As it happens there was a lull in the fall schedule (for me) today, so that made it pretty much a now-or-never evening to catch up on the three-episode Babylon premiere.  Ideally of course you’d want that to get you to where you could make a final decision about a show, but I’m not quite there yet.  In fact if anything I’m probably more conflicted about it than I was after the first episode, which does not indicate movement in a positive direction.

I won’t beat around the bush where the problem is concerned.  I don’t use the word “pretentious” that often with anime, in the first place because there aren’t all that many aspirational enough to even merit it.  And in the second, once the label fits it’s not a show I’m covering most of the time anyway.  But it definitely fits Babylon, and given that we’re dealing with the writer of Kado and the director of FLCL Alternative and Psycho Pass 2 it’s not that surprising.  Those latter two were sequels to series whose originals were genuinely artistic without having to be pretentious – their creators had the chops.  Not the sequels.

When you have anime trying to be artistic and not really being able to pull it off, that’s a recipe for real problems.  I get the sense that Suzuki Kiyotaka is going for edgy and avant-garde with all his quick cuts and composite shots and weird scene framing, but it just comes off as, frankly, poser stuff.  Unintentionally funny.  It wasn’t so much a problem in the first episode, partly because one could focus on the introduction of the premise (which is interesting) and partly because there was less of it.  But it’s all over the next two.  And Nozaki Mado is, based on track record, a guy who can come up with interesting concepts he has no idea how to bring to fruition.  Jury’s out on that one but there was already a bit of drift happening here.

There are elements of this I like, no question.  It’s a show about adults dealing with adult problems.  It seems somewhat willing to take potshots at the corruption rampant in the Japan electoral system and especially the LDP, which has traditionally been a third rail in “the nail that sticks up gets hammered down” Japan.  And the idea of this sort of neo-Tokyo being set up as a kind of ethics Wild West, where everyone gets to do all the shit the pesky regulators annoy them about in the real world, is fascinating.

Whether that – especially in these hands – is enough to get Babylon off the ground and keep it airborne is very much an open question.  The whole plot surrounding Magase Ai (Yukino Satsuki) having shapeshifting abilities and being able to make people want to kill themselves with a smile is kind of discordant with the overall tone of the series.  The irony here is that Babylon would actually stand out much more in an anime environment wildly oversaturated with cop shows if it avoided sci-fi/supernatural elements, which as often as not boil down to a kind of crutch for these sorts of series.  But then, that probably wouldn’t be artistic enough.

We’ll see whether all of it – the cast, Shiniki, the suicide drug Nyux, Magase as the Whore of Babylon – comes together into any sort of compelling whole.  There’s potential here but if I were a betting man, I’d say the odds are against the likes of Suzuki and Nozaki being the ones to realize it.  That said, I’m interested enough to give it at least another episode or two to prove me wrong.