chasing after, confronting them at the church. Hermann fights her and gets mortally wounded, but Malek wakes up and is able to finish her off for good and accept Hermann as a big brother figure before he expires (again).
Malek heads off to fight Xargin, but gets beaten hard. Joseph shows up before he can die, though, and after infecting himself with Isis, engages in the ultimate final battle against Xargin’s Daemoniac form. He gets the tar beaten out of him so hard that Hermann and Gerd’s spirits, watching over him, decide they have to do something to level the playing field. They’re able to possess Joseph, presumably and through their lingering selves in the nanomachines grant him their unique Daemoniac skills and weapons… at least until Xargin manages to hit the body involved, killing the spirit involved, which racks up another death each for Hermann and Gerd.
Meanwhile, the governments of the world decide they’ve had enough of this mess and try to nuke Germany to hell in order to clean up the Amalgam mess. The Apocalypse Knights deploy to stop the massive collateral damage, and all end up sacrificing themselves to take out the planes and missiles, with Victor finally expiring as well. Mei Fang and Shido both ultimately have to crash themselves into an offending nuke source to stop the last one, while Sasha, able to fight from the steps of Zwolf Castle, manages to die when she overheats Bow Rider getting shots off and explodes.
Eventually, Joseph gives a good account of himself, but loses the fight. However, he’s lasted long enough for the Isis to kick in, infecting Xargin in his dying breath, which spreads the instant death to him and his whole army, erasing most of the Amalgams in existence. Malek, apparently, was not hooked into that (I guess he is a free-willed Daemoniac after all) and five years later he and Amanda are part of the reformed XAT, helping contain Amalgam outbreaks and help those afflicted regain and retain their humanity. The end.
For Reference, Blassreiter’s named kills not counting flashbacks are Gerd (twice), his manager, his girlfriend, Johann, three bullies, Al (twice), Brad (twice), Brad’s old flame (twice), two more Paladin pilots, Hermann (three times), Snow, Wolf, Victor, Sasha, Mei Fang, Shido, Beatrice, Joseph, and Xargin. The survivors are Amanda and Malek, for a total of 28 kills to 24 characters, an amazing 117% death!
And that’s kind of emblematic of one of the things I think of most when I think of Blassreiter. Not darkness, though that’s also up there after a fashion, but excess. Blassreiter thrives on its excess and escalation, a certain Rule of Cool that pervades the show and informs most of what it does. For all that it has these dark, tortured, and real scenarios, like the prejudice faced by Malek and young Joseph, this is still the show about robot zombies that ride (or are) motorcycles and sword fight against other robot zombies while riding said motorcycles. It’s artificial cool in a way that’s so extreme you might think it wandered out of the 90’s. Which, in a sense, does manage to successfully be cool. They do badass motorcycle stunts, drive fast (with a good sense of speed from the animation) and sword fight pretty well on their motorcycles. There’s something more campy about it than I think the creators would have intended, given the grim and gritty tone of most of the show, but there’s also a sort of charm to it.
But then, for all the campy excess, I have to consider the serious sides of this show as well. This isn’t Kill la Kill, which pushes its theatrical excess to maximum and doesn’t take itself too seriously when trying to sell its insane premise. But at the same time, it’s not 86 that sold itself through and through and never felt campy or goofy or brought you out of the serious scenario. But is straddling the middle line a strength, a weakness, or just a trait?
Honestly, I lean towards the latter option. You do end up largely accepting the premise, but at the same time the goofiness doesn’t pull you all the way out. It does help let off the steam somewhat, and I think makes the show overall more watchable, since it isn’t wallowing in the kind of doom, gloom, and misery that it could with the apocalyptic stylings and human cruelties put together. If it were less goofy, you might be inclined to say “Screw it, this world or at least this Germany might as well burn.” since it seems to be populated primarily by abusive jerks, victims, and conspirators. Because it has the goofy stuff, it feels more balanced on the whole than it otherwise could. With the exception of Joseph’s flashback episodes, this show never felt oppressive the way other very dark shows can, and that is to its credit.
But, at the same time, this is still kind of a show about nothing despite the fact that it clearly wants to be about something. It doesn’t go all in with prejudice, it doesn’t go all in with its religious symbology, it doesn’t go all in with the revenge plot or the struggle or survival or the idea of death and renewal suggested by Xargin’s speeches. It goes all in for robot zombies on motorcycles and suggests all that other stuff.
On the other hand, I do stick to my earlier statement that I don’t think Blassreiter is totally blowing smoke when it comes to address its harder topics, particularly the brutal mistreatment of the Outsiders like Malek and Joseph. I think real thought and effort did go into portraying the struggles of these characters, so it’s kind of a shame that they don’t get through as an unbroken thread.
When it comes to rating the show, that’s not the only consideration. The action is good, as I’ve addressed, but the cast is only alright. Even aside from the fact that they get slaughtered so completely, they’re serviceable, but little more. Hermann is OK when his “Champ” worship doesn’t get excessive, Amanda is fine but is more an observer to all these other events than an invested participant, Gerd loses it fairly early, Xargin fills his role that’s equal parts fitting and obnoxious… Beatrice and Malek do a little better but then Malek is largely only in the first half of the show while Beatrice is a fairly dilute presence who has a couple good scenes early and a couple good scenes late and then just isn’t in much of the rest of the show. Similarly, the actual plot is a bit of a bait-and-switch. The stuff with Gerd’s story and Hermann and Malek as main characters is basically unconnected with the stuff with Zwolf and Joseph as the real main character. One of these is a story about cops trying to unravel a mystery, the other is the story of a grudge match between apocalyptic forces. The common threads are bitterly strained, and the connective tissue of the show as a whole is weaker than it could be.
Yet, there’s nothing here that isn’t watchable, or that doesn’t pass muster. Through that, I feel like the appropriate grade here is a B-. It’s not bad, and on the whole I would recommend it, but I don’t think it’s particularly lasting or powerful. While Blassreiter can be shaky in places, if you need something that’s gratuitous and yet still serious, this is the show for you.