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Dusk Beyond the End of the World- World Premiere

P.A. Works is one of my favorite studios when it comes to making original projects, and they've had a pretty good batting average in that department, having created such shows as A Lull in the Sea and Shirobako. While not all of their original works are winners, I still have enough confidence in their work for anything new from them to be on my radar, so I was really eager to check out this premiere for myself and see what it had to offer. Based on what was shown, my impressions of it are a bit mixed.

Rather than the first episode, the panel showed “ Episode 0,” which sets up the events of the main story. This premiere follows a young man named Akira, who, after losing his parents, comes to live with a scientist named Kazuya, as well as his daughter Towa, who, despite her young age, has become the world's leading authority on AI and is spearheading the development of androids. For the most part, this premiere was split between science fiction and romantic comedy. In the background of the show's setting, there's a lot of debate surrounding Towa's development of androids and the ethical implications of using AI to create artificial life or alter people's bodies through the use of cybernetics. Given how much AI is a current topic of discussion, this was the element of the premiere I found the most interesting, and while it is a bit questionable to have the premiere partially following a character trying to further spread its use given its current real-world negative effects, the discussion of it does so far seem to be focused more on the ethics of creating artificial life than anything else else connected to it. While the premiere doesn't spend as much time with this topic as I'd have liked, it does just enough with it that I'm curious to see how it will be further explored in the main series.

The romance aspect of this premiere, on the other hand, is where I felt the most mixed about, as it centers on Akira and Towa, who, despite growing up under the same household for ten years, are both secretly in love with each other. While it's hard not to side-eye a “not-siblings” romance, it's not personally something I'd consider an instant dealbreaker, and the episode does paint these two more like childhood friends than stepsiblings, so a lot of the awkward tension between the two of them veers into being cute. Still, given that particular angle, it does feel awkward when their attempt to go out on a date has each of them thinking about wanting to upgrade from being not-siblings to a couple. It's not the worst thing, but it does make it a little off-putting to have this relationship be so central to the story. The romance angle and the sci-fi setting converge in the climax of this premiere. While the twists here are fairly predictable, they do help serve as setup for a more potentially interesting story. While this premiere didn't win me over, I'm curious to see where the rest of it is going. If you're looking for a new sci-fi series to check out, this might be worth keeping an eye on in the fall.

Dusk Beyond the End of the World will be available for streaming on HIDIVE this October.