I can only say it so many ways, but Mars Red really is a fantastic series.  It’s very rare for a show to come from this far off my radar screen to this high in my esteem – sometimes sleepers become standard-bearers, and sometimes non-sleepers become keepers.  But to make the leap from one extreme to the other is probably a scenario I could count on both hands.  It’s such a criminal shame so few people seem to be paying attention, but that experience for me is a lot less rare.

The signs have been there all along, but the transition to the vampires being the heroes of Mars Red really accelerated with the Great Kanto Earthquake.  In the aftermath, Nakajima – now proved beyond all doubt to be a psychopath – is indiscriminately killing people with ASCRA disguised as an anti-“vampire disease” vaccine (apparently Japan can only speedily deliver vaccinations when it’s part of an evil scheme for world domination), presumably towards the end of cherry-picking a few more to be vampire soldiers.  As the city smolders in ruins, vampires of the mindless variety roam the streets and others desperately try and survive, unsure what’s happened to them or why.

We’ve already seen that compassion and decency are qualities that survive in some vamps, most prominently in Yamagami-san and Kurusu.  Yamagami is tragically gone (and missed) but the focus now turns to Kurusu, who naturally survived the quake and is now roaming the ruins performing random acts of kindness as he vainly searches for his comrades.  He even attempts to communicate with Nakajima’s robovamps, but they’re beyond reason or persuasion at this point.  Aoi catches a glimpse of him and vice-versa, but Kurusu slips away before it can go beyond that.  And in a heartbreakingly beautiful moment, he visits Yamahami’s widow and describes for her just what her husband meant to him.

As it turns out Kurusu wasn’t the first visitor from Code Zero that Tomiko received, and I think we can pretty much guess who that was.  So Maeda is out there somewhere, in what state we don’t know (though I would imagine if Defrott turned him, he’ll be fully rational and in control of himself).  Kurusu’s rounds eventually find him crossing paths with three child vampires being attacked by a horde of the zombie kind, and he springs to their defense.  They instinctively fear him – both the zombies and the children – but he’s able to convince the latter to join him in following Tenmanya-san, who likewise came to the scene to help.

The growing sense of tragedy as all this plays out is inescapable.  This can’t possibly end well, not for the new generation of vampire innocents Nakajima had created, nor for the vampires resisting his new army of mindless destroyers.  One appreciates someone like Tenmanya trying to be a small ray of hope in all this bleakness, but he’s swimming against a hugely powerful tide.  His head clerk finally gets a name – Ishikawa – and a voice (Matsuyama Takashi) – and he proves himself highly powerful when he and Kurusu are attacked as he’s showing the younger man the subway tunnel were Tenmanya has been leaving supplies for the vamps too far gone to be around the ones still in command of their urges and faculties.  But again, the tide seems likely to sweep men like him away.

If there is any hope remaining, it strikes me as lying with Defrott.  We can’t be sure of his intentions but it seems clear that mindless flesh-renders and vampire soldiers controlling Tokyo is not what he had in mind for his adopted home.  Maybe if he chooses to openly act, he’s powerful enough to restore some balance and peace – but there are a lot of uncertainties in that.  In any event, whatever Mars Red chooses to depict it does so with astonishing emotional grace and a real sense of style.  The aesthetics of this show are off the charts, as it continues to provide a master class in how to do more with less, production-wise.  It may be the tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it, but this series is certainly making one hell of a sound.