In the future, Humanity has abandoned Earth, lost ages ago. Of the many colony ships that departed Earth, only one is now known to remain, menaced constantly by spaceborne biological terrors. We follow a young mecha pilot as he sets out to protect his home from the enemy’s tentacles.
Sounds simple, right? As a setup, it
promises some cool space battles, at least. Perhaps it otherwise
sounds a little scarce or cliched, but it could still hold up.
Remarkably, Knights of Sidonia reaches well beyond the ‘comfort zone’
of being in a robot fighting aliens and seizes a good deal more of
what makes Science Fiction great.
It does take a while to get there,
though. We’re introduced to Nagate Tanikaze, who at the start of the
series dwells deep in the dark innards of the Seed Ship Sidonia,
where he’s spent most of his life training under his grandfather (now
deceased) to pilot the Garde mechas used to defend Sidonia from its
enemies, an alien species known as the Gauna.
With the death of his grandfather,
though, Tanikaze has to leave his hideout and fend for himself. He
gets caught during his attempt to steal rice to eat, which ultimately
ends up with Tanikaze being introduced to the wider world of Sidonian
society.
Things are a little different in
Sidonia, though. Humanity, pushed to the brink of extinction, has
used genetic manipulation to make life easier. Humans, other than
Tanikaze, now photosynthesize and need to eat only about once a week
assuming they get their RDA of light. The need to maintain a
population also resulted in messing with genders, getting results
like a quick friend of Tanikaze’s, Izana Shinatose, who could, in a
biological sense, either produce copies of herself asexually or
specialize into a male or female opposite a desirable partner. I
will be referring to Izana with feminine pronouns throughout this
review for a few reasons. Izana at least once vocally resents being
referred to with the masculine honorific -kun, her wardrobe including
her uniform is more similar to the feminine, and perhaps most
critically she actually becomes biologically female in the course of
the second season due to her sustained interest in Tanikaze.
Tanikaze makes a few friends and
enemies in short order. In addition to Izana, there’s Shizuka
Hoshijiro, a fellow cadet Tanikaze grows close to, Yuhata Midorikawa,
a young officer candidate who takes just about every kind of interest
in Tanikaze, and filling out the friend corner the captain of
Sidonia, Kobiyashi, and the manager of the dorms, Lala Hiyama (Who
looks like a cyborg bear for some reason). As far as enemies, the
most obvious would be Norio Kunato, an heir to wealth and power and
Garde pilot trainee who resents Nagate’s initial success. He also
seems to be in the sights of the Immortal Council, a shadowy group of
schemers who rule Sidonia in secret and seem to know more about
Tanikaze than he knows about himself.
A routine asteroid mission ends up with
an encounter with the first Gauna sighted in a hundred years
(officially. The Immortal Council and Captain know better.), and
Tanikaze showing some of his ability. After the elite squad sent
to kill it fails, Tanikaze is part of the team sent to recover the
Kabizashi the squad had – spears tipped with a special material
that is both absolutely finite and the only known way of truly
killing a Gauna. During that trip, Tanikaze kills the Gauna rather
than simply recovering the spear, and pulls another stunt on top of
it when he throws himself past the point of (theoretical) no return
to save Hoshijiro, who had to eject when the Gauna attacked. While
they’re adrift, Hoshijiro and Tanikaze form a strong bond before
ultimately being rescued by the entire defense force breaking ranks
to do so. We spend some time back on the ship with Tanikaze as a
hero and he and Hoshijiro growing even closer before they set out for
another mission, deploying to face another Gauna that’s appeared. As
they head out we cut immediately to the aftermath of the mission.
Tanikaze wakes up in the hospital, learning that Hoshijiro is among
the dead and he’s taking the blame for a major failure during the
operation.
Thus ends episode six of the first
season of Knights of Sidonia. Watching this the first time, the
transition and emotion in this moment felt downright sloppy. The
whiplash between Tanikaze being a despised outsider, a triumphant
hero, and now despised again, though as a failure, was intense, and
offing Hoshijiro without actually seeing the battle (at first) was
quite jarring. Up until this point there also hadn’t been many big
ideas in Knights of Sidonia. Some of the conversations between
Hoshijiro and Tanikaze while they were adrift or otherwise alone
touched on concepts (Hoshijiro, for instance, noted that the Gauna
often take humanoid form and wonders if there’s really malice in
their actions rather than simply an inability to understand and
communicate, wishing that more could be done), as did a couple other
moments. There were some marks to appreciate the science fiction,
like Gardes actually performing retrograde burns when required to
stop in space, but nothing huge. The ship leadership felt pretty
standard and Kunato was a very basic cardboard bully, sneering at
people, pushing Izana around and hurting her because she got in the
way of his brooding, and generally just being an unmitigated jerk who
could never be satisfied.
If, at the end of episode six, you
aren’t feeling terribly charitable towards Knights of Sidonia, I’m
pleased to report that this is where the show starts to really turn
around and go from being a vehicle for space battles to being a
fairly legitimate science fiction epic that raises interesting
questions, delves into its setting, and truly spreads its wings.
Yeah, Knights of Sidonia is another anime that puts its worst foot
forward; the second half of season one and the full run of season two
are vast improvements over the first half of the first season. If
you can get this far and keep going, it only improves pretty much
from here on.
Episode seven is something of a
scramble to put things back together. We see the battle, including
why Tanikaze is blamed (Kunato, as his squad leader, set him up to
fire his portion of a set of charges that needed to be synchronized
early by messing with comms) and how Hoshijiro is consumed by the
Gauna rescuing Tanikaze from the sticky situation he promptly finds
himself in. Izana, with Hiyama’s help and approval, does her best to
support Tanikaze in the dark time he’s facing, while Sidonia as a
whole blasts an entire planet where surviving Gauna from the battle
fled to oblivion. Even planetary destruction, though, doesn’t take
them all, and a squad including Tanikaze is sent out yet again to
intercept the survivors… three Gauna that have taken on the eerie
likeness of Hoshijiro’s Garde in bloody crimson.
As the battle is joined, the three
don’t seem to be of even skill. One is fairly dispatched, as is
another from which Tanikaze recovers a sample of the creature,
biomass that has taken the human form of Hoshijiro. The last seems
to be more “together”. Not only does it slaugher the team that
tried to engage it, it also speaks over the comms of the other Gardes
in Hoshijiro’s voice, cheerfully relating “enemy eliminated” like
the real Hoshijiro might have. Something in the experience, whether
his own guilt or just the horror of the human-imitating Gauna, breaks
Kunato as well, causing him to retire from piloting after the sortie.
The elite Hoshijiro-Gauna, later dubbed the “Crimson Hawkmoth”,
escapes, and the remains of the squad return home, including Tanikaze
with the sample that kicks off one of the more “classic Scifi”
arcs in Knights of Sidonia.
The sample, in Hoshijiro’s form, is
held as an experimental subject on Sidonia. Tanikaze is asked to
(through several layers of security) interact with it. Slowly, the
sample goes from seeming feral or mindless, to actually responding
and even communicating – crudely, but in a friendly manner. In
some ways, it seems to be a fulfillment of Hoshijiro’s wistful desire
to bridge the communication gap between humans and Gauna as well as
weirdly keeping Hoshijiro relevant as a character, since her Gauna
version seems to have significant echoes of the person she was,
including her bond with Tanikaze. However, it’s not until the second
season that the plotline pays off heavily; for the rest of season 1
it’s basically an interesting topic to think about, a window into
what the Gauna might be and be after, and something for Izana to get
jealous over.
Meanwhile, we also get a lot of history
and politics. A dissident faction in Sidonia wants the ship to
abandon its weapons, feeling the Gauna will no longer pursue them if
they don’t have the Kabizashi, and are set to be permitted to settle
a planet Sidonia is passing by, mostly to shut them up. The Immortal
Council seems to want Tanikaze dead, and it has to do with what the
audience learns of his true origins and the catastrophe a hundred
years before the present. There’s a lot to get through on that
background and the show provides it in short order so I’ll try to get
through it quickly.
In essence, the mad scientist Ochiai
(then of the Immortal Council) betrayed Sidonia, leading to Gauna
breaching the ship and slaughtering much of its population. However,
since much of the ship’s wisdom was recorded in a way only his brain
could access, his brain was kept and kept alive and his clone (now
Kobiyashi’s assistant) produced to interface with it. The hero of
the battle was Tanikaze’s grandfather, who after the conflict
rejected his immortality and vanished. He reappeared decades later
(about fourteen years before present) which provoked Kobiyashi to
clone him in order to not lose him again. However, he escaped,
stealing the infant clone to raise naturally. That clone is
Tanikaze, who in addition to being a generic copy of Sidonia’s great
hero, someone close to the other kind immortals we see (Kobiyashi,
Hiyama, and to a lesser extent Izana’s grandmother) was given the
immortality treatment at creation, explaining how we’d seen him heal
from injuries oddly quickly. The orthodox Immortal Council fears
him, and wants him on the front line of every battle until he dies
fighting. Even that is a partial concession to Kobiyashi, who seems
to have other ideas.
On the other hand, a quick access of
Ochiai’s brain gets ominous warnings and new weapons, as the body of
a failed Gauna-Human hybrid Ochiai created can now be used to produce
man-made Kabi, removing the need for the irreplaceable Kabizashi
spears.
This is a note I like about Knights of
Sidonia, one of several on the science end: nothing technological is
brought up once and forgotten; the setting makes real progress, and
the switch from Kabizashi to Core-Piercing Kabi rounds for what
appear to be railguns is a big example of that
The technical achievement is what plays
most heavily into the end of the first season. After a battle that
proves the Core-Piercing round, a massive Gauna approaches, having
engulfed an asteroid and rushing at Sidonia for a fatal impact. The
Garde squads deploy to intercept it, and most of two episodes is
spent in a brilliant, intricate space battle against the
planetoid-sized Gauna pod and its escort, the Crimson Hawkmoth.
Tanikaze, aided by Izana, fights the Crimson Hawkmoth in a desperate
battle, ultimately manually ramming a round of ammo into its core,
while team secondary characters goes inside the Gauna to seek out and
destroy its core, flying through a labyrinth of flesh and hate in
search of their objective. Season 1 ends with the destruction of the
Gauna (including its asteroid, via one of the planet busters from
earlier), the survivors returning to Sidonia as heroes.
Season two picks up with some new and
interesting moves, starting with the introduction of a new major
character Tsumugi. Tsumugi is a sweet, caring sort of girl, with
naive curiosity and a sometimes somewhat childish outlook on life;
essentially, the closest character in this cast to the chipper
Deredere type played straight. Oh, and she’s also a Gauna/Human
chimera hybrid the size of a Garde, produced through some mad science
applied to the Hoshijiro Gauna Sample and outfitted with insane speed
and maneuverability, Kabi claws, and organic particle cannons to
devastate the enemies of Sidonia.
The reason for Tsumugi’s sudden
appearance is the arrival of another new figure on the scene. Kunato
and his maid (sister?) start the show by descending into Ochiai’s
sealed lab beneath their manor, and there fall prey to something the
mad scientist left behind: mind-controlling parasites that imprint
his memories, intellect, and will over that of their host. The
Ochiai-infested Kunato also turns the researcher in charge of the
Hoshijiro sample in order to acquire it for his plan to produce,
among other things, Tsumugi.
Tsumugi’s arc, and the question of
what’s ‘human’ serve as one of the major threads of the second
season. I feel like there’s some interesting contrast between how
Knights of Sidonia approaches this compared to other science fiction
stories, especially Western ones, but more on that later.
The other thread, really the backbone
of the plot, is the war against the Gauna. Previously, this had
always been a defensive conflict, with Sidonia fleeing and trying to
defeat the Gauna that came after it. Under Kobiyashi’s direction
(and hers alone, seeing as she has the bulk of the Immortal Council
killed when they try to impeach and remove her, leaving only the
“friendlies” out of the Immortals alive) they’re set to go on the
attack and pacify the Lem star system by destroying the Gauna hive
ship that is the source of their presence. The first big step in
that process, and the objective of the battles here in season two, is
to claim the system’s ninth planet as a beachhead while developing
new weapons suited to taking on and destroying the Gauna.
The third iron in the fire is the human
drama, mostly to do with Izana and her affection towards Tanikaze,
taking up in my opinion just enough time so that you care about these
people when they’re put in danger, such as from a massive Gauna (that
nearly kills Tsumugi and costs Izana an arm and a leg… though the
cybernetics she’s hooked up with after are quite the upgrade), an
out-of-control superweapon, or the final three-episode battle for the
ninth planet.
On Tsumugi’s side, we end up seeing
quite a lot of her. Though her main body is, as mentioned, a giant
creature with only a vague human outline, she does a lot of
conversing with the others by extending a specialized tentacle, which
even manages to thread through the pipes of Sidonia to visit
Tanikaze’s house. Well, I call it Tanikaze’s house, but it ends up
being more of a team arrangement as he invites Izana to stay there,
Tsumugi is constantly around, and Midorikawa even takes advantage of
her rank to insert herself largely into the living arangements.
Knights of Sidonia may never feel like it needs the “Harem” tag
and has few if any genre notes that apply, but Tanikaze does have
quite a following.
For Tsumugi, she has difficulty
interacting with humans in all technical senses, but when conditions
permit and she can be around Tanikaze, Izana, Midorikawa, even the
other Garde pilots during less harrowing adventures, it’s clear that
she really loves it, while forming a strong bond both with her
friends and with the ship she’s made to protect.
As I mentioned in the start, this arc
also sees Izana going through some changes – before moving in with
Tanikaze, so clearly a case of her body betraying her thoughts.
Izana adapting to her feminine state (and others adapting to her
being a her – including grandma Shinatose causing some
embarrassment) provides some much needed comic relief between fights.
Which is not to say there aren’t also emotional moments. After
Izana’s grandmother conscripts Tanikaze into a “secret mission”
(which is really taking Izana on a romantic getaway) and she finds
out it was set up, she quite reasonably gets quite upset having been
let down on the idea that her crush might return her feelings.
For the Ochiai and Cloak and Dagger
plots, we actually get surprisingly little. Ochiai’s presence is
ominous throughout, but he doesn’t ultimately “pay off” within
the show as we have it, being left for a theoretical third season
much like the Hoshijiro copy was left over from season 1 to season 2:
intriguing, and not finished.
All of this comes to a head in the
final arc. Izana is sent out with a small squad to scout Planet
Nine, but encounters an absolutely massive Gauna force, narrowly
evading immediate death by dropping into the planet’s atmosphere.
Tsumugi and Tanikaze, watching the progress of her mission until the
feed cuts out, ready themselves to charge to the rescue whatever it
takes, only narrowly gaining the support of Midorikawa and Kobiyashi.
They carve their way through the lesser Gauna, but once in
atmosphere encounter an old nemesis: the Crimson Hawkmoth, revived,
revamped, and ready to make sure that a massive battle taking up the
better part of an hour and a half is properly impressive. Tsumugi is
pretty impressive and Tanikaze has new tricks, but Hawkmoth, now
appearing like a giant blood-red Hoshijiro with wings, also seems to
have upgraded substantially after her previous demise.
At first, Tsumugi duels the Crimson Hawkmoth while Tanikaze goes for Izana (and the other survivor, with her), but the Hawkmoth spends its time well putting the hurt on Tsumugi, going so far as to (in a shocking move for any Gauna, even this one) use her kindness against her by displaying weakness to bait Tsumugi into mercy before making a surprise attack. Tanikaze takes over the battle, out of ammo and down to a sword. Naturally, he doesn’t do so well and quickly gets held up. If you weren’t convinced of the Crimson Hawkmoth’s bizarre intelligence from her stunt with Tsumugi, she decides to show off her human echoes in the creepiest way possible by oozing into Tanikaze’s cockpit and forming a near-perfect Hoshijiro clone to french kiss him with just a little too much tentacle (while incidentally restraining him away from the controls.) Izana, in the hold, manages to hack into the Garde’s systems and sever the Hoshijiro from Hawkmoth itself, also giving Tanikaze the opening to deal the death blow. The cavalry arrives just after, saving the largely disabled, near dead, and in one case mortally embarrassed Tanikaze and Tsumugi. With all the Gauna lured into one place by Tanikaze and Tsumugi, wiping them out with bombardment proves easy enough, and Planet Nine is secured for the continuing war. But for that, you’ll have to go to the manga or wait for a third season that doesn’t presently exist. (Update: After this was written, a movie, covering the rest of the Manga story, was announced)
So, on the whole, Knights of Sidonia
does have some very notable faults. The early bits, until
Hoshijiro’s death, feel like they’re on an annoying autopilot. The
show then dispenses with the “fish out of water becomes the
wonderkid” angle and writes Tanikaze as more of just an ace,
neither unduly exalted nor unable to catch a break and integrate into
society. It drops the roller coaster of accolades and shames. It
drops Kunato as the two-dimensional bully. But that did last for an
entire half a season, and Knights of Sidonia was absolutely burning
good will along the way there.
Another thing is the animation.
Knights of Sidonia is done entirely with CGI. This actually ends up
looking pretty good most of the time. The Gauna look very alien, and
the angular, sterile designs of many of Sidonia’s spaces and
structures, including the Gardes, are fit quite well by the art we
get. But there are also times, especially in season 1, when it has
to do faces or colorful, intricate scenarios that it ends up looking
just a little embarrassing. Extras, in particular, can sometimes
look a little like NPCs in a video game from the mid 2000s. As with
the initial weakness of the plot, this is a bigger issue for Season 1
than it is for Season 2. Season 2 reaches farther out of the comfort
zone, with some more rustic beautiful sights around Sidonia and the
yellow-brown cloudscape of Planet Nine rather than the black
emptiness of space, but they work out better than a lot of the less
taxing moments in Season 1 that caused effects failures. At the very
least though, it’s an acquired taste.
On the good side, when I say that
Knights of Sidonia is classic Science Fiction, I mean that as pretty
high praise. And it is Military Science Fiction in particular, which
lends itself to the action taking up big swaths of the show. The
Science Fiction, however, doesn’t get lost in it. I mentioned
earlier that there were small notes keeping my hopes up through the
early phases, like retrograde burns, and those are all over. There
is wonder-technology and the somewhat physics-defying nature of the
Gauna, but where the action in Knights of Sidonia intersects with
known science, someone did their work and takes the time to show
their work. In an early season one battle, Sidonia has to turn
sharply to avoid an oncoming Gauna, and the g-force of acceleration
is a major issue (and major disaster).
On the Science Fiction end, Knights of
Sidonia also does an amazing job integrating the strange into its
narrative. This is a show that’s not afraid to present something
that’s really out there, and pushes the boundaries of what can or
should be handled. And I think, oddly, it benefits from being
Military rather than Social and doing this, because that allows some
of the strangeness of Sidonia to be kept low-key. The fact that
humans photosynthesize and have extra genders isn’t the point, but it
does contribute heavily to the themes and feel of the show.
There are works of science fiction in which Izana (A genetically-engineered transhuman with new biological abilities, traits outside the human canon we know, and cybernetic implants connected to her brain by the end of the second season) would be the template for an “always evil” scenario. And something like Tsumugi, this giant alien-human hybrid war machine, would be almost reliable in its evil and treachery in modern Western Science Fiction. This is actually something that’s bothered me about a good number of scifi works: they seem to be afraid of what the future might hold and shun as horrifying the new horizons that genetic and robotic science could open. Knights of Sidonia, on the other hand, fully embraces Humanity using every tool at its disposal to survive and thrive, even if that means that mankind has reinvented itself and may continue to do so. For a story about exiles from a destroyed Earth on the run from a numberless foe that mindlessly hunts and kills them, I could weirdly call it quite optimistic about science, technology, and the future.
The action is also very good. There
are a lot of space battles with Gauna, some of which don’t even
contribute much of value to the continuing plot, but they’re all
visually engaging, well-paced, and intricate. The evolving
technology of Sidonia and the constantly new forms of the Gauna
requiring new tactics and counters keep the action lively, which is
very good because it takes up vast swaths of this show. Really, the
space battles are some of the best of their kind that I’ve personally
seen – thinking of it, the battle with the Gauna Pod at the end of
Season 1 (the second biggest and most intricate battle in the series,
after the battle for Planet Nine at the end of Season 2, which is
much more personal in scale) has a lot of good notes in common with
the battles over the Death Stars in Episodes 4 and 6 of Star Wars –
the trip to the inner core is somewhat reminiscent of the fall of the
second Death Star in particular, while Crimson Hawkmoth’s appearance
on the outer battle recalls Vader taking matters into his own hands
in the first movie. When it comes to the pure choreography of space
battles, those are some good models to borrow from and high bars to
live up to.
Despite all this, or perhaps because of
it, a final rating was actually difficult to settle on. The action
is great, as is the approach to Science Fiction in general, but the
plot can be somewhat light or the characters thinly sketched at
times. And there’s the matter that the quality of the show you could
either say improves over or its run or else is marred by a weak
opening. If I were to separate the seasons, I’d probably give season
1 a conflicted B (since a full half its run is spent doing the weak
stuff) but the second season a qualified A. For the whole package,
which I think is better to view Knights of Sidonia as given how the
seasons dovetail and build their themes and ideas, I’ve come around
to an A-. Knights of Sidonia is certainly flawed, but it does have
both basic strength in its core areas and some high marks for
achieving ambitions within its genre. If you’re up for Science
Fiction action with some good thinking as well as exploding and can
get through the art style, I’d recommend it.