This Week in Anime

Pacific Rim is Back in Black

Jean-Karlo
Nicky, I sympathize with this here stiffly-animated CG dude. We're in for a rough week, because we gotta talk about Bad CG, mediocre monsters, and pointy chins. It's Netflix Time again.

Oh boy. I hope you folks brought kosher salt and freshly-ground pepper, because I have beef with all things Pacific Rim. Long story short, I don't like Pacific Rim. Short story long, I grew up watching a lot of mecha, like Vandread or Patlabor or GaoGaiGar or Evangelion. And I get that Pacific Rim represents a spotlight being forced onto a beloved nerd staple in the face of "normie" media, but the films frustrate my mecha-loving heart because outside of a bunch of loving references to classic mecha anime (The Russian pilots wore Scopedog helmets! The Precursors are literally the Dinosaur Empire from Getter Robo! Gypsy Danger functioning in an EMP field because "it's analog" is ripped straight from Giant Robo: The Day The Earth Stood Still!) Pacific Rim just doesn't do anything interesting of its own. The Jaegers are boring. The kaiju are boring. The characters are boring. It just makes me want to watch the many things that its team of artists lovingly reference instead of another Pacific Rim.

I've actually watched mecha anime, so Pacific Rim can't just dangle mecha-shaped keys in my face and hold my attention. But for your average pop culture consumer who probably never got a chance to see Evangelion before Netflix rescued it from the heap, I guess it scratches the "Who cares? Robots!" itch.

So here we have Pacific Rim: The Black, which takes place in Australia. Kaiju – which are just giant monsters but we gotta have a foreign-sounding fancy word because I guess giant monsters only exist in Japan – are being sent from another world by beings called The Precursors via dimensional warps call Breaches. While most breaches are in the Pacific Ocean, Australia is quickly beset by terrestrial ones. Teams of Jaegers can't save Australia, so Operation Blackout is initiated: like with the Buster Call in One Piece, nukes rain down upon Australia and anyone left on the continent is left for dead.

Our heroes are Taylor and Hayley, a pair of kids who are left at a safe glade in the middle of nowhere after The Blackout happens. Their parents take the last Jaeger in Australia to get to Sydney in the hopes of finding help. But five years later, no help comes. But Hayley finds a training Jaeger, Atlas Destroyer.

Early on, we even see a few people leaving the encampment—we never do see what happens to them, come to think of it...

Also, this is a Polygon Pictures show, so all of these models are in extremely jerky frame-skipping animations and look super awkward while they're moving around. So, uh. Be ready for that.

Vibe check!

I wanna give this first episode credit; Copperhead laying waste to the encampment and the siblings seeing the mangled bodies of their long-time friends is a serious gut-punch. As far as calls to adventure go, this is a good one. The remnants of it stick with Hayley for a good bit.

However janky these look in screenshots, allow me to remind you, dear reader: it's even jankier in motion.

At any rate, the fight against Copperhead leaves Atlas without power, so the siblings try to hunt some batteries down. Their adventures lead them to Boy, the most anime thing Pacific Rim has actually managed to do. He's a white-haired mute child!

Pacific Rim takes a moment from ripping off mecha anime to toss in a Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid reference. Progress?

Considering how Netflix Anime™️ works, that's probably a feature and not a bug. "Folks still like The Walking Dead, right?"

I wanna take a moment to talk about Mei, because I think someone who worked on this show loved her a lot. She might be an even more blatant Motoko Kusanagi rip-off than Mako in the first Pacific Rim, but she's at least way more compelling and actually has a story. I think someone on the production crew would be very happy if someone were to draw a lot of AU art of her dancing at parties and working at a café and otherwise having a happy, non-canonical life.

The one thing I can give Shane is that he finally puts some of Pacific Rim's tech to interesting use. See, the giant robots in PR work off of Evangelion's synchronization system by way of G Gundam's Tracer System: the pilot controls the whole mech with their body. But a giant robot is "too much strain" for one person's nervous system. So two pilots need to sync up their brains in a "neural handshake" process called "Drifting" to pilot a Jaeger.

Shane, as it turns out, has his own Drift system, which he uses to probe people's brains—or better yet, manipulate people's memories. It's later revealed that this is how he put Mei under his thumb, and it's also how he finds out about Atlas Destroyer from Taylor.

It's easily the highlight: Shane literally pokes his head around a bunch of the earlier scenes in the show like an Australian G Man.

I also wanna give a quick shout-out to this guy, Joel. He's a Jaeger engineer who works for Shane and is tasked with repairing Atlas. In searching for a compatible Drift partner among his goons, Shane fries his brain; Joel loses all of his memories associated with fixing Jaegers, but walks away with a completely different set of skills.

This turns out to be relevant because stealing Atlas back from Shane requires that Taylor pilot Atlas alone—and the only way to do that is for Taylor to drift with the "ghost" of a pilot who did it. There's a cute bit where three characters from the first Pacific Rim are namedropped, but the resulting mind-meld lets Taylor pull the trick off—albeit, his own brain gets scrambled so now he has another man's extremely vivid memories.

Erica Lindbeck, ladies and gentlemen! She does such amazing work.

Unfortunately, there isn't much else to talk about. Like Nicky said, there are only seven episodes to Pacific Rim: The Black. It doesn't feel like a whole season. There are some tense moments with Apex, a remnant of a Kaiju-Jaeger hybrid from Pacific Rim: Uprising that imprints upon Boy and otherwise... doesn't do much. There's some drama with Mei where she tries to suss out the truth of her origins. And there's a big climactic showdown against Copperhead! But that's about it.

The kids do find their parents' Jaeger, but there's still no sign of their parents so the search goes on.

Oh, and it's revealed Boy is actually a kaiju that can disguise himself as a human.

Again, I kinda wanna take a moment to shake Pacific Rim by the shoulders and scream at it, "Why are your Kaiju so boring?!" Guillermo del Toro is famous for his monster designs and channeled a lot of energy from classic robot anime, but in a medium that gave us the bizarro Dinosaur Empire or the mind-bending Angels, why are all of PR's kaiju just... lizards?

Like, Boy's true form is halfway creative, but if you're gonna have a shifting Kaiju, I dunno, add a little Ultraman flair. Give him wacky red-and-silver colors, or—here's an idea! Give him totally messed-up anatomy, like maybe his head is in his chest like Ultraman's Jamila.

I mean, Raleigh and Mako themselves weren't particularly great either in the first Pacific Rim—and John Boyega won out in PR2 by virtue of being the loveable John Boyega.

I hate to be a downer in This Week In Anime, especially since I know a lot of people really like Pacific Rim. But all I can do is offer a shrug at Pacific Rim: The Black. Even this year alone, Back Arrow showed how you can take personalized mechs and make it breezy, energetic and fun while still having a tense politically-charged storyline and memorable characters. And next month, Trigger's gonna drop a sequel series to its beloved, emotional SSSS.Gridman in the form of SSSS.Dynazenon. So from where I'm standing, all PR:TB has going for it is jingling giant-robot-shaped keys in my face. I'd hate to be so down on this when someone put their very beloved OC Mei into the show, but even she just feels like someone's Oni OC.

I deeply, painfully wished I liked anything with the words "Pacific Rim" on it more than I do. But Pacific Rim: The Black just can't manage it.

I think Mei might have some sage wisdom for us. Mei, you got anything?