B – properly B: The Beginning – is a 2018 show that promises dark detective work and perhaps a spot of superpowers. It also brings us to the end of my lamentable single-letter experiment. Can it rise above the standards of mediocrity, or does an anime really need a longer title to work?
I honestly don’t think the title has anything to do with it, but this one did at least get a sequel. Then again, so did K, so that doesn’t really prove anything.
We start with a woman being hunted for sport and the apparent thrills of a guy watching the live feed, only for something to descend upon and slaughter the assailants. We then catch up with the CSI team, called the RIS, as they investigate the killings, the work of a vigilante known as Killer B thanks to the B marks he leaves at his kills.
We also see that the impetuous young CSI girl, Lily, is actually the sister (presumably adopted, based on later material) of a mild-mannered boy named Koku, who is actually B. But she doesn’t know that.
The watcher, who wasn’t axed, runs in with some weirdo terrorists who agree to help him find and take revenge on B, which involves joy riding some kind of super tank through town, blowing up whatever they please. The cops get on the case, since apparently being a CSI for the RIS also means doing high-speed chases, as a master profiler of few words, Genie, tries to work out what’s going to happen.
The cops are given the slip, but B does indeed appear once the crooks are away on a train. They quickly get rid of the useless guy, making you wonder why they even used him to lure B out if they could just do this all themselves, and the one of their number on the same train fights B, forcing him to take on a few layers of transformation before he stabs the terrorist clown in the head and the clown disintegrates.
In the wake, the train is derailed in the shape of B’s mark, and the other weird eccentric and probably superpower-having terrorists are away with some nerve gas presumably for later.
Whatever else I can say about this show, it’s a hell of an opening.
So, our principal characters are Koku, Lily, and this grumpy old CSI of few words named Keith Flick, but often called Genie by the other old hand cops. Our antagonists are this insane clown posse (no relation) who at first don’t have much in the way of a motivation, but who seem to need infusions of gold and be completely nuts as well as superhuman.
The next case is once again staged by the clowns using other criminals as patsies, this time ones threatening to nerve gas a high class party (and the entire city) if the mayor isn’t murdered. However, the clowns switch out the deadly gas for knockout gas and use it to cover their own crimes. Once again, one of their number goes after Koku, this time babbling about some history together like she’s a jilted ex. It seems that she might not be entirely crazy, though, as Koku has some questions for her. Well, one question: “Where is she?!” which tells the audience fairly little. Koku is also able to integrate one of her limbs and presumably her core power after killing her.
After that we get some slightly lower key time that does a lot to team Keith up with Lily (much to the former’s chagrin) and parallel him with Koku.
We segue into another case through this, with surveillance being done on the RIS in a way that demands an inside traitor. The techie who finds this out is attacked, though he survives the bloody stabbing. After some cloak and dagger getting there, Keith ends up confronting the traitor alone. The traitor doesn’t seem entirely sane, and kills himself with a knife stolen from Keith’s home. Rather than doing anything intelligent, Keith messes with the guy (getting blood on him and his prints on the man) and books it.
In his booked it state, Koku catches up with Keith. Keith seems to understand way more about Koku than one would suggest, and ends up naming a time and place to meet up again and tell Koku all the answers, including presumably the one answer Koku wants, the location of a girl named Yuna.
And when we get that later encounter, we take a trip to crazy town. Now, to be fair, we had oddly-styled terrorist lunatics with superpowers; while B may have felt somewhat gritty, it was not a mundane setting. Further, while some real locations are mentioned, the main country we focus on is some fictional ambiguously European-ish island kingdom named Cremona.
But it still is another thing entirely when, out of nowhere, with only the show thusfar to go on, we are informed that our story really begins hundreds of years ago with the discovery of black-boned winged humanoid skeletons who were determined to be the ancestors of modern humanity and also gods, and how the kingdom ran a many generation long program to recreate these gods through eugenics or something, but eventually decided to fund the research with the obvious play of taking failed candidates and making them some kind of terrorist super spies who would manage conflict the world over, balancing fear and order, only for some genetic researchers from Japan to show up and actually start re-creating the pitch black bone people. One of these researchers was Keith’s father, and a young Keith evidently translated the prophetic tablet inscription that was found with the original skeletons.
It’s… a lot to take in. Koku and Yuna were two of the re-creations, childhood sweethearts who “resonate with” each other and thus… something mystical.
Anyway, she turns out to be brainwashed and part of the clown gang. She tries to kill Koku but after he realizes who she is and comes to his senses and stops fighting back, she does about the same. He might be a little impaled, but they hug it out and the framing even makes you think we’re about to get a kiss when the sub-commander of the clowns shows up and runs them both through.
This results in a fight that has the final sum of the clowns getting away with Yuna, Koku managing to not be captured like they wanted despite the very silly yet effective in context move of raining harpoons down from a zeppelin, and Keith shooting the lead clown’s arm with some magic buckshot that actually hurts his otherwise invincible body, which is what forces them to leave mostly empty handed.
We are also treated to a long backstory of Koku and Yuna, confirming that his mark is actually a code for the two of them (the “B” is actually a stylized 13, his number, and the tally that goes with it a Roman numeral version of her number, 4) and showing how the facility raising them was kicked over by… the graduates from the same program? Answering to somebody whose face is kept constantly out of frame so it must be someone we know.
Also Koku’s core power was memory manipulation, which he used on himself to forget everything but Yuna, only now that he met her again his brain is straightened out and he remembers.
Oh, and meanwhile Keith is kind of wanted for murder. You know, just a little thing like that. Also, his stake in this is to find the man who killed his sister eight years ago, which seems unrelated but of course isn’t.
Follow that okay? It was hard enough as the show presented it, I imagine it’s a lot to take in when summarized.
Lily eventually finds the two, when they are interrupted by a quickly dispatched clown attack. They split up, with Keith and Lily going back to the cops while Koku goes to face his destiny on the clown gang’s zeppelin base.
The cop line takes longer. Keith comes up with a plan to goad out the real evil, which involves using Lily as bait because the perpetrator is their boss and his old friend, who is still obsessed with Keith’s sister (who Lily is the spitting image of). This results in a near miss for both Lily and several other cops, and Keith tracking the guy back to his lair where he goads Keith into killing him because some nonsense about making Keith a murderer being the ultimate high. Since mastermind had a gun of his own pulled it’s pretty cut and dry self defense, which we normally don’t call murder, but he gets to go out with an insane inner monologue so I guess he’s cool with it.
That guy, it turns out, was sort of the mastermind for the clowns, but they go their own way. The cool head among them burns his last subordinate and flees with Yuna to the place with the secret inscription that tells all about the black bone god people, which is evidently the only place where Koku is really mortal. He does this because he believes, because mastermind lied to him, that if he can kill Koku he’ll become the new black-winged king. They have themselves a brutal little fight and… Koku doesn’t do so well.
However, Koku’s will to protect Yuna is stronger than a few stabs, gunshots, or lost limbs. After being down his sword arm, that leg the odd girl out willed him becomes the means to a kill. He’s seen princess carrying a badly injured Yuna away from the place with the magic ick that stops their regeneration, so presumably they’ll pull through.
And, sure enough, three months later we check in with the cops (who are all doing fine, including Keith) and at the very end run into Koku and Yuna, who seem to be living normal lives. The end!
And, with that ending, I feel like I should stop and grade the matter here, since every antagonist and arc was fairly neatly tied up.
B is a strong show. It’s a thriller more than a mystery, in that the audience is never really invited to solve anything and there’s a fair bit of focus on the shock and brutality of the violence, but at the same time that’s a fine genre to be in, and B wears it well.
There is the big issue where it goes completely mental babbling about ancient gods and prophetic giant rocks, but… I mean, it’s speculative fiction, you can do that. Does it spike way stranger than the rest of the show and involve invoking a lot of rules and important-sounding words that weren’t needed? Yeah, it does. We had powers, but I think you could have condensed the whole mythos to “government supersoldier program” and gotten the same effects: kids raised in this isolated setting with special powers, controllable abhumans living secretly among common folk, corrupt government agencies turning on one another, the works. I don’t think you needed to pull in genetic recreations of gods and ancient literature that perfectly predicts what’s happening in the plot.
But then, I’m not the writer of B, so I can just take what they give. And what they give is… still fine. It’s awkward here and there, and stumbles in places, but Lily is likable and Keith and Koku are fine to follow and the clown gang are a very watchable brand of crazy. Overall, it’s a solid experience that delivers exactly what it promises: some scary moments, a little gore and ye olde ultra violence, superpowers, and crime.
Unpretentious and effective, B: The Beginning in fact does get a B as its grade. It’s one I’d fairly easily recommend. As for the six-episode sequel season, Beginning Succession? That’s for another time when we are presumably not learning our ABCs.