GOODNIGHT HEAD 2041

Cool-looking as it was, my enthusiasm for NIGHT HEAD 2041 was starting to fizzle out in the last couple weeks, and now I’m putting it to bed for good. Part of it was the stiff character models, weirdly mixed with traditional 2D models presumably to save money, since thematic reasons were tenuous at best.

But again, the looks weren’t the main issue; the bland characters who had started to repeat themselves were, as was an increasingly opaque plot and a dystopic “anti-fiction” premise that felt, at times, laughably over-the-top. Unlike fellow CGI series Knights of Sidonia, NH2041 never quite felt as cool as it looked, nor was it ever as profound or edgy as it tried to be.—Braverade

NIGHT HEAD 2041 – 06 – A Model of Peace

While an armed guard keeps Naoya hostage, Kazama’s sketchy-ass Free Speech Alliance takes over the main news government propaganda TV station. After a brief and frankly hackneyed speech about corruption, oppression, etc., Kazama intends to put Naoto and his power on display for the entire viewing public to behold.

Needless to say, with so much of the population brainwashed hook, line, and sinker, it’s patently silly for this guy to believe seeing someone demonstrate “powers” on a TV program will win hearts and minds. Just as Naoya warned several times, the operation fails when the super-skeptic guy—whose treachery, in hindsight, was telegraphed within an inch of its life—reveals he’s an undercover SWE agent, and kills Kazama.

Despite being surrounded by the newly-awakened SWE oficers, Naoto still manages to slip away, until he’s cornered in the parking garage by Takuya. The Kuroki brother has a lot of questions for Naoto, but Naoto is in no mood to answer them, and at least at the start of the battle he’s a better psychokinesis user; or at least a more controlled one.

Ultimately, Naoto, along with Naoya, Emily, and Masayuki’s mom (Shouko’s old friend) end up vanishing in a big ‘ol flash of light. While I shouldn’t assume anything with the limited information we’re given, I’ll go out on a limb and theorize that it was Masayuki’s mom’s connection to Shouko that led to everyone being sent…somewhere in a similar manner to Shouko herself in previous encounters.

NIGHT HEAD 2041 – 05 – Girl Out of Time

The Kirihara brothers escape with the FSA and Masayuki Miki, who wants to go right back to rescue her boy. But Naoya believes it was Miki’s friend Futami Shouko who guided them to meet Miki.

From there we flashback to Miki’s friendship with Shouko back in 2014, when she saw with her own eyes what Miki could do. Shouko compulsively wrote strange symbols in a notebook which literally jump off the page and send Miki into a kind of hallucinatory trance spanning time and space.

But according to Miki of the present, one day she was just…gone. Of course, we know she’s still alive, kinda, in the future, and either the willing or unwilling guinea pig in a lab’s desperate attempt to do…something. Correct the timeline to make 2041 less of an anti-fiction hellscape? Perhaps.

Miki also mentions how when she was 26 she received a package from Shouko, postmarked before she disappeared. In it she found the notebook and some instructions, which Miki followed, spending a single night in a small shrine but emerging the next morning to find three months had passed.

We also flash back to when the Kirihara brothers were first brought to the lab where they’d spend the next few years. While they awaken in what could be described as a gilded cage, Naoto still tries to escape with Naoya, only to be stopped by a barrier that only seems to affect psychics.

Back in the present, one of the FSA members bristles at Kimi’s story about seeing the future and skipping time, continually calling it a bunch of lies. How he can say this after what he’s seen psychics strains credulity a bit; it’s as if he’s only there in the room to complain and dispute Kimi’s testimony.

Meanwhile, while the SWE lost a number of people, HQ is back up and running, and they consider it a net win since it resulted in the awakening of both Reika and Michio and the progression of Yuuya’s powers. Takuya ended up psyching himself into a coma, but he soon recovers.

Kimie gets to work as a guide for Yuuya and his powers, as both she and the SWE boss believe he could be the most powerful of all of them if he’s able to control that power. All we know from the boss is that they’ll “use that  power to achieve their goal”, which I presume means rooting out all psychics who aren’t SWE soldiers. Kimie calls it “protecting the order of the world.”

Back at the old factory, the FSA’s leader Kazama has a proposition for the Kirihara brothers, and Naoto in particular: they’re going to execute an offensive operation on the FSA, and they need Naoto’s power to help. When Naoto refuses, they pull a gun on Naoya and threaten to kill him if Naoto doesn’t obey. Emily, the voice of reason and temperance in the FSA, definitely didn’t want it to come to this, but Kazama and his commandoes are the ones with the guns.

Takuya and Yuuya are chilling in their cold, sterile apartment when visions of the past start flowing through Yuuya, including a scene of their mom and dad being taken by…er…someone.

Between the SWE crew not doing much this week and the FSA immediately and disappointingly showing their true colors, it was overall a pretty listless downer of an episode. My favorite part was the inter-dimensional joyride Shouko sent Miki on with her symbols, but that was all too brief, and that part of the story still carries more questions than answers.

NIGHT HEAD 2041 – 04 – The Kids Are Not All Right

NIGHT HEAD 2041 is all about making connections between people on very different ends of the struggle for freedom of thought and creativity, which is really the struggle for humanity itself. One of those is that the mother of Masayuki—the boy who can take over minds who went full John Wick last week—was high school friends with Futami Shouko, the time traveling girl the Kuroki brothers saw at the Miracle Mick raid. I’m not sure why this connection exists—or why Shouko ties her hair…with her hair—but it’s still intriguing.

 

Meanwhile, the Kirihara brothers were rescued by the Free Speech Alliance, who are pretty much the opposite of the SWE, fighting for the very things the SWE are trying to stamp out on orders of a government that does not care about the hypocrisy of employing psychics. Members of the FSA admit that nobody really has very clear memories of the disasters propaganda touts as the reason for this thought crackdown.

In case you thought the governemnt had some good points, we along with the Kiriharas are shown how those who commit thought crime—including young children—are put on display like zoo animals and re-educated. These are bad, but faceless people. We only know who work for them: SWE and the Kuroki brothers.

When Masayuki goes berserk, escapes from custody and goes on a bloody killing spree through the halls of SWE HQ, all because he fears the cops hurt his mom, I’m kinda on Team Nobody. Both Masayuki’s mom and Naoya are a bit too naïve to think the kid can come back to anything resembling a normal life after all the people he killed.

At the same time, only SWE scrubs get killed, and I can’t feel too much sympathy for them, since we know “I was just following orders” is no defense for committing atrocities. That the SWE officers with names who we do know shoot their mind-controlled colleagues without hesitation shows how much this system has fucked with their humanity.

Hell, that the system pushed a little kid to the brink it did means this simply isn’t a system that can last long before it crumbles. But despite working for what can be charitably described as an Enemy of Humanity in the SWE, Yuuya still leaps out and saves Masayuki from Takuya’s psychokinesis , while Reika’s own power awakens just in time to save Yuuya from a giant deadly falling corporate sculpture.

This is a great symbol for the system: overly burdened with zero tolerance laws and brutal punishment; hanging by a thin, fraying cable. The Free Speech Alliance doesn’t actually do anything yet, and it’s not exactly clear what they will do. But between them and the rampant “law-breaking” going on even in normal high school club rooms, that cable is going to snap someday.

NIGHT HEAD 2041 – 03 – Taking a Turn

Fresh off their narrow escape from the diner and SWE, Naoto and Naoya  decide to pay a visit to their dear old parents who drugged them and sent them away to the lab when they were kids, because there might not have been any choice considering the powers they possessed. Predictably, not only are the parents gone, but so is the very house they grew up in.

The balance of the episode is focused on a high school, where a circle of friends are apparently suffering the effects of a black magic spell that backfired. They intended to get revenge on someone, but their “spell” seemingly results in a string of gruesome suicides at school, all of which are worth a solid trigger warning.

The SWE squad is dispatched to the school to investigate, with Takuya driving while Kimie rides shotgun and tries to relate to him as a fellow Psychic. They raid the club room and find a treasure trove of fiction and occult contraband, any one item of which carries the death penalty.

I’m sorry, but I don’t understand how this society…works. The SWE can’t be everywhere all the time, so I imagine bastions of lawbreaking are quite prevalent—especially in schools! In any case, Mikie can sense a powerful psychic at work, controlling the minds of people, including Michio and Reika, who shoot wildly at their Kuroki brother comrades like brainwashed zombies.

The one survivng high schooler ends up crossing paths with the Kiriharas at their dad’s old factory, where they also encounter the time-traveling Futami Shouko, who ties her hair…with her hair, which is…unsettling, somehow. I guess that’s the point; she’s an inscrutable person.

Before Shouko blips out (returning to several years in the past), Naoya’s clairvoyance senses a voice telling them to go to a certain place. That place happens to be where the culprit behind the mind control murders lives. He’s just a little boy, but he’s a powerful Psychic whose puppy the high schooler who spearheaded the black magic ritual slaughtered for its blood…hence the desire for revenge.

Mikie and Reika roll in and neutralize the boy, ending the immediate threat, while Naoto uses his psychokinesis to shove the ladies aside so he and his brother can escape. They’re met outside by Takuya and Yuuya and the two pairs of brothers recognize each other from their strange visions. It’s like that Spider-Man pointing at Spider-Man meme.

Thankfully, the Kirihara brothers have an ally in the shadows, who reveals himself to knock out the Kuroki’s and tells them to come with him. He doesn’t add “if they want to live”, Sarah Connor style, however. I can’t say I’m the most engaged with these characters, but it’s a very slick looking show and the music is great, so I can’t complain that much.

NIGHT HEAD 2041 – 02 – Diner of Illusion

In addition to showing us a lot of cool stuff, NH2K41 can add another feather to its cyberpunk cap: it’s able to cover a lot of narrative ground in these two episodes. There’s a lot of information to convey, and while it isn’t always the most elegant or subtle (we learn the Kuroki brothers were abandoned because…they mention it while looking at a photo) it’s all easy to digest. And Takuya’s whiskey on the rocks looks frikkin’ epic.

The show also wastes no time connecting our two pairs of brothers, as Yuuya has a momentary vision of the Kirihara brothers, who are once again just trying to fill their stomachs in an unassuming diner. Unfortunately for them, the fugitive Miracle Mick is there, along with a Harley Quinn-style femme fatale, who uses Mick’s celebrity to bilk a 2D three-man band out of all their cash. She, not Mick, is the one with the psychic power: the power of mind control.

It isn’t long before the Thought Police (Takuya and Yuuya’s squad) show up, but they’re just there for Mick and the woman using him and manipulating the musicians, whom she sics on the cops like brainwashed dogs. The order comes down to arrest everyone in the diner, even the cute waitress, but when they start getting rough Naoto gets pissed off and uses his psychokinesis to fight back, stopping all the bullets Neo-style. In the process, Yuuya learns he has a skill: psychic shields.

Naoto, Naoya, and the waitress are able to flee, while Mick and the band are arrested as scapegoats. Then the mischievous woman, Kobayashi Kimie, reveals she’s a cop who was working undercover to bring Mick down. She also demonstrates her powers of illusion in one of the coolest manners possible: by “stabbing” the four squad members with glass spikes. It’s as pretty as it is gruesome.

That’s when Takuya, Yuuya, Reika and Michio learn that it isn’t that the supernatural doesn’t exist, but that the government wants the public to think it doesn’t exist. Psychics, like the four cops are about to awaken to be come, are the exclusive purview of the government. If they have to use supernatural powers to root the civilian world of the supernatural, so be it.

The waitress Naoto saves isn’t particularly thankful, as now the cops will be after her since she’s a Psychic too (though not, as she says, a “monster” like the brothers). She thanks them before shuffling off, warning them to keep a low profile. That may be tough in what is clearly a police and surveillance state where everything that has a microchip could be watching or listening.

The fact that when the Kirihara brothers escaped from the lab where they spend fifteen years, only to find themselves ten years further into the future than they expected, doesn’t help matters. Naoto thought they were going somewhere where their own kind were accepted and coexisted with regular humans. Instead, the opposite has happened.

Clearly the girl in the school uniform is a part of the experiments at the lab, as she’s returned unconscious and with a weak pulse, but alive after an apparent trip to the future. The question is, is there any way to prevent the awful post-WWIII dystopia that exists in 2041?

NIGHT HEAD 2041 – 01 (First Impressions) – It’s That Kind of Night

I’ll give NIGHT HEAD 2041 this: it gives you bang for the buck. There’s a metric fuckton of stuff to look at in its 22 minutes, and a pulsing, pounding score by Yamada Yukata (Vinland Saga, Great Pretender) adds weight and dignity to every one of those minutes. The CGI modeling of most characters is akin to Knights of Sidonia, a show I enjoyed quite a bit, and like that show’s sci-fi setting, the sometimes off-putting style fits the cyberpunk milieu like a glove.

The thing is, it’s not just visuals and sound that NH2K41 has in spades; it’s characters, factions, and ideas. It’s not lacking in ambition, but it often feels scattered, like it’s trying to say too much to fast. I’m reminded of the 2004 live-action Casshern film, which my friends and I love, but also joke that it’s about “absolutely everything, all the time, only louder and faster”.

Perhaps that’s a side effect of having to introduce us to this world, its pair of protagonist brothers on opposite sides of a post-WWIII conflict between the hyper-atheist, rationalist powers that be and anyone and everyone who believes in higher powers, the supernatural or the occult, or any kind of fiction. That last part is a bit hard to chew; but fine.

I can totally believe that society has put all of its eggs in the pseudo-military police industrial complex that is Special Weapons Enforcement, to which the Kuroki brothers belong. There’s a distinct vibe to both them and their two comrades that made me think they were criminals going after other criminals a la PSYCHO-PASS. But the less this is compared to that, the better; at least for now.

P-P could go off the rails at times, at least had some focus to its bold brash ruminations on society. It was also anchored by my avatar of many years, Tsunemori Akane, one of my all-time favorite anime characters. Night Head has a lot of characters, including the aforementioned pair of brothers, but they’re not exactly brimming with personality or originality.

One thing I did like was how the episode suddenly changed gears after one of the Kuroki Takuya accidentally conjured an EMP to save his little brother Yuuya, basically committing a crime by doing something that shouldn’t be possible. That segues smoothly to the Kirihara brothers, Naoto and Naoya, a psychokinetic and a clairvoyant, respectively.

Freshly sprung from some kind of lab where they’d spend an untold portion of their lives and with a fast car and a stack of cash in their possession, Naoto continually assures his adorable little brother that the time is now, as in, for people like them to step out of the shadows and join the world community without fear of ostracization or oppression.

Unfortunately, when you and your brother are essentially X-Men, it’s hard not to make ordinary humans fearful, angry, or a combination of both simply by existing. That’s what happens when the brothers dare to grab a bite to eat—though it’s at least partially their fault for waltzing into a bar where there’s an obvious shit-starter lounging on a couch with his honey.

Weirdly enough, these two are rendered in the anime-standard two dimensions instead of the three of our superpowered brothers. I’d normally cry foul but it makes sense thematically, so I’m going to allow this. Still the interaction is awfully pat, and drags on a bit too long, such that I left the scene less worried about backlash for the brothers, and more upset that what was probably a pretty good pizza went to waste.

After the Kiriharas’ pub crawl, we return to the thought police in the aftermath of the EMP, which erased all records of what happened during the raid to capture “Miracle Mick”, who may just be a money-grubbing charlatan or could actually have powers. Heck, Takuya clearly has the power to create an EMP—a super useful ability if you don’t want anyone to know you have an ability, owing to the overreliance on electronic tech.

While it’s usually a good idea not to expect every episode to look as good at the first, both Sidonia and the more recent Akudama Drive are exceptions to that rule. But it’s not consistent production quality I’m worried about. I know Night Head 2041 is probably going to look and sound awesome every week. But will it ever get around to organizing its myriad ideas and scenarios?

Learning that the girl only the Kuroki bros saw during the raid astral projected into the future is the kind of hook that ensures I’ll be back next week and probably the week after that. I just hope there’s more in store than eye an ear candy…but some head meat and potatoes, too.