Ergo Proxy - The Complete Box Set

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Dai Sato is a guy who is possibly a little too smart to succeed in the entertainment business. His last big production was Eureka Seven -- a brilliant series, to be sure, but one that aimed well over the heads of a Sunday morning kiddie-show audience. The odds are good that most of the eight-year-olds watching missed the references to American sci-fi authors and the British rave scene of the early '90s.

Now we have Ergo Proxy, which aired in a grown-up late-night time slot and might sail clean over the heads of everyone watching. This one is drowning in references to prominent philosophers and critical theorists. (To give you an idea, there's a character named "Derrida" that pops up early on.) You don't necessarily need to know who Edmund Husserl and Gilles Deleuze are to understand the plot, but that gives you an idea of the kind of viewer the show is apparently trying to connect with here.

It's not the sort of science fiction series that explains itself in advance. There aren't any opening titles to fill us in about where we are and what's going on. Instead, it drops us into the middle of a new world and lets us pick out the critical details as we go.

Along one thread of the plot, we learn that the balance of the world isn't much fun to live in anymore. Most of the planet's surface us wrecked by pollution, forcing humanity to retreat under closed-off domed cities. Along another, we discover that there's a sharp divide separating the few who live inside, the refugees trapped outside, and the immigrants in between who scramble to earn the prize of uncontested citizenship

Life as a citizen is a pretty good deal, at least when you consider the alternative. Much of society's heavy lifting is handled by "autoreivs," self-willed androids who obviously aren't human, although they're gradually getting better at faking it.

They're human enough to get sick, for one thing, with something called the "cogito virus." This doesn't necessarily make them dangerous, but it does make them think ("cogito ergo sum," get it?), and the one can sometimes lead to the other. One of the key characters, Re-L Mayar, is a cop charged with keeping rogue autoreivs under control – she's the young lady with the striking blue eyeliner who shows up in all the promo art. The character upon whom the plot really hinges, though, is Vincent Law, an unfortunate immigrant functionary who gradually discovers that he may be something more than either android or human.

The implications of artificial life have been a reliable springboard for science fiction since before anybody even called it that. It's a direct route to a basic philosophical question – what makes us human? If we can build something that more or less approximates a human, where's the practical difference between the creator and the creation? Ergo Proxy asks that question, and asks something like the reverse as well, when we start to learn exactly what goes into the making of a "model citizen."

Meanwhile, if we can make something that exceeds us in some way, there's the dilemma explored in Blade Runner and hundreds of other stories. The creation may not agree with what the creator has in mind for it. That particular variation on the theme is a reliable springboard for violent action, and Ergo Proxy has more than enough excitement in between the philosophical musings. As a rule, the series has a good handle on what it should show as opposed to what it should simply suggest. Some of the violence happens so fast that you could miss it in an eyeblink – the camera only lingers over the aftermath, which is often a lot more effective than dragging out the money shot in slow-mo.

Sometimes the series takes homage too far. Simple in-references like the character names are no big deal – they don't actually use up any time or space – but once in a while someone decides to show off their education for what seems to be no good reason. There's a sequence in one of the early episodes, for instance, that's an obvious riff on the train-station shootout in The Untouchables. It's perfectly effective if you can't pick up on the reference. If you can, though, it's a pointless distraction. The director's nudging you in the ribs when he ought to get on with telling the story.

That's time that would be better spent making sure all the different threads of the plot weave together neatly. Early on, there are gaps, but it's not so hard to mentally fill them in. Events still follow a logical progression and the characters still have believable motivations, so long as you're prepared to make a few assumptions about what happens in the empty spaces. The show goes a long way on atmosphere alone, too – it has the dark, sterile, antiseptic character of something like Serial Experiments Lain, with interiors that tend to give the eerie impression of wandering around a hospital with the lights out.

As the series goes on, though, the gaps start to get wider. You can only demand so much of your audience, no matter how smart they are – we can't read Sato's mind, and Sato's mind may be the only place where the final movements of the series make sense. The characters, too, grow harder to connect with. They have a tendency to talk in sequences of pronouncements rather than anything that sounds like real human dialogue. True, the ways in which they've become somewhat less than human are much of what the story hinges on, but they're inevitably difficult to sympathize with as a side effect.

Some fans may still find Ergo Proxy rewarding. The visuals are haunting and creepy, and its ideas are occasionally very thought-provoking. As a story, though, it's ultimately not very satisfying. Next time up, Sato and company may want to try keeping their cleverness in check a bit more often.
Presentation and Video
As mentioned before, this show is frequently very dark. There's a lot of black and brown and gray making up the picture, and precious little in the way of bright colors to balance them out. The color design suits the tone of the series in general, certainly, and it's never so grim and shadowy that it becomes genuinely difficult to make out what's going on, but it helps to be prepared in advance. If you're watching Ergo Proxy on an LCD television or monitor, you may want to make sure you're sitting dead-center in front of the screen with the lights out, because watching at even a relatively steep angle may cause some details to fade into the surrounding dimness.

Keeping that in mind, the DVD production here is pretty impressive, because it would have been easy for a bad job of video compression to create some very ugly flaws in the picture. (Digitized bootlegs of the broadcast version inevitably featured rough, blocky separation between spaces of dark and not-so-dark in most of the show's more shadowy moments.) You can pick out some blocking if you look very closely at some of the scenes on these discs, but it's definitely not the kind of problem that leaps off the screen.

8 out of 10

Languages and Audio
Both the Japanese and English audio tracks are available in 5.1-channel Dolby Digital, and the sound design in this show is brilliant, enough to give a lot of theatrical productions a run for their money. Even when there's nothing especially complicated happening on the screen, the soundtrack alone is powerfully enveloping, and when there is a lot of movement going on, the sense of being immersed in the action is exceptional. Hardcore audiophiles might enjoy watching this series for the soundtrack and not much more.

Exclusive to the American version, Geneon added a DTS version of the English-language audio. While it's by no means a massive improvement on the Dolby track, it's a nice extra for viewers with the hardware to take advantage of it, all the more so because Geneon's English dub is excellent. Just a few characters do the vast majority of the talking, but the American cast shoulders the load without much trouble. Karen Thompson plays Mayar with the appropriate degree of restraint and control, while Liam O'Brien handles all of Vincent's wild emotional swings very well. Travis Willingham stands out in a smaller role as Iggy, Re-L's Autoreiv partner – he has a funny sort of supercilious tone that gives him more personality than your average robot.

9 out of 10

Packaging and Extras
This box set wraps up the series neatly on six discs, two each in three thin keepcases. A fourth case includes a separate disc of bonus features, and all four slide together into a compact slipcase. In an odd move even for a distinctly highbrow production, the cover art is completely abstract – you would actually have to buy the set and open it up before you got a good look at any of the characters.

In any case, once you crack open the set and have a look at the extras, they break down like so:

• Featurette #01: "Keywords of Ergo Proxy
• Featurette #02: Behind the Scenes featuring Shinichiro Kobayashi (Executive Producer) and Shukou Murase (Director)
• Featurette #03: English Staff Interview featuring Jonathan Klein (Voice Director) and Taliesin Jaffe (Script Adapter)
• Promotional Trailers
• TV Commercials
• Creditless Openings
• Production Art Gallery

It's a respectable collection of bonus material, and the Japanese featurettes in particular shine some valuable light on what the series is getting at. (Most viewers are still going to have some unanswered questions, but explaining everything going on in Ergo Proxy would probably require a lot more than one disc's worth of features.)

6 out of 10

The Bottom Line
Ergo Proxy isn't without its share of disappointments, but even so, it has a heck of a lot going for it. What it lacks in the way of a truly gripping, involving story, it makes up for in part with a powerful soundtrack, some powerful visuals, and the occasional powerful insight. If those are the sort of things you go to Japanese animation looking for, you might not find this series disappointing at all.