If my last two reviews hadn’t been so generally positive, I’d feel like I was picking on Takuya Satou. In case you’re wondering, he’s the man who directed Steins;Gate and Selector, and who also directed this week’s charming little paradox, RErideD.
Believe it or not, he’s not the only great talent to work on this show. The character designs are from Yoshitoshi ABe, who also did the character designs for Serial Experiments Lain and just about everything for Haibane Renmei, a show that I consider to be an all-time great. This makes a pair of incredible people who have done incredible work, stepping up to the plate in their successful fields. That means this show should be good, right?
You’d think so, but no.
Our main character is Derrida Yvain, a brilliant young roboticist with a lot on his plate here in the first episode. He has to write a patch for a bug in the latest robots, the DZs, that would cause them to go berserk if many were given coordinated orders, such as in the rumored military applications. He also has to attend the birthday party of his friend Nathan’s daughter, Mage, where he also runs into Mage’s shutterbug best friend, Yuri. Beyond that, he has to meet both his boss, Andrei, (who is far less than helpful) and his emotionally distant genius father about the DZ bug and intent to patch it.
Everything goes to hell when, in order to cover up the bug and patch alike, Andrei has his father murdered, and then goes after Derrida and Nathan as well. A roadside ambush sees Nathan killed, while Derrida gets away from the immediate danger. Then, he falls through a random air duct into an underground base and trips into a cryogenic stasis cell, where he’ll be trapped for the next ten years. As he sleeps, the location is visited by a woman who looks suspiciously like an older version of Mage (probably because she is) who leaves a pocket watch there for Derrida to find.
The world Derrida wakes up to after his Futurama-esque little jaunt to the future is a lot more post-apocalyptic than the one he left behind, with ruined cities as well as functional ones and wilderness areas overrun with berserk zombie-style DZ robots. He gets saved (in an action scene with no skill or continuity to it) by a gruff mercenary named Vidaux, who uses his awesome AI car Grahm to take Derrida to safety. Vidaux’s little daughter, Mayuka, is there too. Derrida reveals who he is, and that if he can just find Mage, she should have a spare copy of the patch file for the DZs, which would be worth a small fortune in addition to the fact that it would stop this nightmare.
They visit Mage’s old home, and there are ambushed by Yuri, all grown up now and fairly quickly developing quite the crush on Derrida. She tells them that Mage used to live with her, but went into hiding fairly recently. And, since they’re all looking for Mage and trying to save the world, Yuri goes ahead and joins the party. It’s in the nick of time, too as Dona (a cyborg assassin hired by Andrei) comes to kill Derrida. They shake her in another lame action scene and then try to follow Mage’s trail.
And at this point, it’s as good a time as any to mention what’s been missing in this summary of a time travel show: the time travel. It is, technically, introduced early, with Derrida apparently having produced a time travel theory, called the Trout theory. The Trout theory is never given a proper explanation in the show, which is a huge miss when it comes to science fiction, but we do know a few of its traits, the most central of which being, on one side, that powerful memories and wishing it enough are the keys to time travel while, on the other side, experimentation with Trout Theory “Time rides” burn memories as fuel, meaning Derrida is gunshy about playing with the theory any more since doing so in the past erased most of his childhood.
Mage, for her part, was very interested in Trout theory as was her father Nathan, to the point that when Derrida didn’t want to go back to the research, Mage tried playing around with it on her own, resulting in a hospital visit back in episode 1, albeit not one that caused any real harm.
At the risk of putting a digression within a digression, Mage talking intelligently about time travel theory and being able to perform some sort of solo experiment highlights one of the minor niggling issues with RErideD: Mage’s age. When she’s a nine-year-old kid, she acts much more like a high school student at least, being able to relate with the adult Derrida as a peer and taking on some pretty tough subjects. And, it’s strongly and continually implied that Mage had (or has) a romantic interest in Derrida, which ranges between nervously precocious and very creepy when he is literally old enough to be her father. The whole show would work better if Mage started out a teen and Nathan was either Derrida’s senior at work by a fairly large margin or else was Mage’s uncle and guardian (with a smaller age gap) rather than actually her father.
In any case, something related to Trout theory causes both the appearance of a strange little girl called Ange, who manifests from mysterious fog with the very image of young Mage, and Derrida himself to experience fairly uncontrolled “Time Rides”, mentally slipping back to events from his past before being yanked to the present again… possibly with something changed.
On the surface, this isn’t a bad setup, but there are a couple problems on top of no one making an effort to have the audience understand Trout theory or Time Rides past some very basic facts. And I know, often it can be bad to give too much detail about why and how something is supposed to work, rather than just the facts of it working. But time travel, as a science fiction concept, is one that pretty much demands a more complete explanation because of how many styles of time travel there are in fiction. And when the character is clearly supposed to know things about it, it becomes quite grating that the audience isn’t clued in.
The group makes a vain attempt to infiltrate the headquarters of Derrida’s old company , and while there they find out the insane truth that the DZ bug and subsequent rampage were both intentional on the part of company heads (mostly Andrei) and government officials, because apparently evil is profitable on its own.
This turn seriously bothers me because, if there was a way in which having a bunch of berserk robots on your own soil tearing things up was somehow of benefit both for the robot-making company and the local government, which I sincerely doubt, it’s badly explained. It does mean that getting and using the Patch File won’t be as simple as acquiring it and handing it over to the authorities, since they’re complicit, but I think there would be easier ways to limit the options of our main characters. The initial assumption, that Andrei was acting to mask his involvement and would continue to oppose Derrida because Derrida could bring him down with evidence, was perfectly fine. We didn’t need this dose of nonsense choices.
While suffering occasional badly-choreographed action hazards from Dona or DZ swarms, the team follows Mage’s trail to a museum. There, Derrida is able to go on a vaguely useful Time Ride, both reconnecting with his father (who never appears nor is really mentioned again, making the alright scenes with him here kind of useless) and securing information about the museum and what Mage might have done there. Security camera footage leads to the group learning that Mage met with some sort of accomplice at the ruined museum, a man Derrida recognizes as Cassiel, a researcher he worked with before everything went to hell.
Before we can seek out Cassiel, though, we take a detour to repair the awesome AI car, and in so doing run across another useless villain, a government bureaucrat called Schmidt Maier who has the fashion sense of much better antagonists (particularly Ergo Proxy’s Raul Creed) but very little in the way of plans beyond “Kidnap Yuri and Derrida should do whatever I say, right?” for Plan A and “Lots of guns I can’t use on the person I need alive” for Plan B.
Naturally, Derrida manages to save Yuri (like her crush on him needed the help) with the help of Vidaux, and they tear off after the plot they procrastinated. On the road, Dona attacks again, and a mysterious voice on the radio leads the team to safety. This voice turns out to belong to Cassiel. He gets them away from Dona by using a little DZ transmitter to mess up her cybernetic arm, and then goes ahead and explains his role. Cassiel, it seems, was part of the conspiracy but came to regret his role, tipping off Derrida (because Nathan was out dealing with Mage’s reckless little time travel experiment) with a phone call and, after everything, going to ground to work against Andrei from the shadows.
Mage met with him, it seems, in part to acquire some items for a project of hers that sound suspiciously like trying to recreate her family home somewhere. He also tips them off to where else she might have gone, but before we part ways Dona attacks again, getting a stab off on Vidaux. Derrida does a Time Ride for about the dozenth time but only the second we actually care about, reliving Cassiel’s phone call and slipping an extra copy of the transmitter he used to disable Dona into his pocket, retrieving it in the present so everyone can get away. In the process, he learns that Time Rides are one-time affairs, and he can’t revisit somewhere he already visited.
That might be a problem, because outside powers seem inclined to reduce the entire country to ash with WMDs and saturation bombing now, in order to contain the Zombie Robot Apocalypse, a fact previously rumored but now looming close. I’m not sure if this was always supposed to be the case or if it was caused by the latest Time Ride, but it doesn’t particularly matter which since it’s a problem now that we really don’t focus enough on.
Cassiel agrees to act as a decoy because like any sane person he wants out of this show, and we launch into two episodes that are each almost all flashback. The full meat of these episodes is that everyone gets away and Vidaux pulls through despite his injury, and then Derrida and team visit his old college (now a fortified enclave) and talk with his teacher about where Mage might have gone and the dangers of mad (or even not-so-mad) science. Oh, and Dona just murders Andrei because she’s bloody insane.
The first flashback is Vidaux, where we learn that he’s not just an ex-cop, but every depressed former cop with a dark and tragic backstory, in this case meaning that Mayuka isn’t his biological daughter but rather the daughter of his wife’s killer, who Vidaux discovered in a cradle after he killed her father in revenge. That’s… nice I guess but this is a little late and Vidaux is a little minor and dry as a character, so it doesn’t land like it could.
The second flashback is all about Dona in which we learn that the insane assassin was, in fact, always insane. Specifically, she (then called Angelica) was involved in a research project to create a DZ with a personality, essentially performing a Turing test by attempting to talk to the thing. Doing this somehow causes Angelica to become unhinged, hallucinating that the DZ is stealing her face and attempting to steal her identity, renaming her “Dona” in reference to being a personality donor for the robot. None of this seems to be actually happening, but she goes berserk, attacking the robot with a knife and then going off on all the scientists before adopting the identity of “Dona”, a robot assassin who actually isn’t a robot at all. This isn’t a good sequence, it doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t make Dona sympathetic or express any abstract horror at the experiment being done like the show clearly wants you to think it does, it just expresses that a person who seemed dangerously unstable was, actually, always someone dangerously unstable and delusional. And, I suppose, it also tells us that robot scientists in this universe have even lower sanity standards than ones working for Aperture Sciences.
When we’re finally through that mess, we emerge into the great final conflict. Derrida and company find Mage’s “quiet place”, a hidden and seemingly abandoned radio telescope. They fight through legions of DZs, and even get ambushed by Maier and his combat drones first, and then Dona coming back for one last shot at someone vaguely responsible for the creation of robots. Derrida struggles to get inside as the group peels off with first the car, then Vidaux, then Mayuka staying behind, the first two to protect the rear and the latter because she wants to be with daddy at the end. Respectable. What’s not is the choreography, which is terrible and has no sense for continuity, and, at this point, Yuri.
Through most of the show, Yuri was the only character with a personality, but here at the end she utterly degenerates into a helpless whiner, crying about how she has to question if it’s right to rewrite time, and undo what and who everyone is right now. If she kept it to a line or two of regrets, or if there weren’t thousands dead and millions more to die in a devastating scorched earth campaign, maybe this could land, but as it is you just want to slap her and remind her of everyone who has already died and everyone, including herself, who is about to die due to the past that’s all set to be changed.
She keeps it to the obnoxious complaints, though, and is there with Derrida when he finds Mage in her Snow White style glass coffin at the heart of her Time Ride equipment. We get more random details of Trout theory time travel without the broader understanding to evaluate them, and learn that Derrida’s Time Rides haven’t been of his own doing, but rather the product of Mage sacrificing herself to give him the jump power. Because of this, she’s in a bad way, her mind almost totally destroyed by the Time Rides and her consciousness lost to what few scattered memories remain. Which would be interesting, if it would actually matter and we weren’t just unwriting this present.
As it stands, though Derrida makes his final Time Ride in Mage’s presence, getting some nonsense answers from Mage’s mental doppelganger in the timestream and going back to his conversation with her on the evening of her birthday. This time he’s supportive of her interest in Trout theory and promises to take up his research again. As a result, Mage doesn’t do a reckless experiment of her own, doesn’t put herself in the hospital, and doesn’t cause Nathan to miss work. At work, Nathan rather than Derrida fields Cassiel’s call, and does a better job of it, resulting in him, Derrida, and Derrida’s father blowing the whistle on Andrei rather than tipping their hands and getting offed. Ten years later (at the same time we were in the main story) the nation is happy and prosperous and Mage and Derrida, the only ones with memories of the ruined timeline, are creepily a couple. Everyone else is doing better too, with Vidaux having a baby on the way, Mayuka being happy with her biological family who never did anything wrong, Dona/Angelica being normal, and even the car AI now somehow existing in a waiter robot. Well, Yuri’s not better, as she finds herself crying due to phantom memories of the chance she might have had (which still would have had a creepy as hell age gap in a world where Derrida wouldn’t have been frozen for ten years, but okay, I guess Mage got there first). And that’s the end anyway, so I’ll take what I can get.
By Haruhi, this is a bad one. The technical aspects are bad. The ABe character designs look good in stills, but aren’t often animated very well. Beyond even that, the action scenes (which there are a lot of) are never assembled right. They don’t maintain a proper continuity, they don’t visually tell a story, and they don’t even look particularly awesome while they’re doing what they do. There are no really creative scenarios or inventive back and forth moments, it’s basically just running over hordes of robot zombies or bland gunfire so inaccurate you’d think they were trying to not hit anything.
The plot makes no sense, being full of random holes in logic and sequencing like the bull about the government being in on unleashing berserk robots within their own borders, or the ending-episode twist that Mage apparently couldn’t time ride back ten years herself and thus… time rode what must have been ten years back to save Derrida (who was supposed to die) so he could time ride to the time she time rode to in order to change things. And, there’s not really much of it for twelve episodes. When you get down to it, the entire show is about finding Mage, a process that doesn’t actually have too many steps. They visit her home, picking up Yuri, then the museum, then Cassiel, and then pretty much get to Mage. Without the detours, which are largely unnecessary and unwelcome, we don’t have a lot of material in the search that’s worth seeing.
The villains are also particularly lame. Maier is as generic a smug jerk as they come. Andrei is a total clown that it’s impossible to take seriously and isn’t even dealt with by the heroes. Dona starts a personality-deprived nobody, literally just a hired gun, and ends pointlessly and unsympathetically insane. Lastly, I suppose there’s the foreign army that’s going to burn out the whole country, but we never meet anyone actually affiliated with them, so their threat is a nonentity when it comes to actual villains.
The characters range between flat (like Vidaux) and annoying (like Derrida, Andrei, Dona, or end-phase Yuri), and are essentially uninteresting. We don’t care much about them as people, so we’re not really invested in their struggles or what few attempts they really make to grow and express themselves, which is alright when very few of them even try.
And, of course, the science fiction is a complete mess that never really communicates the science nor the fiction of our scenario, but instead just picks details that somebody though were cool and yet were not.
All in all, I’m sorry to say, but RErideD is a plain Fail. It’s not a good show, it’s not an engaging show, it’s not even a particularly creative or colorful mistake. It’s sad that it’s got such amazing talents working on it because, clearly none of those talents were utilized to anything resembling their full potential. It’s not the worst show I’ve seen, not by a long shot, but it’s keenly lacking in anything resembling a redeeming feature or point of interest. Skip this show and never look back, because it sure as hell won’t make any good memories if you watch it.