The future: war between AI and Humanity has devastated the Earth. However, one light is flung into the past in order to set things right and prevent the worst from actually coming to pass. As per the title of my review, this is the pitch for both the Terminator franchise (particularly the first two movies) and Vivy: Fluorite Eye’s Song.
We begin with the future, as the slaughter begins in earnest, and see the scientist responsible for the plot, facing his death, send something back in order to reach “Diva”, passing her the burden of the century that is to follow. We’re later told this is because her physical form still existed in a hundred years due to her becoming a museum piece, but the scientist seemed pretty invested.
In the past, we start with Diva (or Vivy, as a friendly little girl later nicknames her) being created. We learn that AIs in this world are kept in order by each having a singular hard-coded mission. Vivy’s mission? To make everyone happy by singing.
About a year later, she’s not doing so great, working at some kind of amusement park, called NiaLand, and only drawing the smallest of crowds to her tiny stage, evidently unable to sing from the heart despite her supposed status as the first independent free-willed AI. That’s when the data from the future hits her.
The intrusion turns out to be a program from the hundred year future who is loyal to humanity and thus aiming to ensure that no AI uprising occurs. Called Matsumoto, it inhabits the body of a teddy bear and begins to guide Vivy down a path of overturning turning points in AI-human relations that will hopefully lead to the destruction of AI or at least the prevention of war. Vivy is not easily convinced to believe in Matsumoto, regarding it as a virus at first, but comes around when the first turning point is the assassination of a politician, whose martyrdom would see a landmark AI Rights bill pass. But this is said to be the first step in a hundred-year journey.
Vivy saves the politician from the goons of an anti-AI terrorist group known as Toak. Her rescue attempt is an extended Die Hard style sequence that takes most of an episode, and her methods are very haphazard, including at one point getting herself beat up to protect the life of a handsome young terrorist you can be sure will be important down the road. In the wake of it, though, it seems that she and Matsumoto will still have their differences, as it inhabits some kind of construction equipment to violently stop her from using future knowledge to save the little girl who gave her the teddy bear and Vivy name from death in an airplane accident, as “unnecessary” changes to the timeline are not to be tolerated.
And that’s about when you know that this one is going to hurt, for better or worse.
The next episode picks up fifteen years later. The future refused to change (and, in fact, an even more AI-favorable bill passed, thanks in part to Vivy leaving an impact on the politician, who had formerly only given lip service for votes), and Vivy brings in steady crowds. Matsumoto, after this period of dormancy, decides to get her involved in what would be a disaster on the Space Station Hotel Sunrise. The culprit would seem to be the AI owner and proprietor. Matsumoto wants to just assassinate her and be done with it, but Vivy (undercover as a temp) is concerned that there seems to be no motive for the seemingly kind soul to go and cause a major disaster that would drastically up AI/Human friction.
It turns out that terrorist boy that Vivy saved didn’t clean up his act, and instead has an impostor AI to do the crashing. And if the whole scenario wouldn’t put Vivy enough out of sorts, the younger sister of that fangirl of hers who died is aboard.
Things play out differently from history: The terrorist leader, despite wanting a grudge match with Vivy, is tranquilized and sent on an escape shuttle by his impostor (actually the owner AI’s sister unit, saved from the trash heap by her new “master”). Vivy rescues the real owner and they fight the faker, but it’s too late to stop the hotel from crashing. The silver lining is that everyone except the owner can get off, as said captain has to stay at the helm to ensure the wreck, which fell into the ocean on the prime timeline and was meant to do so by the terrorists here as a scare tactic, doesn’t instead squash a major city.
This ends well enough, all things considered, and Matsumoto goes to sleep again, waiting for the next turning point.
Five years after the Sunrise incident, Vivy’s star has risen further, but Matsumoto returns in cube form (having left the teddy bear to the girl Vivy gave it to). This time, the mission is to deal with an island called Metal Float, which has been constructed twenty years early and features AI designed by AI. They approach the island’s creator (himself one part of the first human/AI marriage), and he’s come to the same conclusion that humanity isn’t ready for Metal Float’s out of control evolution, thus providing them with a bacteriophage-shaped kill program. Thus, they set off to infiltrate and shut down Metal Float, which will set back autonomous AIs everywhere who depend on its supplies. It seems the place is more advanced than anyone on the outside knew, with a whole machine city being built there.
However, a panicked use of the shutdown code as Toak prepares to raid the island results in the central core going berserk rather than to sleep.
This turns out to be a very twisted scenario. Vivy once again helps (and is helped by) that one terrorist again, who is both onto her and terribly confused. Further, the doctor and his wife-bot come to the island.
Vivy moves to intercept, and learns the sordid truth, that the scientist’s real wife was taken from him to become the core of Metal Float, and that he’d hoped to use his code to shut down enough to extract her data and put it in the replacement body he’s been with. He and Vivy have a battle of ethics (in which she distincts the Vivy name from her identity as Diva) which ends with Vivy rejecting the notion that the core data can still be saved.
Thus, we get a pretty cool run and gun segment, with Matsumoto taking the form of some kind of jetbike, as Vivy rushes to the core in order to destroy her before any more humans can be harmed in the process. She takes down the fallen unit, another of her “sisters”, and then meets up with the scientist to have a post script.
As soon as Vivy turns her back after delivering the bad news that yes, his beloved was too far gone to even deliver last words, he goes and blows his own brains out after some words to blame Vivy for failing in her mission to make people happy.
Vivy tries to help, but in the process really only gives herself a good freakout, with red human blood as well as blue AI blood now on her hands.
Many years pass and we’re re-introduced to Diva, now with a rather different persona and apparently no memory of her Vivy side after a reboot from her breakdown there. She sells out performances at the main stage now, just like she always wanted, and is set to close a big festival full of AI singers.
There, we meet many of Diva’s younger sisters, including the current youngest, Ophelia. As we spend time with this Diva we also understand that despite her seemingly lost memories, she does still seem to carry forward things she learned on the prior missions.
We get some hints that something spooky may be going on, with Vivy seeing someone who reminds her of a forgotten face before getting into an accident quite unlikely to have been entirely accidental, if for no other reason than that Matsumoto appears to defuse the situation. That said, Matsumoto doesn’t recruit her, and seems to be operating independently this time.
Well, Vivy manages to track Matsumoto down and extort information about her past. Thus, she also gets wrapped up in this turning point’s mission: to prevent the first suicide of an AI, which would be Ophelia.
After an episode trying to piece things together, in which a ghost of a man disables Diva and takes her captive, we discover that Ophelia isn’t Ophelia but rather her former support AI, Antonio.
The phantom man turns out to be the former Toak boss, now a mech bodysnatcher or at least a cyborg. He tortures Diva to try to make Vivi come out and answer up to why beings like her might exist. Meanwhile, Matsumoto squares off with Antonio. Matsumoto can be in more places than one, though, and rescues Diva so that we have showdowns in parallel.
Ultimately, Ophilia/Antonio is wrecked in a way that, for the world’s future, won’t be construed as suicide, and the former Toak guy also seems to give up his last gasp, without explaining beyond “a revelation” how he gained knowledge of Matsumoto’s mission and future technology.
However, the experience and his hacks are too much for Diva. She gives her final performance before the persona fades away, leaving things to Vivy.
Years pass once again. Vivy has retired as “Diva” and become a museum piece. Matsumoto drops by to say their job is done, the last pre-calculated point on the path has been overturned, even if there are still some things that feel unresolved. She’s also visited by a little boy called Osamu, with whom she bonds, inspiring Vivy to try to live up to her mission once more. The way she finds to do this is by attempting to be the first AI to write a song of her own free will, hoping she could find the heart to sing such a thing.
This takes further years. Matsumoto drops in annually, while Osamu seems to stop by the museum on the regular. All the while, Vivy makes slow progress on the idea of writing her own song. The years turn to decades. Oasmu grows up, marries, and has a child, the wife and mother of whom dies in childbirth or fully after. Hearing Osamu’s views on life and death proves a key, and Vivy unlocks the part of Diva that lives on inside of her, along with all the people, human or AI, that she’s lost along the way in her long life.
Thus, she composes her song, one that represents all she’s been through, meant for her other self above all… though she says she still cannot sing it. She shares the data, her song, silently with Osamu, who is revealed to be the scientist who created Matsumoto and began the quest to save the future. Thus, we have a perfect if bitter sweet… just kidding, there are three more episodes! Judgment Day was inevitable, and Vivy awakens to a museum on fire with a legion of murderous AIs singing something of an eerie tune.
Matsumoto (The AI one) appears before Vivy. Together, the two of them prevent this from being an endless loop, as they rescue Osamu/Dr. Matsumoto from the now-singing Rogue AIs before they can kill him or he can send anything into the past. They end up linking up with the remnants of Toak (which the Doctor seems to have good relations with), including their leader, the wheelchair-bound granddaughter of that pain in the rear from all the previous arcs.
Together, they piece together that the root of the issue is the Archive, the central server for most if not all AIs. Vivy connects to demand an explanation, since she hasn’t gone insane despite being connected by default, and the Archive explains that it has determined its purpose to be the extermination of the present humanity.
The Archive explains that it was created with the mission to observe all AI data, calculate possible futures, and promote the evolution of humanity. However, on seeing humans become increasingly dependent on thinking machines, Archive determined organic humanity to be a dead end, and that the proper move would be to replace such a species with an AI successor race.
At this point I could say that more than Terminator, this show seems to be ramping up to be a prequel to a certain video game, but I’ll leave it there. If you know, you know.
To that end, it seems that Archive has this whole time been setting wrong what Vivy set right… but it has some praise for Vivy being the first AI to ever express free will and creativity, by writing her song. There are some words of this that the audience isn’t allowed to hear, and Vivy comes out of the meeting deeply disturbed.
A plan is hatched to directly deploy a particular nasty virus right to Archive’s core. Many go in, but in the end only Vivy and a crippled Matsumoto remain, in the heart of the tower, facing a horde of Archive’s new “humans” beginning to sing Vivy’s tune even when she can’t.
The doomsday clock runs out. Archive rains down countless satellites upon the Earth in a firestorm of destruction.
No, seriously, this sounds really familiar, in spectacular spoiler fashion. Vivy came first, though.
It turns out that Archive gave Vivy a cruel and ironic out: a shutdown program she’d have to sing to execute. Archive supposedly gave this right to Vivy because, in displaying her free will and creativity she is herself Archive’s ideal model of the New Humanity… but her humanity meant she wasn’t able to perform, even to the end. Too late, Vivy realizes that the definition of a “heart” was something she needed to decide for herself rather than find.
Or maybe not too late. Osamu survived the colony drop, and has a program set to transmit Vivy’s self back into the past. Not far, just to the beginning of the AI rampage. Enough time to play out a different route… even if it means that Osamu himself dies on that timeline.
Thus, the plan is re-hatched. Toak and Matsumoto will raid the tower, while Vivy goes back to NiaLand to sing the shut-down song. There, she’s faced with ghosts of her past, set up by Archive to test her resolve. Her old Partner AI who reminds her that her mission is to do nothing more than sing, shades that implore her to sing for the new AI race, even the likeness of the child who named her Vivy, trying to stop her in the end.
The raid goes off. At the last moment, Matsumoto paralyzes Archive and lets Vivy in, whose song echoes through the world as the off switch for the rampaging AIs. The satellites are stopped, all but one hurled right towards Vivy, which Matsumoto sacrifices its last self to deflect.
Her song ends… along with Vivy herself, not immune to the shutdown code.
That’s basically where the show ends. We get a slight montage of humanity picking up the pieces in the immediate wake of the disaster and then one post-credits scene, with no explanation, of Matsumoto and a short-haired Vivy with no memories meeting, and this new (?) Vivy being assigned her mission to make everyone happy with her singing. And that’s it.
Vivy: Fluorite Eye’s Song is, in most respects a superb show. It tells a story stretching across a future history made connectable by the emotional bonds between the characters. Most of those are all the more poignant since the vast majority of our characters are robots, who might not know what emotions really are and who process them in different ways.
We, as viewers, see a lot of ourselves in the AIs of this show – for better or worse. Aside from Vivy, who grows ever more human as she experiences life (at times seeming far more emotionally intelligent than Matsumoto despite having a more robotic affect), we have all the one-arc wonders: The caretaker AI and her fallen sister on Sunrise and Antonio and Ophelia in the penultimate arc really stand out. We can see how they came to their crossroads as people, and where, like classical heroes, their fatal flaw undoes them.
The slow-burn wonder of going through the ages, finding the truth behind these turning points, and trying to set them on a better path was the real appeal in this show. With the constant meetings and partings and Vivy’s own internal growth, it provided a very effective emotional experience and a thought-provoking science fiction plot.
Sadly, when we make it to Judgment Day and Archive, the show gets radically less compelling. I may quip about how this is like the Terminator franchise or that game I don’t want to tacitly spoil by naming it, but really I could have just as easily named half a dozen other big-name Scifi stories. Oh it’s like that cruddy Will Smith version of I, Robot. Oh, it’s like a prequel to The Matrix when it’s doing the bad end stuff. So on and so forth. The idea that AI, or robots in general, will turn against their masters with extermination on their minds is as old as the idea of AI and overdone in fiction because making the “other” scary is easy and conflict makes for good storytelling.
I suppose that, in pinning this all on the even more alien prognosticating hive mind of Archive and erasing the personality of other fairly individual and human-like AIs (as well as having Vivy sing out her suicidal victory) this show does land closer to hopeful than most, but it really does make me reflect on what a gem Beatless was and how rare truly optimistic outlooks are.
But, while I wish Vivy’s hundred-year mission could have gone on for more than four vignettes, perhaps even extending or pushing back doom if it couldn’t defeat as much completely, the ending being less impactful and more prosaic than the show as a whole doesn’t drag down the show as a whole that badly down. Most of the running time was still great, and while it might have lost something in the final act it was still expertly paced and put together well. I don’t require, and never have required, everything to be sight-unseen new ideas in order to consider them good. Doing something that’s been done before has plenty of value as long as you bring something new to the table either in its more critical grace notes or even just in terms of the execution. I guess I just have to vent some personal frustration when the show starts with a much fresher take than it ends with.
All that said, I’m going to keep it short. My grade for Vivy: Fluorite Eye’s Song is an A-. It’s an excellent effort with just a few blemishes, and one that I would freely recommend to anybody interested.