Metallic Rouge (Season One)

Rouge Redstar has been tasked with hunting down the Immortal Nine, a group of Proto-Neans who seek to undo the shackles that keep the Neans, an android race, subservient to humanity. However, Rouge is also wanted for killing their creator!

What did you watch?

I’ve finally done it. Just as the Spring 2024 schedule comes to an end, I have finished watching all of the shows that I planned to watch from the Winter 2024 schedule… for now! Who knows what the future holds? Anyhow, I watched a total of fifteen seasons, binge-watching them one by one after the seasons had ended. Well, mostly! I did watch three weekly – Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, Solo Leveling, and Chained Soldier. On the whole, I’ve had a great time and would definitely repeat the process. I find watching shows several episodes at a time over a couple of days makes for a more enjoyable experience. So, let’s find out how Metallica Rouge faired.

What happened?

Humanity had just overcome its first intergalactic conflict. The Usurpers, the second alien race to make contact with Earth, attacked as mankind colonised Mars. The war was won largely because of Neans, combat androids. Now that the war is over, they have become a subservient class, living among us. However, they are not the same as humans and many see them as disposable. They are bound by Asimov’s laws of robotics which makes it impossible for them to harm or indirectly cause harm to humans. They are also dependent on a substance called Nectar. Without it, they die. However, humans can use Nectar like a drug and often steal it from the Nean resulting in many needless deaths. There is another group – the Proto-Neans who are not bound by Asimov’s laws and they want to free all of their kind from slavery.

Rouge Redstar works for Aletheia, an organisation that is responsible for overseeing Nean populations. She has been tasked to take out the Proto-Neans before they can undo the Asimov Code and potentially create a civil war between Humans and Neans. Working with her handler, Naomi she’s tracked down several of the Proto-Neans already, however, some don’t appear to be fighting or orchestrating a rebellion. Some just want to live. Rouge, a Proto-Nean herself, begins to wonder if she really has free will or whether she’s simply a puppet on a string, dancing to the instructions of those above her.

What did you think?

The word I would use to describe this series is fine. It really shouldn’t be given the number of fascinating ideas that they’ve borrowed from numerous classic science fiction stories, but that is what I think it deserves. It started out like Blade Runner in a dark and dirty future where Mars has been colonised and there is rampant division between humans and Neans. Then, it took on several of the ideas of Issac Asimov’s classic, I Robot. There were alien races to contend with too. This series should have been amazing. However, I think the problem comes from the fact that they’ve taken on too much and tried to squeeze it into thirteen episodes. There simply wasn’t enough time to do any of those ideas justice.

On top of that, I felt like there was nothing linking us to the characters who were all kind of boring. Now, if that was the idea because they were actually mostly Neans then bravo, but that feels like I’m giving them too much credit. It’s a shame because there hasn’t been much good science fiction in a while and when I started watching anime in the late 1980s it was almost all science fiction. So, when a new show comes along, I have hopes that it’ll restart that trend. This series will not do that!

What was your favourite moment?

For me, this series peaked in the first couple of episodes. We were thrown into the deep end without much exposition or knowledge of what was going on. We simply had to pay attention and piece it all together as the details became apparent. I know some can find this jarring, but I love trying to work out what’s going on. I loved the gritty world we saw on Mars. We saw people treating Neans as if they were disposable and irrelevant. It was gross, but that was the point. Rouge was working undercover at that stage and it allowed us to really live in that world.

We saw shipments of Nectar being stolen and then re-stolen. It was complete chaos and that made it exciting. You had to pay attention to everything just to work out who was who and what they were trying to do. I wasn’t too sure about the early interactions between Naomi and Rouge because it felt like they’d only just started working together when the series hinted that they had been working together much longer. Either way, there wasn’t much chemistry between them. Kei and Yuri they are not. Anyhow, it was dark, depressing, and a brutal reflection of many stages of human society. Sadly, this series peaked too soon.

What was your least favourite moment?

As they piled more and more ideas on top of one another, the earlier ideas of the Neans hoping to free themselves seemed to be entirely irrelevant. Even the Proto-Neans didn’t seem to be all on the same page about freeing them. It really seemed to struggle with the idea that freeing an enslaved race is always the right thing to do. That’s a fairly troubling idea to struggle with.

Anyhow, towards the end, this series did something that instantly boiled my blood from a storyteller’s point of view. The Puppeteer had lured Cyan to him so that he could use her as another body to transfer his mind’s data to. Ash Stahl, a detective who had been investigating Rouge Redstar had been dragged into the whole ordeal was nearby and saw the Puppeteer’s face. He gasped and then the screen cut away. Later, he met up with some others and proudly told them he knew who the Puppeteer was… and then it cut away. In fact, by the time Ash revealed the identity of the Puppeteer, he was in the middle of removing his mask anyhow. What was the point of having him know that if he wasn’t going to immediately use that information for some purpose? Why show us that he knew if it didn’t lead to anything? I find this to be incredibly frustrating.

Who was your favourite character?

And here is the biggest issue with this show. The characters were uninteresting. I wanted to see how Rouge would come to terms with the idea that she may not have free will. I wanted to see how Naomi kept Rouge on task. I wanted to see some sort of friendship beyond this forced charade that we witnessed. I mentioned earlier that Rouge and Naomi are not Kei and Yuri and by that, I’m referring to Dirty Pair. Kei and Yuri had a real relationship. They got along, they fought, and they made fun of each other. They made me want to keep watching Dirty Pair regardless of what was going on in the episode. Rouge was still and emotionless. Naomi looked like she had some promise, but then she turned out to be a Nean too and they doubled down on her being cold and logical.

If it was only them then maybe I’d have found a side character to cheer for, but they were all the same. Ash Stahl was probably the only one who showed any sort of growth or compassion, but he was used time and again to vocalise the things that we should be taking away from the story without needing to be told. At one point, he pointed out that freeing the Neans was the only right thing to do. My personal belief is that characters are the most important part of the story. Without them, the plot just isn’t worth worrying about, even if they are using a series of tiny black holes to move Venus into the same orbit as Earth. Seriously, this series should have been amazing. I can’t believe they dropped the ball so hard.

Metallic Rouge Episode 3 Naomi Orthmann and Rouge Redstar

Who was your least favourite character?

It could have been anyone else sadly. However, special mention has to go to the Puppeteer/Roy Junghardt who was just annoyingly insufferable and the bizarre father-son relationship between Eden Varock and Gene Junghardt. I’m kind of curious how a Nean and a human managed to have a child together, but not that curious. They couldn’t even give us an interesting villain. Giallon Fate came close, but he was too in your face with his desire to just have fun and see where it led him. No one was particularly complex, which is disappointing for a show that touched on so many fascinating ideas and issues.

Would you like some more?

I’ve seen a reasonable number of anime original stories and most of them tend to fall flat. There are some exceptions of course but it’s not the most common outcome. I wonder if the fact that most anime tends to be an adaptation of a light novel or manga series where the story has probably been refined over and over again, often starting life as a web novel, makes a big difference. By the time, it’s caught the attention of an animating studio, it’s the real deal. A lot of the bugs have been taken care of. The anime could well be the fourth version of the story, excluding initial drafts. An original series doesn’t have the same level of scrutiny before it gets to that point. I’m never going to ignore a series because it’s original, but it’s hard to get my hopes up. As for this series. Nah, I’m done.

Metallic Rouge Episode 12 Naomi Orthmann and Rouge Redstar

What have you learned?

You can have too many ideas. Well, it’s not the number of ideas that are the problem, it’s how they are handled. Metallic Rouge seemed to want to throw every idea under the sun into the story and make them all as important as one another. That made them all unimportant. Had the story focused on Rouge’s struggle to gain free will with everything else as a minor backdrop, it could have been fascinating. Had it focused on the Nean’s struggle for freedom and equal standing as humans, it could have been great. There are plenty of examples of both of these in science fiction. The best stories zero in on an important idea and make that the theme of the story. If you try to make everything important then nothing is.

Metallic Rouge Episode 6 Ash Stahl and Noid

Series Information

English Title	Metallic Rouge
Japanese Title	Metallic Rouge
Medium	Anime
Released	Winter 2024
Episodes	13
Animation Studios	Bones
Genres	Action, Science Fiction
Demographic	Seinen

Other shows from Winter 2024

2 Comments

Merlin

2024, June 24 / 20:14 Reply

Agreed. Absolutely agreed. This show had one of the strongest starts I’ve ever seen, but, oy vey, did it go way downhill from there! Good grief!

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- Lynn
  
  2024, June 24 / 20:30
  
  They lost track of the message and tried to cram in as many sci-fi tropes as possible. All great sci-fi is more about the people the technology impacts than the technology.
  
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Metallic Rouge (Season One)