Metallic Rouge took me back to the 2000s, including the profound final-episode disappointment

(There are spoilers in this piece for only the last five minutes or so of Metallic Rouge’s final episode, which are so important to to the series overall that we have to discuss them in full.)

I’d been excited about Metallic Rouge since I first heard about it, boasting as it does a dream team of 80s/90s anime talents. Created by the renowned designer Yutaka Izubuchi, known for Patlabor, Rahxephon, and too many famous suits and machines, to count. Character designs by Cowboy Bebop’s Toshihiro Kawamoto, who once again delivers grounded fantasy characters with style and grit. And animation by Bones, the studio responsible for so many high-quality TV series in the 2000s, the kind of stuff you might, back then, have called prestige.

For better and for worse, Metallic Rouge is a lot like one of those 2000s series. It’s got an ambitious, fascinating sci-fi setting, endearing characters, and a steady sense of unraveling mystery as its story progresses and widens. It also has so many ideas– and moves so fast through them– that it eventually crashes into a wall when it reaches the end with too many ideas in its head, no satisfying finish in mind for the events at hand, and not enough minutes left in running time to properly put one together.

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Rouge Redstar is an advanced android (Nean), and also a transforming superhero in the style of Kamen Rider and so on. As the series opens, she’s on a road trip around a far-future Mars that’s in the process of being terraformed for human use, with the labor being done by other Neans, programmed as they are to be slaves to the humans. But Rouge’s job doesn’t have to do with any of that: along with her handler Naomi, she is on the hunt for a special group of protoype Neans, the Immortal Nine, to kill them.

Of course this isn’t nearly that simple a series, and it’s apparent from the first episode that something is wrong with Rouge’s mission. Indeed, that Rouge doesn't see anything weird about it tips us off as to just how innocent this child android is to the world. In any case you’re allowed exactly one spectacular super-powered battle— with the most majestically chuuni theme song I’ve heard in forever— until you get to feel bad about it. Metallic Rouge then shifts from a superhero series to a slowly unraveling sci-fi mystery in which sometimes a superhero does some fighting.

I was on board with that for about the first two thirds of the show; indeed I was actively recommending it. Every week Rouge and Naomi go somewhere new, they run into the other folks chasing them (classic hits like Anime Joker, Anime Columbo, and Evil Miku), they flirt with each other, Rouge suits up to punch some threat, and we learn a little bit about the world and the state of the Neans. Meanwhile, innocent Rouge is slowly taking in the points of view of all sides of the conflict, and working on what we realize will be a major, final decision that only she can make.

By the middle of the show you’re sitting down every week to watch steady lore drips: this world has no shortage of secrets, most of all the tangled origins of the oblivious Rouge and her strange family. Sometimes we find out something that was fairly obvious to us as viewers, but beyond the innocent Rouge. Other times the revelations are total curveballs. The stakes crank up pretty quickly, Rouge gets a little sister somewhere in there, and by the third act we’re up to the fate of all android-kind.

At which point the series flies off the rails while the drip of revelations becomes a firehose blast. Metallic Rouge is never actually hard to follow; characters look you in the eye and tell you exactly what is going on. It’s just a lot, and it does demand you pay attention. The final episode, on the other hand, may was well be playing in fast forward.

After concentrating for many episodes on a ruthless revolutionary faction seeking to free the Neans by any means, the series chucks it all out for one unsatisfying final revelation. And in the last five minutes, with everything dealt with, Metallic Rouge performs a bizarre narrative double backflip in which an even more unsatisfying final twist almost plays out before it is immediately undone, leaving this story… nowhere in particular.

The last moments of the show flash to a climactic battle between Rouge and the real villain behind everything: a pitch too big for the last ten seconds but also too thin for a second season or epilogue episode. It’s just another anticlimax; the third the show lands in a row. As the audience, how much can we take?

(Also, from a moral standpoint, it is kind of weird to see a “free the slaves” scenario set up and that choice being presented as risky, dangerous, and possibly a trap.)

The show’s biggest misstep might just be that awkward second-season grab. It’s understandable: original anime series like this almost never get continuations, and the people behind Metallic Rouge built a world bigger than fits into these briskly paced 12 episodes. Perhaps the storytellers also predicted the sense of anticlimax we would feel as the series resolved in such an unsatisfying way, and opted to leave us with at least the anticipation of a final big bang.

But there’s a way to communicate new ideas so ineffectively that they bring down what came before, and that’s what we see in the final minutes of Metallic Rouge. File this one away as an amibitious disappointment, and bring back the 26-52 episode sci-fi anime season. This one needed it.