Last year, I reviewed DearS, a show with a premise that vaguely reminded me of a western film, in that case District 9. They ended up being pretty much nothing alike in tone, style, or content (more’s the pity), but it was an interesting comparison because it was, in some ways, like two students submitting different work for the same project.
When I started up elDLIVE, I was reminded of that experience because, once again, a 12-episode anime seemed to have the same setup as a pretty famous movie – in this case, Men In Black. For those who don’t know, Men In Black is a science fiction action-comedy about a relative normal who ends up recruited by a secret organization staffed by both exceptional humans and strange aliens, that polices the presence of aliens on Earth, handling crimes and cases related to the many extraterrestrial creatures that live secretly among us. And that is, basically, the idea behind elDLIVE as well.
If you’re one of the people who likes that I normally don’t curse in these reviews, you may want to skip this one. Sometimes, a bad word is the only way to describe something. That said, let’s dig in.
So, the show starts with a group of eccentric, colorful, and fun space cops chasing down and arresting a gribbly alien monster criminal. They banter and seem all-around enjoyable. Don’t get used to this. Of the four characters we see in this opening, one is mission control and two won’t reappear until after the halfway point. Like most of the cold open scenes in this show, the arrest we witness ties into very little (nothing in this case, really) and exists just to show us something kind of cool. And, to be fair, it’s kind of cool.
What’s not cool is our main character, who we’re shortly introduced to. He’s Chuuta Kononose – a sad, wimpy loner of a middle school boy who is nervous, doesn’t really dare talk to other people, has no friends, and is generally about as much of a helpless little crybaby as you could ask for. Seriously, Shinji Ikari would tell this kid to toughen up and get out there some more… and several times over the course of the show I found myself wishing we had Shinji instead. He doesn’t do as much damage to the show as, say, Daisuke does to Revisions because his archetype is more tolerable in abstract, but that doesn’t mean Chuuta is good.
He also appears to be a complete schizophrenic, as he hears a voice in his head constantly and often “talks to himself” having a conversation with said voice. An encounter with this (after he briefly has a run in with a friendly fat kid from his class, and a stupidly oversexed lady teacher hauling a student around under each arm) displeases his potential crush, Misuzu Sonokata, who gives him a shockingly harsh and cold rebuke.
And now, then, is as good a time as any to address a few of the elements of elDLIVE that are just plain everywhere. First, the character and creature designs. On the plus side, the aliens look great, and are really creative. There are some rubber forehead types or animal people, but more of them are extremely bizarre creatures, who often aren’t even humanoid. They’re unique, creative, and part of the fun is seeing all these things fit into relatively ordinary roles. This much once again reminds me of Men In Black, where part of the fun is seeing how the aliens all fit in, both within the agency and in the world at large. They aren’t the only bizarre creatures running around, though – any humans (or aliens who might as well be humans, of which there are a lot. I blame Rassilon, and tip my hat to anyone who gets that reference.) who aren’t members of the titular alien cop organization elDLIVE or immediately related to them tend to be done in a vast panoply of styles, most of which… really aren’t appealing to look at. I think the up and down is somewhat part of the same package deal. The artists got really creative with aliens and disguised aliens, but couldn’t or didn’t rein it in for ordinary humans, meaning that some technically normal folks look pretty alien. Again, people like Chuuta, his aunt (who he lives with), and the other main characters are immune, but the secondary cast and bit parts are really made ugly, sometimes shockingly so.
I guess you could still praise that, since it’s not falling into the “everyone is cute” trap, but it’s really not appealing to look at. Other shows know how to give characters unique designs, even ones that successfully communicate that they’re not good looking, without making them hoarse-screeching Jinx Pokemon or weirdly proportioned black-eyed demon children. Somewhere, there is balance, and elDLIVE went too far the nonstandard way, showing us why most shows would prefer to at least give you something nice to look at.
Second, someone on the production clearly wanted their style to be hugely conspicuous, and it is distracting and annoying. What do I mean by this? Well, for one, most of the transitions in this show are wipe transitions. That’s not strictly bad on its own, but every wipe uses an object to “wipe” the scene. For instance, if someone is walking somewhere, their leg sill sweep across the screen, transitioning the scene. Sometimes, if there’s a long walk, there will be multiple leg wipes. Now, in abstract this sounds maybe just kitschy, perhaps even slightly charming, but it is distracting and annoying. In the majority of cases, scene transitions should be relatively invisible, or just visible enough to communicate that a transition has occurred. They aren’t something that you generally want to draw attention to, which is why a lot of styles of transition have fallen by the way side. I’m not saying there’s never cause for a good curtain wipe or dissolve, but you have to have a fairly exceptional purpose to justify one, especially nowadays. Adding the object to do the wiping does not make it any clearer or more natural, especially because it’s not an object or angle that was already in the scene, it’s a new copy of a leg just for the wipe.
Further, a lot of intercuts, especially closeups, are done in a particularly bizarre style of pastel colors and geometric patterns. For instance, a character reacting to something, rather than just being given a closeup, might be given a closeup in which they’ll be rendered on a white field with a pastel blue checkerboard drifting across their scene, and the cut to the other character in reply will have the same treatment except it’s yellow polka dots rather than a blue checkerboard. I was fed up with this the second or third time it happened, but the show kept doing it all throughout the run. It doesn’t look good… and elDLIVE seems weirdly proud of that. It is aggressively showing off that it doesn’t look good, and is instead doing this cheap style (when the show is otherwise, while not the best animated piece you’ll see, at least not noticeably cheap)
Sometimes, you can do really fancy stuff with cinematography. One of my favorites, and a show that I rate incredibly highly, Dusk Maiden of Amnesia does a lot of tricks with transitions, shot-framing, blackspace, and so on. But the difference between a skilled creator doing that for good reason and in order to better visually communicate a story and an incompetent one doing it because they wrongly think that something looks cool is night and day, and elDLIVE’s weird scene decisions are by far on the bad end of that.
Third and finally for this juncture, Sonokata is a bitch. I see what they were going for in her character. She’s supposed to be the “Defrosting Ice Queen” subgenre of Tsundere where the hostility is initially real and gradually becomes a defense mechanism before the girl can finally be honest with her feelings. To the show’s little credit, they do move her character forward over time and give her a less than terrible arc, but did she have to start out quite so bad? For the better part of the show, I found myself wishing that someone else would come along and steal her screen time, because she was just such an unpleasant person.
As the first episode continues, Chuuta is abducted by an alien transporter, which brings him to meet elDLIVE, the space cops who do the Men In Black job. He’s been scouted as a new member on the advice of MOTHERS, an unseen network of computers that determines everything and makes the judgments on which interstellar society is run. So it’s like Psycho-Pass’s Sybil System, only dumb and not at all the point of the show. In any case, since MOTHERS has determined he would be a good member of elDLIVE, the boss of the local branch, Laine Brick, decides to go with it. Sonokata, who turns out to be an elDLIVE agent assigned to monitor and assess Chuuta personally, is strongly against his recruitment, with some harsh words to the effect that he’s a wimp (guilty), a pervert (No more than an ordinary person. That would mean having a personality.), and generally not fit in the least to be a space cop (probably guilty on that one). She will spend most of the rest of the show reiterating her hostility to the idea and suggesting that he disappear (or die) without leaving a trace. She does this because she is a bitch.
Laine overrules Sonokata to test Chuuta anyway, blackmailing him into trying out for elDLIVE by essentially threatening to space him when he doesn’t want to get involved with space cop nonsense. We know he’s probably joking, but that’s still a little dark.
Speaking of not wanting to get involved, that’s a big part of Chuuta’s major malfunction. Apparently, something bad happened when he was with some friends while he was really little (we’re not given a clear picture until a few episodes in, when the specific details become relevant) and he blames himself and is resolved to not get involved with anything or anyone lest he once again bring harm to what he cares about. So, at least at the outset, Chuuta really doesn’t want to do this. Or anything. This is why he has no friends and is the level his confidence is at, the voice in his head verbally sparring with him all the way.
Chuuta’s test is a first assignment, where he’s given some handcuffs and asked to solo-capture a low-level wanted criminal. With no real leads he just sort of wanders the streets of town for a little while (I guess he’s too polite to just blow off the test and deliberately flunk himself out of elDLIVE, as much as Sonokata would like it if he did), until he runs into the oversexed teacher and fat kid from earlier, the other kid now absent, and his inner voice insists that it smells oil.
As Chuuta tries to deflect any possible conversation or invitation and send the two on their way, he gets into an argument with the voice in his head about that oil smell, which gets the attention and anger of the teacher, who is ultimately unintentionally goaded into revealing her true form as a giant flabby alien pig monster and the wanted people-eating alien criminal. In a sequence that was longer than it needed to be, Chuuta agonizes over his desire to not get involved and fear that doing anything will hurt people, weighed against the fact that there is a terrified kid in a monster’s clutches who will almost certainly be devoured if he takes the pig monster’s advice to just back off and not do his space cop job. When he finally works up the gumption to try to stand up for said ugly-crying classmate, this triggers the voice in his head to reveal its true form as a carbuncle-like pokemon-faced cute thing that pops out of his chest on an unidentified stalk.
Yeah, big surprise, it turns out that the main character isn’t schizophrenic, and has instead been talking to the alien symbiote he didn’t know he had. This being is named Dolugh, and is a “Monitalien”, a sort of alien remnant of an ancient society that bonds with planetary natives and can, together with them, utilize greater powers. The main power of Venom’s really lame cousin here is called “Sympathy”, which allows Dolugh to materialize anything that Chuuta can visualize, starting with a basic force blow against the pig monster to knock it back and the fat kid free of its grasp, and followed up with, on noticing that the thing’s flabby flesh reminds him of the tattered edges of a rag, literally sewing the monster up into its own skin so that it can be arrested without further issue.
If you think that Sympathy presents great opportunities for creative problem-solving, capable of unleashing a cornucopia of varied attacks and powers tailored to any situation, then give yourself a pat on the back because you’re more inventive than the writers of this show, who pretty much have Chuuta rely on two or three moves for the twelve episode run, rarely inventing anything new or handling his problems in a novel way.
With the alien captured, the fat kid presumably hit with the Neuralizer off screen (as he shows up later with no proper memories of the incident. Perks of elDLIVE.), and the charge of “Is a total schizo” cleared up in favor of “Has a super-rare and powerful alien symbiote”, Chuuta is officially made the newest member of elDLIVE.
Before getting into what we do with this, a word on Dolugh. Dolugh is… so close to working. His excessively cute design matches his kind, supportive personality (most of the time), but the show falters a little on how Dolugh works. When Dolugh pops out, Chuuta is able to physically interact with him, and even discovers that they have something of a damage link, where he feels what Dolugh feels. On the other hand, Dolugh doesn’t seem to actually have physical existence. His neck/tail just sort of fades into whatever Chuuta is wearing at about the chest level, so that with his head up he looks like a really weird Dilbert necktie most of the time. So obviously he’s not colliding with normal matter, and Chuuta does not have a flesh protrusion from his upper midsection.
Others still don’t seem to be able to hear Dolugh normally, though it’s less clear whether or not they can see him… except the ones that can see, hear, and even touch him, so it’s clearly not just a “host is special” sort of thing. Obviously something in the space science side of things can detect Dolugh, since when he first pops out they realize they’re dealing with a Monitalien, but why couldn’t they figure that out before? Further, Dolugh’s manifestation is based on Chuuta’s ability to believe in himself and their bond, which is tested repeatedly throughout the show. In fact, it’s tested way, way too many times, with almost every encounter with some sort of hostility including a moment where Chuuta’s will falters and Dolugh turns all transparent like he’s fading away. The mechanics of this are also very unclear, it’s pretty much just used as a lame barometer for how much our main character is feeling like he should tap out despite having kickass powers and lots on the line in most of these interactions. Granted, a couple of the moments do feel legitimate, but more feel like we’re forced to just accept the lameness.
Those mysteries aside, we don’t really get much in the way of information on Monitaliens. We know they’re rare and special, and highly desirable because of their great power and the fact that the precursors responsible for them aren’t exactly around to make any more. Beyond that, all the space people seem to recognize one and know things, but they’re not exactly sharing, probably because the writers didn’t want to have to set facts in stone.
All in all, while Dolugh isn’t an annoying character, he is something of an annoying plot device, a way to put some extra and direct stakes on our main character not running away from everything as he is so inclined to do (again, at least Shinji fought that impulse on his own), and occasionally to serve as a topic of interest, similar to Yuji Sakai’s Midnight’s Lost Child in that the villains want it and think they can have it, in a way that would probably kill our lead.
So, back to plot. Sonokata, as one of Chuuta’s new direct coworkers (the other, Chips, being a small blue blobby tripod creature who gets drunk off machta. This is one of the cute ones.) gives him the tour of the ship. In the detention cell they discuss space law, and how it’s based on rehabilitation and even something like the pig monster could get a second chance, though Sonokata doesn’t seem too thrilled by this. While the line seems to hint that there’s some bigger reason she may not believe in the back end of the justice system, we’re never let in on any personal reason she may have to be sour regarding rehabilitation, so I must conclude it’s just that she’s a bitch.
A different killer alien escapes containment and teleports down to Earth (elDLIVE’s base being a ship), and Sonokata and Chuuta give chase. They corner it in a park, where Chuuta manages to dive in and save an old lady from getting axed by the monster, and Sonokata works to arrest it. Which is to say, she tells it once to come quietly and then, when it doesn’t, takes her true battle form as an angel-like being (that is, angel-like in that she’s a pretty girl in a white leotard with white wings, not like an Evangelion angel or anything else cool and different), and conjures spinning purple halos of light that ensure the escaped criminal “disappears without leaving a trace” as she’d say, assuming you don’t count the massive amounts of green blood spattered on the scene, Chuuta included, as a trace of the offender reduced to chunky salsa by Sonokata.
You know, in Psycho-Pass, the Enforcers can get away with this sort of thing both because it’s explicitly their orders and because we’re supposed to believe that the society is, in some ways, profoundly messed up. Here, you just got done explaining that intergalactic society is actually rather nice and that it believes in rehabilitation even for the worst, so even if a cop can get away with responding to a lethal threat with lethal force (fair), I don’t think one should be so cavalier or casual about running suspects through the blender. Sonokata is a bitch.
In any case, after that little harsh first proper day on the job, we get what at first seems like a fairly irrelevant case. It begins with Chuuta actually feeling better about himself and trying to stop a shoplifter, only to accidentally hurt his aunt and then angst even harder. After that incident he finds out that the shoplifter is an alien, and participates in attempting to bring the suspect in.
During this we get an explanation for the space magic in the setting, usually called SPH. You should be sitting down for this, because I think they workshopped the idea to find the absolute dumbest “scientific excuse” for Space Magic that they possibly could. So, why do various aliens have their powers, like Sonokata being able to summon purple buzz saw halos of light, or other aliens being able to change their form, perform astounding physical feats, teleport across the vacuum of space, or so on? It’s smell.
I am not making this up. This is not my April Fools review. SPH stands for “Space Pheromones”, and all those weird magic-like alien powers are supposedly scents secreted by their users. Most earthlings can’t sense SPH, at least not with the good old nose, but this is the story and they’re sticking to it. While there are broad types of Space Pheromones that do the same thing, an individual’s scent is also unique, similar to a fingerprint, and that allows scanning systems to pick something up and identify and pinpoint individuals, including, say, tracking a criminal once their SPH has been identified.
So, a smell can spiral-slice a giant murderous crab-spider monster, be detected across the vacuum of space, invoke teleportation, and so on and so forth. This is so moronic, so patently insane to all sensibilities that I think it’s tampering with dumb the likes of which have seldom been touched by human media. And yet, despite that, an excuse that wants me to howl about how astoundingly not even remotely plausible it is, there are ways in which I am forced to concede that they kind of use it well.
In as much as SPH is used throughout elDLIVE, this gives me an opportunity to talk about a topic that I think is quite important when considering fantasy and science fiction, and that is the relationship between realism, verisimilitude, and consistency.
Realism is, of course, how well things conform to the real world as we know it. However, the speculative fiction genres are inherently unrealistic. Giant humanoid robots don’t work. Legged combat vehicles aren’t swift or practical. Magic isn’t real. No known process can enable travel or even information transfer beyond the speed of light. Dragons couldn’t fly. These aren’t realistic things. But we take them for granted in many science fiction and fantasy settings and can even treat some of these flagrant breaches of sense, logic, and physical law as “realistic” while others are not.
The difference between them is verisimilitude. Instead of how real something is, verisimilitude could perhaps be best described as how real something feels, and that can draw from both its intrinsic traits and the storytelling skill with which those traits are presented. We know there’s no such thing as magic, but we treat a deeply analyzed magic wrapped in scientific language as being more real, and accept it more fully, than magic that just sort of does its thing. Edward Elric’s transmutations feel more real (that is, they have more verisimilitude) than Shiro Emiya’s Unlimited Blade Works which itself feels more like something that could actually exist than Megumin’s Explosion spell. Neither Juggernauts nor Gunmen could really exist and operate the way they do on screen in our world, but we sort of accept pretending like the Juggernauts could. The BETA are no more real or plausible than the elDLIVE member who is a crescent moon face with two big beefy arms that he can apparently disappear at will, but despite having literally no frame of reference for actual aliens, one feels worlds more like a “real alien” than the other.
But all the examples I’ve given so far, and SPH for that matter, we accept on some level, at least when we’re engaged with the story they’re a part of. This is because the most important factor, in the end, for whether or not an audience will accept your speculative fiction mumbo jumbo isn’t even verisimilitude, it’s plain old consistency. When you’re creating a setting that, whether technically set on “Earth as we know it” or not, leaves actual realism behind, you have an obligation to set the new rules and a lot of freedom with how you do so. If you tell us that unicorns can breathe and fly in space and shoot lasers from their horns, despite the initial “train of thought screeches to a halt” moment when these facts are first announced, the audience can and will ultimately accept it as long as everything we’re told and shown continues to align with that version of reality, and with it we’ll ultimately accept all the space-flying laser-shooting no-helmet Unicorn action. It’s when your unicorn villain Glitterhoof the Despoiler, Scourge of Antares, is defeated by shooting him out the airlock of his flagship with no comment to the commonly accepted unicorn traits of breathing and flying in space that people will outright call bull, because that’s when you’ve gone and screwed up your consistency.
In that regard, SPH is bloody insane, with what little verisimilitude it has scraped together from storytelling and presentation alone since the concept itself is so deep in the red I think it might be radio frequency… but it’s also applied in a damnably consistent manner. All SPH manifestations are sourced from living things, every being seems to have at most one natural SPH, which has a traceable quality that’s fingerprint-unique to the user, and individuals with the Alien ability to sense SPH via olfactory senses react to trace SPH (rather than SPH in the source of energy blasts, which is a bigger issue) like you would react to a scent. Things come in that modify the situation, like sensor jamming to keep those fingerprints from being detected, but the basic rules and concept hold fast.
So, that madness addressed, back to the show.
In keeping with the aliens in this being creative, but sometimes childishly weird, the shoplifter is, in its true form and not the dark trenchcoat that shoplifted, a pint-sized little blob of gum driving what amounts to a Tonka truck filled with its smuggled cargo. When cornered, it jumps onto Sonokata’s face and tries to suffocate her, which is awkwardly neither played entirely seriously nor played exactly for laughs. To compare this to Men In Black once again, in that movie you have some of the early scenes that, while the movie overall didn’t have a “Stand-up comedy” tone, skewed funny, like Will Smith’s character trying to deliver an alien baby and getting utterly manhandled in the background. If they’d gone a little bigger with the humor of the bitch angel girl having her face covered with a blob of gum that has its own face and is talking itself up, and less on the imminent suffocation, this could have worked as a very funny bit. It’s not even Sonokata’s side that doesn’t work. She’s fairly nasty, so seeing her in pain is its own reward, but our main character is such a nervous wreck that he can’t deliver the other side of the comedy, and instead tries to make the situation more serious because, well, everything is super serious and emotionally damaging to him.
Eventually Chuuta thinks up Sympathy power #2 (#3 if you count “generic force blast”) and freezes the gum so it can be unstuck from his cop partner’s face. Before they can bring the gum blob in, though, it turns out that it has bosses of the “You have failed me” variety, and a space magic bomb in its body goes off, obliterating it and scorching the sigil of its masters onto the ground. This introduces the real arc antagonists of the show, the interstellar crime syndicate, Demille. We’re told that they’ve got a lot of forces and a bad habit of burning worlds to ash, so their operations being present on Earth is a poor omen.
The next episode starts with a flashback to Chuuta’s traumatic past. We see him hang out with three of his friends, lead them to do a little light hiking, and then be faced with trouble when some of the mountainside starts to crumble. He makes a false step due to misinterpreting Dolugh’s warning about some of the rocks, and the lower ledge his friends were barely clinging to goes out entirely, and they fall to their presumed death (though no bodies were ever found).
To be fair, that is a hellishly traumatic experience for a little kid (we’re not told exactly how old, but it looks like they’re in grade school) to go through, especially when we see in a flashback to later that the mother of one of his friends angrily blamed him for being the only one to return. Plus, Chuuta is only in middle school, and the avoidant behaviors he adopted immediately after in response to feeling like he’d break anything he touched have probably contributed to his lack of healing, especially when it’s commented on several times that after finding purpose and friendship in elDLIVE (of a sort. I wouldn’t count Sonokata for reasons of bitch, but most of the other elDLIVE crew are pretty nice to him), he’s been rapidly improving. As annoying as Chuuta is, he at least feels more like a real kid dealing with real grief than, say, the characters in AnoHana. That doesn’t forgive him constantly faltering even when he should have learned his important lesson about friendship several times, or being a pain to watch, but I’ll give the show a couple points for actually thinking out the why of their wimpy kid.
As one might surmise, though, starting an episode with a detailed flashback, along with the fact that the bodies were never found, means that this incident is going to come back into the limelight, and with the re-emergence of one of the significant players. This begins, distantly enough, with the arrival of mysterious transfer students, and something causing Sonokata and Dolugh to faint at assembly. While none of the elDLIVE tech detected the SPH used, it’s clear that it was sleep-inducing SPH at play, because only the individuals able to directly scent it were hit, so elDLIVE’s doctor makes them some sleep-resist candies to take if they run into the malefactors. The transfer students are of course suspected, but there’s no clear motive and no direct ability to identify them. The ones from the assembly don’t come to school the next day, but yet another new transfer student does, and he’s the spitting (aged up) image of one of Chuuta’s old friends. He goes by a different name and doesn’t seem to know Chuuta, but he has the same look, same mannerisms, and ultimately Chuuta follows him on a little after-school trip with the destination cited as one of the old friend’s former addresses.
They stop at a somewhat out-of-the-way shrine where Chuuta had once spent time with his friends on the way, and there the Transfer student reveals that he is, indeed, Chuuta’s old friend… and that Demille salvaged him from death at the bottom of the cliff and has sent him to take Dolugh from Chuuta, and that he blames Chuuta for what happened. This, naturally if frustratingly, causes Chuuta to have quite the breakdown.
While this is going on, Sonokata ends up confronting the Demille thugs with the sleep SPH and getting put to sleep (though we see her cover her mouth before fainting, so no prize for guessing she actually did pop the sleep resist candy), and thus she gets brought to the scene as a hostage as well.
Eventually, Chuuta finds the will to say no to getting Dolugh extracted with a giant sword, and Sonokata takes that as her signal to drop the ruse and immediately bisect both her captors. Again, I think it might have been appropriate for her to make a token effort to bring them in for questioning, but we know Demille bombs their grunts against capture, so it might be a bit of an academic difference whether she slaughtered them or not. She has a much harder time with Chuuta’s old friend though, and he starts to lose confidence as he watches Sonokata fought to a standstill, and then slowly losing. Eventually, his desire to not see her hurt means that while certainly having a psychological episode, he at least had the focus to let Dolugh shoot off an energy blast.
This blast impales his old friend, which said friend is oddly calm about. Not only does he seem to be not bleeding out too much, but he reveals that the shot knocked out the bomb/tracking implant combo pack, allowing them to speak freely, at least for a couple minutes while Sonokata is still out of it. He quickly reveals that while Demille saved his life and recruited them, he owes them no particular loyalty, and wants to use his connection with them, and Chuuta to use his own new connections in elDLIVE, in order to find the other two friends who should have died but almost certainly didn’t. He also points out that Chuuta’s actions had nothing really to do with the lower ledge falling except by perhaps seconds, meaning that Chuuta was essentially blameless in that final moment of the accident.
With that new plot hook and secret to keep, we move onto a fresh plot as a high-ranking inspector (Alien type: purple skinned pointy-eared vampire sort of thing with a Snidely Whiplash mustache) arrives to put Sonokata under arrest. She’s not being taken in for a zillion counts of excessive force, though, but for aiding and abetting in the escape of the killer crab monster alien from Episode 2, with some fairly convincing security footage showing her breaking the containment. Still, Space Vampire Snidely Whiplash does things by the book, and has her held in isolation and interrogated, and everyone else in the local elDLIVE interrogated as well, mostly by his fairly intimidating assistant (alien type: big ogre-ish humanoid with elephant-like hide, a stout body, three burning red eyes on stout forward-facing stalks and a maw of razor sharp teeth.) Even Dolugh seems to think she’s guilty, though Chuuta dearly doesn’t want to believe and can’t answer why even though it’s blindingly clear he apparently has a thing for her. I’m not sure why, since she’s a bitch, but I guess she is the only decent-looking human-like female in his age bracket at this point.
Things take a turn for the worse when Sonokata, in containment, passes out and hits medical emergency, and it seems the local chief knows some things about why this is and how life-threatening it might be if she doesn’t get her proper medication.
While this is going on, the chief also assigns Chuuta to recover a scientist called Doctor Love (properly Taklamalkan Strange Love, who oddly enough isn’t wheelchair-bound despite the obvious reference), whose body doubles have been murdered by unknown forces. These matters turn out to be connected, as Doctor Love once ran an experiment to artificially graft SPH-production into other individuals, of which Sonokata is one of the few survivors. Her body giving out without medication is a permanent side-effect of the experiment, and Doctor Love could also confirm that the necessary medication could put her into what I gather to be a sleepwalking-like state, excusing her apparent release of a prisoner. Sonokata doesn’t know any of this because her memories of what she suffered during the experiment are repressed, but the high-ups know more or less about said top-secret kid-killing unethical experiment, and that means that only Doctor Love can clear Sonokata’s name.
So, Chuuta is off to rescue a guy who sounds like the space version of Gensei Kihara, which is fine and good, but he’s not expected to go alone in this. Instead, he’s teamed up with the two other girls we saw briefly in the opening of episode one, Veronica Borowczyk (A feisty and super-competitive redhead who prides herself on being the scion of an ancient race with super-powerful kicking. So… space Fanalis?) and Nina “Ninotchka” Mikhailovna Pavlova (An extremely sweet and slightly shy girl who, in terms of SPH abilities, is an absurd powerhouse who can throw around spiraling force-spikes and shields. She can also see, hear, and even touch Dolugh.), who are also friends, provided you accept rivals as a sort of friends, with Sonokata.
The team arrives at a particular restaurant to rendezvous with Doctor Love, but the terrorist who’s been looking for him and bumping off body doubles is already there, and has the patrons and staff mind controlled to provide innocent people fighting against elDLIVE. Eventually, with the level of hostages and a threat to blow the whole thing sky high, they cave and tell him that Love is supposed to be in a bunker under the building, which leads to the terrorist blowing the building sky high and Ninotchka saving everyone with her awesome powers.
The crater that remains reveals the bunker, but inside is a surprise: the aged Doctor Love appears to be already dead, layed out on an operating table with his body burst open, while a strange blue-haired teen with strange mannerisms, dressed in scrubs and spattered with blood, is already in the bunker. This distresses the terrorist, who can’t find “the key to the treasure” without Love’s knowledge. While he’s flailing for what to do with this, the kid triggers some machinery to seize the terrorist, disable him, and blast him with a laser.
The team goes in to arrest the unresisting weird kid when the truth is revealed – the terrorist isn’t dead, he’s just been freed of the mind control SPH that was being used to have him as a pawn on the field. Further, Doctor Love isn’t dead either – he just shed his old skin, and is in fact the weird boy now, fresh and rejuvinated. I actually love this because I was able to guess it from the shot of the body, but also wasn’t certain in my guess since it wasn’t completely obvious. And, again, it’s nice that they’re letting even aliens who look just like humans, such as Love, be legitimately weird and alien.
They’re not out of the woods though, as it turns out that Ninotchka was seeded with mind control as well, which is revealed when she carves a huge hole through Veronica’s torso. Doctor Love isn’t inclined to go quietly with her, though, and despite Veronica, on death’s door, telling him to run (and despite another long and draggy attack of nerves before reaching this point), Chuuta decides to fight back to save the real Ninotchka, Veronica, Love, and Sonokata up in space.
This goes very badly for him. Ninotchka, as I mentioned, is extremely powerful, and Chuuta’s current lame skills with Sympathy seem to at most tread water and evade her attacks.
It’s also worth noting at this juncture, as another very strange feather in this show’s cap, that Ninotchka (like Sonokata) has a minor transformation into full combat mode. In her case, her hair does color change things and, like Sonokata ends up in a white leotard, Ninotchka also manifests a “combat suit”. Hers is also beyond fanservicey, consisting of black and green pasties over her nipples and crotch, and Ninotchka is quite embarrassed to be seen in it when she’s herself. The mind controller piloting her body, of course, has no such compunctions, and she spends the better part of two episodes very nearly naked while doing her badass fighting.
Mixing fanservice, especially heavy and blatant fanservice, with serious action is something that’s more trouble than it seems like it should be. Nonsense of that sort went a long way towards killing Omamori Himari and moments of fanservice that take you out of otherwise serious struggles are rarely good-feeling comic relief rather than jarring and distracting. I’ve often said that there’s a problem where you can’t really enjoy the fanservice if someone is in pain or mortal danger… but that doesn’t apply here. Ninotchka’s stupid outfit does its job of being revealing, looking good in the grand scheme of things, and not utterly ruining the action. Why?
Part of it is that Ninotchka, for this bit, is our villain… and we sort of give leeway for villains to blend “sexy” and “dangerous” in a way that leads to them looking good on the field of battle. This doesn’t just apply for female villains either, though it is probably more pronounced among them given the femme fatale type. Because she’s the villain, she also spends the vast majority of the fight where she’s showing off with the upper hand, so there’s not the same pang of “Can’t enjoy this she’s suffering” that happens in, say, Omanori Himari when everybody is on the ground in agony with vast clothing damage.
Another part of it is the framing. The action sequence with Puppet Ninotchka is shot like any other action sequence. Her mere existence is fanservice enough, and we aren’t treated to a lot of awkward shots to fit more of her and her goods in frame. If anything, the style tends to draw attention away from her body, focusing more on her energy attacks and all the destruction she’s causing or would cause if she actually hit, or fairly normal close-up shots of her face when she’s talking. It’s bizarre that in a show that is otherwise seemingly obsessed with showing us constant new brands of ugly I would be saying this, but in a case of “Keep it simple, stupid” the fanservice here works because we are served well enough by having something good looking to look at.
Third and finally, her design is actually really good. Let’s ignore for a moment that the clothing component of her design is markedly more revealing than a bikini and just look at the technical and artistic aspects. She’s drawn with several very sharp expressions, as well as harsh red eyes (due to the mind control) framed by her extremely long, black hair. When we cut to a close-up, she really looks the part of a diabolical, threatening villain. Oddly enough, this still works with wider shots as well. Because her hair (which fades from black to green, with purple highlights) is so big, it fans out behind her. Like the traditional villain cape, this gives her a much bigger and more domineering profile, which means that the usual impression isn’t of “nearly naked girl” but “something big and threatening”, especially since she’s usually throwing around huge spiraling green blasts of destructive energy. The color design works as well. Pink/purple and green are properly contrasting colors, but despite the fact that they’re a pair that should generally look good together, and in some ways does, it’s a pair that people also find very unnatural and off-putting. The black and green overall pattern, as is the primary division in her hair and is reflected in the color scheme of her modesty bits (which are black with angular green lines) also has a very unnatural and slightly threatening feel. It recalls technology, circuit boards, and with bright toxic green and pitch black also resembles traditionally threatening warning colors, like the yellow and black bands of a wasp. Finally, while anything that could count as clothing if you’re being generous is very minimal, her skin is also marked with tattoo-like markings in ashen gray, which take the form of these angular and vaguely motherboard-ish designs that match up with her “combat suit” little bits. Taken as a whole, there’s a structure and consistency to her design that really works and signals something other than plain and undifferentiated fanservice.
I’ve said before and will say here again that this show likes to show you ugly things… but the subtle skill with which Ninotchka’s design, that probably shouldn’t have worked, is executed, along with the also frequently mentioned wild creativity of those other designs, leads me to believe that the ugliness in elDLIVE is intentional. Someone who was good at what they were doing made the choice to show you something that you probably would not like to see, which means when they turn that same skill towards the creation of something that is conventionally attractive, it does pay off. To a degree, at least – so add this to the growing pile of ways in which elDLIVE almost works, or could work if it didn’t also dig such a deep hole to start out with.
In any case, the battle with Puppet Ninotchka goes pretty poorly, then calamitously poorly when Chuuta and Dolugh lose a classic anime beam battle with her, resulting in Dolugh being almost directly hit and half his head being annihilated, which due to the transfer of damage between a Monitalien and its host, means that half of Chuuta’s face is covered in agonizing black-and-red-crackling burn. Dolugh is not quite dead (of course, or Chuuta would be dead) and they have a mindscape heart to heart while blacked out by incredible pain, in which Dolugh ultimately says that he trusts Chuuta and wants to stay with him.
What happens next is helpfully narrated by Doctor Love so that we can know what the hell is going on. Dolugh regenerates and changes into a slightly different carbuncle stalk thing, which is apparently a pokemon-style “evolution” called an Update that a Monitalien performs on autopilot when its coded instincts sense that its host is dying and it will have to fight another one. It develops new abilities in preparation for untethering, so that it can subdue the strongest creature in the area to bond with, given the condition of swapping. This means Dolugh, acting in a weird robotic manner, fixates on Puppet Ninotchka and actually starts to get the better of her all alone. Of course, if this is allowed to play out, Chuuta will die, and fortunately he comes to enough to see what’s going on, and though he might not realize how much his life is on the line, he sees his friends still even trouble and even Puppet Ninotchka (who is still a friend, even if her will is absent) getting hurt. This galvanizes him to, despite being in so much pain he can’t speak, seize Dolugh and turn him around to come face to face, right as Dolugh was preparing to energy blast Puppet Ninotchka into submission. This lets Dolugh’s proper ego perform Sympathy and re-bond to its old host, Chuuta. This regenerates Chuuta (I guess because he was hurt by transferred damage and Dolugh is now uninjured) and, unlike a proper transfer, causes Dolugh to permanently keep his evolution, which according to Doctor Love is called an Update.
Chuuta plus Updated Dolugh has a very different round 2 than round 1 against Puppet Ninotchka. They’re radically faster, with tricks like flight and flash-stepping, and Chuuta even squeezes out his last drop of creativity to come up with his third and final special Sympathy attack, slicing Ninotchka’s attacks crosswise because… they kind of remind him of green onions in appearance? Whatever, it lets him disperse the shots and cuff her good. The mind controller makes some threats, but while monologuing about Updates, Love applied first aid to Veronica and rebuilt his “SPH be gone” laser to blast Ninotchka with, freeing her from the true mastermind’s control.
After this, Love lets drop some facts about the mind control SPH: seeding it is extremely short range and requires intent focus, and Ninotchka was only infected at most a couple hours ago. This pretty much narrows the suspect list down to that investigator that Space Vampire Snidely Whiplash had interrogating everyone on the ship.
Thus, the last movement of the arc involves going back to the ship, where a sizable number of crew have been mind controlled and are now wreaking havoc. Love notes that the mind control SPH is effective on a small enough percentage of those exposed that there’s no way the controlled can actually take the ship, so everybody intuits that there’s another goal. Sure enough, the mastermind kills the vampire, steals his authority, and tries to grab the unconscious Sonokata from the brig and make off with her, since apparently this has all been done because her repressed memories hold the key to something incredible. Eventually he’s forced to drop Sonokata and accidentally spaces himself out an airlock because the escape pod hadn’t been put back after a prior space battle, and with Love aboard and the real evil deceased, all seems to be well that ends well for the arc.
For your information, all the stuff about Sonokata’s memories and whatever this guy was after? It never comes up again. This arc was a massive (for this show) three episodes on its own, and possibly the best sequence in elDLIVE (and not just because we had Veronica and Ninotchka rather than Sonokata, though that helped), but it’s largely pointless. We even find out that apparently Love could fix Sonokata’s body permanently and restore her memories, but MOTHERS has vetoed the idea (which is also the only time after Chuuta’s recruitment that MOTHERS really comes into play), so there’s a degree to which her whole “condition” is staggeringly pointless.
What follows are two episodes of mostly filler (One where the gang goes bowling, and a second where elDLIVE is trying to find an alien on a spree of very minor crimes, with the problem that said alien’s government gives all members of its species headed to Earth the exact same face and disguise) that, together, deal with what seems like a minor issue: Chuuta’s SPH has changed somewhat after Dolugh’s update, and Sonokata finds herself unbelievably disgusted by the smell.
In the episodes themselves there are only a couple notes worth mentioning. While looking for an arsonist (later revealed to be the same-face guy), Sonokata and Chuuta both try to question the patrons of an alien-only bar. Sonokata gets nowhere with the hostile approach, and ups it to arrest or even death threats out of annoyance with Chuuta getting everywhere just being nice. What a bitch. At another point, they’re confronted by an Earth cop looking into the arson, and to dodge suspicion, Sonokata pretends to be Chuuta’s girlfriend, which of course sends him into an overstimulated breakdown when she hugs his arm. And the resolution of the deal is that the offender had his space passport stolen, and without it or SPH capability (since his species, like earthlings, is normally incapable) he was just doing things to catch the attention of elDLIVE.
As far as the stink arc, there are some interesting differences. Though Sonokata first tells Chuuta to his face that he stinks, in her typical bitch way, she quickly backs off when she realizes she may have actually hurt his feelings, and takes to wearing a nose clip that she lies and says is a purely decorative accessory. She’s still standoffish, but she is legitimately trying to be less of a bitch. The doctors later give her a hair ornament that provides an SPH veil to block out the scent, which is a lot easier for her to excuse as not being a nose plug. At the end of the minor crimes episode, though, they reveal that it didn’t last very long, and that the bad smell was a psychosomatic response from Sonokata.
Their reasoning is that Chuuta kind of saved the day and leveled up while she was out of commission, so at least on a subconscious level she must have been feeling threatened or left behind. The attempt to catch the arsonist, despite some competence on his part, proved he could still screw up, and combined with the magic feather of the hair decoration, meant that Sonokata could handle the ‘smell’ she percieved.
She takes this rather badly, but not in the way you would respect. Rather, realizing that a part of her wanted someone who was supposed to be her partner in work to fail, and couldn’t handle his improvement, causes her to declare herself the worst and realize and become conscious of how much of a bitch she’s been. Thus, with a hefty dose of guilt, another of self-loathing, and some insecurities on the side, she finds herself having a hard time but wanting to relate to Chuuta better.
If she hadn’t actually just been the worst, this could have salvaged a lot of her character. Her initial hostility to Chuuta was fairly natural, seeing as he was a blithering spineless incompetent, so if that was the foundation for her troubles accepting him and we had literally any reason to believe that she was a decent person most of the time rather than just an angel-faced Dalek, it would be interesting to see her grapple with the darker sides of herself. This also would have made the start of her arrest arc play better, since we would understand why Chuuta might want to believe in her other than just being horny for what was at that point the one and only attractive girl in the show. As it is, it just comes off as being about damn time.
There’s also a big problem in that, while it is nice in abstract to improve Sonokata from “total bitch” to “bitchy tsundere”, we take two whole episodes of filler to do it, when we’ve got two main plots both on hold – Demille and the missing kids on one side, and Sonokata’s sealed memories leading to something on the other. I’m just going to take a wild guess and say that elDLIVE was likely adapted from a significantly longer source material and couldn’t have gotten a real conclusion even if it had two extra episodes, but it’s still baffling to keep them and do so here.
At least we get a bigger plot for our final pair of episodes. It starts with Chuuta being reassigned, temporarily, to an understaffed elDLIVE team led by one of the chief’s friends. This friend is both a badass, helping Chuuta take down a Demille-aligned werewolf alien and even disabling said werewolf’s implanted bomb so that he can live to atone for his crimes, and amazingly personal, acting as a near-perfect senpai and big brother figure for Chuuta.
If you have any plot sense at all, you know this can’t last, and that he’ll be dead or evil by the end of the arc, but we spend most of an episode on what looks like more filler getting to know him because the show thinks it can still fool you (or because the beats, while utterly predictable, are still necessary for the plot, but I like making fun of this one.)
While Chuuta is away, we also see Sonokata grapple with her situation, as she finds herself lonely as well as guilty, but doesn’t know how to bridge the gap between them or how she’ll get a chance. Again, if she were just a little less awful to start out with, this would play really well, but as it is it’s a good attempt at a save that just can’t be made, at least not in the time we’ve got left. I’d still happily leave her behind bars and take Veronica and Ninotchka (who have remained and transferred into school with the other leads, but haven’t gotten much screen time) instead. The chief throws her a bone, giving her something important to pass to Chuuta, but she doesn’t get to see him before plot goes down.
Speaking of plot going down, Chuuta receives a strange e-mail to his badge implicating elDLIVE in the disappearance of his friends from the mountainside all those years ago. When he plugs into the ship computer to check who the sender might have been, a virus hijacks the elDLIVE ship and messes it up good, and a Demille flagship appears to demand Chuuta and Dolugh be handed over. Demille ships also come out of cloaking all over Earth, and threaten to reduce the whole planet to ash if their demands aren’t met.
What pass for negotiations get a brief reprieve, during which time the team beams down to Earth, with the goal of hiding Chuuta away so Demille doesn’t get what it wants, and essentially holding him and Dolugh hostage to protect the Earth. Planetside, Chuuta has his most epic pity party yet. Not that some grief and guilt isn’t deserved, but we’ve seen this out of him way too many times. He loses his nerve, Dolugh fades (totally vanishing into inactivity this time), and eventually he’s going to get something of a spine back to rally for the win. Could we please have him remember some of the important lessons about believing in himself rather than retreading them every blasted time? I’d totally accept him wanting to just surrender in order to spare the worst if this wasn’t always his problem.
In any case, Sonokata catches up to him just before the new guy does, and gives her best friendship speech. It’s still very much her speech in tone, but it is actually kind of heartfelt and friendly. She also hands over that thing she was given for him, which turns out to be the case files on the accident that cost him his friends, which elDLIVE investigated and the chief pulled the records of once he realized Chuuta had been involved, proving that they didn’t actually mean to keep anything from him.
This leads our group back to the alien-only cafe where it’s time for the new guy’s sudden but inevitable betrayal. He puts quite a few holes in Sonokata, because abdominal wounds in this show are like a skinned knee, after which Chuuta still does the denial phase like his crush is not on the ground bleeding. He tries to intimidate Chuuta into surrendering, but the cafe patrons stand up for him even when threatened with violence, since many of them hold old and deep grudges towards Demille and are itching for the chance to take a swing at the crooks. Ultimately he leaves, in large part because Dolugh is MIA and he’d be in trouble if he returned with a powerless Chuuta.
This surprises the chief and other elDLIVE members, since the traitor had a long and clean record, but Doctor Love helpfully points out that a sleeper agent would have a clean record, and that sometimes infiltration missions are even passed down through generations of family. A plan, though, is drawn up to fight back against Demille, and since we don’t have much time left it’s quickly enacted. Team elDLIVE rams and boards the Demille flagship, while the lesser ships all over Earth are taken care of by teams of alien volunteers like the bar patrons, who the transporter guy beams in to seize the ships rather quickly.
In the Demille ship, Sonokata and Chuuta end up facing off against the traitor again, which gets Sonokata perforated once more before Chuuta finally manages enough believing in himself to bring Dolugh back and beat the bad guy. He even saves the traitor from certain death in the vacuum of space (having blasted away an outer wall of the ship with the finishing blow), throwing back the guy’s words to the werewolf about living to atone for his crimes. With that, Demille is down their elDLIVE plant, a member of the gang’s ruling family who was leading the assault, and a fairly substantial war fleet, so we won’t be hearing too much from them for a while unless it’s the brief cut to Chuuta’s old friend and his little splinter ship of Demille mooks. Thus, we all go bowling, Sonokata still doesn’t know how to compliment Chuuta without coming off as a bitch, and the show ends.
I’m not going to lie, elDLIVE is a bad one. The show is mostly not nice to look at and not fun to watch. The visuals are ugly, the characters are annoying, and the plot ultimately goes nowhere. It tries to tap into the same comedy of weirdness that Men in Black did, and at times its creative alien designs are successful, but even then it’s still missing something. Specifically, it’s missing the wonder and pathos that complemented the mania in Men in Black and really made that setting work. For all the zany jokes, you still did get a nice sense of the vastness of it all, and the experience of an initially unknowing human being brought into a radically broader and stranger universe. Without that, elDLIVE’s aliens might be delightfully bizarre, but they’re not going to hit the spot the same way. It’s more comparable to Men in Black than DearS really was to District 9, but it still doesn’t hold up on that front.
That said, the original Men in Black was pretty darn good, so it’s not entirely fair to use as a metric. I don’t think I need to use it, though, to say that elDLIVE has a lot of problems. Two of the biggest are named Chuuta and Sonokata, and that’s never a good place to start from. And while I highlighted a few jokes that work, a lot of the comedy bombs pretty hard as well, like a running gag where Chuuta freaks out imagining Doctor Love being pervy with Sonokata that was just miserable and unnecessary. And, of course, the weird as hell transitions and cuts are worth calling out again as a big mistake that makes the show hard to watch.
There is a lot of skill showed throughout the run of elDLIVE. I tried to call it out and give credit where it was do throughout the body of the review, but don’t let that fool you into thinking that the final product is skillful. There’s too much bad material that the skill can’t really show through. I don’t know if it’s bad creators working with good ingredients or good creators working with bad ingredients or (most likely in my mind) skilled people not checking at any point to make sure they were applying their skills well, but the entire experience is pretty much a drag.
As a whole, elDLIVE is a D affair. But unlike a lot of D-grade shows, I won’t exactly say that there’s no reason to ever watch it. The skillful moments and general insanity add together to make it, in my mind, a decent pick for a “So bad it’s good” sort of experience. If you go into this expecting to mock it the whole way, and especially if you do so with some funny friends, you might have something actually approaching a good time. Every once in a while it will reward you with a legitimate laugh or passably cool scene, and the rest of the time you can supply your own at the show’s expense. There is, however, no sufficient reason to watch elDLIVE unironically. If you’re looking for a good media experience, look elsewhere.