What makes good science fiction?

This is a question that I have been asking a lot as I watch Train To The End Of The World, streaming now on Crunchyroll.

In the near future, a young woman, Yoka, is scooped up by a famous Japanese sculpture of an owl and deposited in the middle of a huge gathering. She is clearly unwilling to be the center of so much attention, but is forced to click a giant “7G” button that will enable something something. As she hits the button, reality is scrambled and nothing on Earth is ever the same again.

In a small, provincial town west of Tokyo, Yoka’s friends are now living among wild animals who used to be the adults of the town. Shizuru, the leader of Yoka’s friends, is obsessed with finding Yoka, as they had parted on bad terms. With the help of a transformed railway employee, she enables a single train car to try to try and find her friend. With too little preparation, Shizuru and her friends Reimi, Akira and Nadekko are heading to Ikebukuro, 30 train stops away from their town and into some of the best science fiction I have encountered in anime.

In my opinion, dystopias are far too easy. We, in 2024, can understand exactly how we got to Blade Runner, Mad Max, Akira, or even Silent Mobius. But in Train To Nowhere, the dystopia makes no apparent sense. Some things work, some do not. People are changed from town to town in unpredictable ways. The unpredictability is, for me, one of the key features of this series. This isn’t just about getting somewhere attacked by persistent gangs or capitalists or even demons. There *may* be gangs, but why and how they formed will be more interesting than just hoarding gasoline or water. 

Secondly, I have decided as I watched, good science fiction ought to make me feel slightly uncomfortable. And not just “oh gosh, will /some pointless violence that probably feels very rape-y or just be rape/ happen to our female protagonists?” (Again, I think of that female character in one of The Saint novels who asked out loud, exhausted, bored and annoyed at the threats being made at her, “Why does it always have to be rape?”) No, good science fiction makes you uncomfortable because even if you understand what might happen, you may not understand what the consequences are.  In Train To Nowhere, the girls’ movement through subsequent towns may have repercussions we cannot imagine. What might happen when they arrive in Ikebukuro – what has become of Yoka? Neither we, nor her friends know or can guess.

And then, there is what readers of Okazu will undoubtedly see as either Yuri or Yuri-adjacent. Shizuru’s friendship with Yoka was close and the loss of her friend weighs heavily upon her. That loss compels her to learn how to drive a train through an unimaginably bent reality. That’s certainly a level of intimacy that I find compelling.

There is a manga adaptation of the anime that is currently on Kadokawa’s Comic Walker in Japanese (which is down, as I write this, so check back later.) It really surprises me that this an original anime first and is not adapted from a novel or LN. This is exactly the kind of science fiction I would have imagined came out of the SF genre in Japan.

Ratings:

Art – 8, especially when it comes to the newly configured landscapes
Characters – 8 A good ensemble, but I relate best to Akira, the person least likely to walk into the creepy bath
Story – 9 The episodes favor visual impact over narrative coherence, but its still very decent
Service – Mild, and ignorable
Yuri – As I see it, 6

Overall – 8

We haven’t had the time the characters have had to learn to accept this new reality – and many of the viewers are indeed responding as if they have been thrown into it. “WTF am I watching?” was a common response to Episode 1. As for me, my response was that Train To Nowhere is good science fiction, and whatever happens, I’ll be watching.

You ever watch something so familiar that you spend the whole time wondering where you’ve seen it before? ^_^ I’m not saying Metallic Rouge streaming now on Crunchyroll, is derivative, but it definitely feels like a lot of other things I have seen.

To begin with, the opening moments of the anime are so evidently by the team that brought us Carole and Tuesday that I wondered if the story was going to tie in, somehow. No…but it sure could have been and worked just fine. A single newspaper cover in common would have been fine. Instead we’re in the glitter/grungy world of planet Mars that the story treats like a single city. Have you ever noticed how often whole planets are treated as if they are one town? One culture, no other languages, food, or politics. Heck, even small cities have more than one of those. But no, “Mars” is one place.

There’s a Noir-ish quality to our primary pair – fighter Rouge and her handler Naomi, mostly in the sense that the two of them do missions for whomever they work for. The background story of who everyone works for is messy, with a shifting cast of organizations vying for who know what.

There is a human racism plotline that feels so familiar but I cannot place it. It’s racism lite, as it so often is, in anime. Upperclass vs underclass. Bad people are bad, and mean people hurt the demi-human Neans and there’s no complexity to any of it. Like a child’s garden of racism. Neans are the underclass that humans created in order to treat them like crap. Yup.

There is mecha, in the form of hardsuits, which feels very Bubblegum Crisis, as Rouge takes on other hard-suited baddies for reasons that shift every episode. With, I should add, some very sticky music that is more of a single riff that echoes in your brain, than a song, per se. I get Devilman Lady vibes off the music.

And there is a very 90s OVA quality to the whole thing. Each episode or two is it’s own arc, and will come to an end…even if it’s not resolved in a meaningful way. Rouge’s memories are already the big mystery, but to be honest, I don’t really think this anime will bother filling in the details in a meaningful way, any more than Carole and Tuesday wrapped up any of it’s storylines before the big pay-per-view concert that resolved nothing – don’t think we’re going to forget that, Bones, because we are not.

Is this a Yuri series? Nah. Nor is it trying to be one. It’s a buddy story and that’s just fine. With mecha, fighting, and repetitive, epic music, and a cast that appears to be the same 5 people back for every other episode. I appreciate that kind of cost-cutting. It works better than just underfunding the animation. Points off for the evil clown, though. Mars has enough problems, it doesn’t need evil clowns.

Ratings:

Art – Very pretty
Story – Many things stick to this wall
Characters – Sure, why not
Service – Why are all “clubs” in the future the same one tawdry sex club? Get an imagination people!
Yuri – 0 and not likely to go past “I got your back, as long as you’re not stabbing mine”

Overall  – 8

Not everything has to be high art. We can just like some pretty crap with fighty robots, then forget it existed after its over. It’s okay. ^_^