NOIR: one of the best shows you've never heard of
It was back in 2001 or 2002, when it was still new, that I first saw Noir. A friend and I were trying to watch all the best series out there, and when we found this one we tore through episodes as fast as we could download them. Although I now realize that we didn't really grasp more than a small portion of what was going on beneath the surface, at the time we both felt that it was an excellent series. It's remained on my "A+" list ever since, one of a handful of series that I felt were truly fantastic, but for more than six years I never got around to watching it a second time.
In the summer of 2008, someone on my friends list was asking for recommendations of series to watch. Her criteria included things like "strong women," "intrigue," and "maybe some angst." I listed off a handful of personal favorites, including Noir, which I felt fit those descriptors like a glove. I realized then that it had been a long time since I'd seen Noir, and that my memory of it was getting a little vague. So, I got out the CD-ROMs I'd burned the downloaded episodes to back in '02 and spent my next two days off marathoning the series.
The show hit me with the force of a freight train. Emotionally I was drawn in to a degree I hadn't been before. Intellectually, the 26-year-old me noticed levels of meaning that the 19-year-old me had missed, subtleties and nuances, layers and depths. There was a whole lot more going on in this show than I'd thought. I went out and rented the DVDs and watched those, uncovering new meanings in the series with the help of the better translation. Then I rented them again to show to a friend, who agreed it was awesome. Finally, I realized that I was going to wind up wasting money that way and just went ahead and bought the series boxed set, the first time other than the Farscape Starburst Editions that I'd bought an entire series on DVD. I started to show the DVDs to friends, and to loan out the boxed set to them, all of whom agreed it was awesome. I started to cruise the internet for analysis of the series, background information on the production, and yes... even for fanfic.
In short, I turned into an utterly unabashed fanboy.
Now I want to convince you, my internet friends, to watch Noir. I do this because I think you will enjoy it, knowing the ways in which your tastes coincide with my own. I do this because I love to share the stories that I enjoy with the people that I like. I do this because I know many of you have recently lost (hopefully temporarily) a show that you love, and I think this will provide some of the things that you miss from it. And I do this because my real life friends, while generally intelligent people who loved Noir when they watched it, don't do the sort of in-depth analysis that you all do. They don't dig down into the layers of meaning like you all do. They don't read into subtext and nuance like you all do. And I really, really want someone I can talk about this series at length with, about more than just the surface stuff. About the things underneath. It's a selfish desire, I don't deny it. But I think it'll be to your benefit as well.
Some of you have no experience with this medium. Perhaps this would be a good time to give it a try. Others of you have only seen examples of it you didn't like. I urge you not to judge an entire medium based on those poor examples, any more than you would judge all of film by the works of Pauly Shore or all of television by the reality shows on FOX. I guarantee that this series is not like those you've seen before, because it's not like anything I've ever seen before, and I've seen a lot. This would not be a bad gateway series for the medium, despite its complexity. There will not be a lot of confusion over divergent cultural concepts (most of the series takes place in France) and it abstains from many of the more odd or obnoxious tropes of the medium. One could easily have made this series live-action, if one had a hundred million dollar budget for practical effects and location shoots.
If you're reading this, then I know we like some of the same things. I think you'll like this, too. If I'm wrong... well, video rentals are cheap and downloads are free. It's only 26 half-hour episodes, the exactly length it was always intended to be, so it's not a huge cost in time, either. What do you really have to lose?
And now, on to the review....
Overview
What is Noir? It’s difficult to define briefly and still do it any justice. Is it an action series featuring tough female characters, and slick, stylish, jaw-dropping fight sequences? Is it a highly intelligent exercise in subtext and subtlety, in communicating the unspoken? A moving drama of pain and friendship and two young women who are willing to go through hell to save each other’s lives… and each other’s souls? A smart, well-planned mystery story full of twists and turns? A dysfunctional-yet-sweet love story? A sad, dark and ultimately heartwarming character-driven tale? An examination of issues of identity? Of love versus hate? Revenge versus forgiveness? Sin and absolution (or the lack thereof)? Guilt and atonement (or the lack thereof)? Of destiny versus free will? Is it a globetrotting adventure set in locations around the world, all rendered in loving detail and accuracy and accompanied by an incredible soundtrack?
The answer is yes, it’s any and all of those things. It can be some of those things to some people and others to others, and each member of the audience can decide what to take away from it. And all the things it can be, it does well. It’s an excellent series, one of the truly great examples of the medium and capable of being enjoyed on many different levels.
One thing that it isn’t, despite the title, is an example of what I think of when I think of the film noir genre. The most similar thing to it I can think of would probably be Luc Besson’s The Professional (a.k.a. Leon). The title instead refers to the original meaning of the word “noir” as the French word for “black”… or for the darkness.
Plot
Our story opens in Paris, with a young woman named Mireille Bouquet. Born the daughter of a prominent family on the island of Corsica, when Mireille was little she walked into the dining room to find her parents and brother dead. That was ten years ago. To avenge their murders she became an assassin, but even though she’s worked her way into the top tier of contract killers and made contacts throughout the underworld, she still isn’t any closer to figuring out who killed her family. Then one day she receives a mysterious e-mail from a girl in Japan named Yuumura Kirika, asking her to “Take a pilgrimage for the past with me.” Mireille dismisses it as nonsense until she hears the attached sound file: a music box melody she hasn’t heard since the day her family was murdered. Determined to get to the bottom of things, Mireille heads to Japan and tracks down Kirika just in time to get caught up in a firefight as a group of hitmen attack. Surprisingly, they’re not here to kill Mireille the professional assassin but instead Kirika the high school student. Even more surprisingly, Kirika defends herself with uncommon skill.
As it turns out, Kirika is an amnesiac. She had awoken in a house with no memories of her past. When she tries to remember who she is, all she can recall is “I am Noir.” She has a name she got off a student I.D. with her picture on it that she found near her bed, but the identity that goes with it is fake, a paper trail of forged documents. In a drawer she’d found a gun- which she has no idea why she knows how to use- and a pocket watch which plays the music box melody when opened. At first she’d tried to pretend she was normal, but then the hitmen started to show up trying to kill her. Running on pure instinct and the procedural memory of training she doesn’t remember getting, Kirika was able to kill them all easily… and is horrified at the lack of remorse she feels. Desperate to know who she really is, what she really is and how she got this way, Kirika went searching for information until found out about Mireille. The watch links both their pasts together, so Kirika wants them to work together to find the truth.
The last thing Mireille wants is a partner. She even warns Kirika that if they team up, Kirika will find out too much about Mireille: when it’s over, Mireille will have to silence her. But Kirika doesn’t seem to care: she needs to know the truth and she needs Mireille’s help. Finally, Mireille relents and brings Kirika back to her apartment in Paris. Teaming up under the codename Noir, they do jobs together and wait for the people who are after Kirika to come and try again. Then they hope to turn the tables on the mysterious group that’s out to kill them and get to the truth… if they can survive the attempts on their life and the missions to assassinate some of the world’s most dangerous criminals and terrorists, not to mention the travails of living together. But as the mystery deepens, as the stakes get higher, as new players enter the game and as the two assassins’ relationship with each other gets more confusing, they start to realize that they’ve caught on to something much larger than they ever imagined… and more than just their lives may be on the line.
Characters
Noir is a very character-driven series, populated with complex, morally ambiguous and emotionally damaged individuals. There are four major characters.
Mireille is the most normal of the bunch, at least on the surface. She can put on a smile and hold a conversation with the best of them, interact with people at all levels of society. She’s well-socialized, well-read, well-dressed… and dangerous. Under the class and beauty burns a cold fire of hate, hate she’s honed into a weapon. The desire for vengeance against her parents’ killers drives her. She’s dedicated her life to a vendetta without a target, and directs her anger instead at whatever lowlife she’s getting paid to kill this week. Yet despite being fueled by rage she is controlled, dispassionate, and even cold-blooded. She’s stoic and keeps her feelings hidden. I can’t really say if she’s more or less moral than the other main characters: Mireille picks the targets, and they’re always dirty in some way, always have blood on their hands. But she never makes a claim to any sort of moral superiority over other killers, rarely seems to regret taking a life, and will be the first to admit that she chose this life for herself. If this were Discworld, Mireille would be an Assassin with a capital “A”: professional and calculating, but with a certain sense of style and code of conduct. She couldn’t kill people while looking frumpy because it would be gauche. She comes from an upscale background and was trained in the old school of assassination by her uncle, one that values careful preparation, tradecraft and just a touch of panache. She prefers to do her work cleanly and with a minimum of mess, and uses her Walther P99 pistol almost exclusively, disdaining hand-to-hand combat except as a last resort. Not that she often needs anything else: she’s an absolute virtuoso with the pistol, fast and accurate to lethal effect. Mireille is also the brains of the operation. She picks whether to do a job after doing careful research to make sure that it is what it appears to be. She does the legwork to get information on the target, using her network of contacts. She usually plans the strategy she and Kirika will use based on the information she’s gathered, and she handles the arrangements for transportation and logistics. But despite having numerous contacts, Mireille has very few real friends. She keeps almost everyone at a distance, hiding her feelings behind a cheery façade. At least, until she suddenly finds herself saddled with a partner and roommate….
In contrast, Kirika’s social awkwardness is obvious. She was also alone before they teamed up, but unlike Mireille it wasn’t by choice. With no memories to work from, no cultural context and everything about herself being either a lie or unknown, she wasn’t able to connect with anyone. With no past and no identity that isn’t forged, she doesn’t have anything to build a sense of self on. She clings to the lie called “Yuumura Kirika” and that useless student ID card for lack of anything else, but she desperately wants to find the real her, the original her, the normal her. What she’s apparently been turned into deeply disturbs her: she knows that there’s something fundamentally wrong with being able to kill so easily. Part of her feels that being killed, either by their enemies or by Mireille when after their team-up is done, is what she deserves, and she rushes into danger with the fearlessness of someone with nothing to lose. Hurting and lonely, Kirika’s only source for basic human companionship is Mireille, who’s too closed off emotionally and too unwilling to let other people get close, especially ones who might be dead soon. Still, Kirika gets very emotionally invested in her partner: small kindnesses from Mireille lift her spirits considerably, and harshness or rejection hits her like a kicked puppy. Kirika, like Mireille, doesn’t tend to talk about her emotions, but you can read them easily in her eyes. Kirika has some of the most expressive eyes in anime (nothing to scoff at considering that anime places a high priority on communicating emotions to the audience through a character’s eyes… it’s one of the reasons the eyes are so big) and the degree to which she can emote using just her eyes and tone of voice is nothing short of impressive. Kirika’s body language frequently seems to be screaming, “I need a hug!” Tiny and sad, she seems entirely non-threatening… until it’s time to fight and the emotion fades from her eyes and is replaced by something else, something unfeeling and so almost reptilian. It scares her even more than it does her targets, which is quite a lot. Kirika is deadly with almost anything. She’s a crack shot with any gun she puts her hands on, from the old, small Beretta M1934 she found when she woke up to assault rifles taken off the bodies of dead enemies. And in hand-to-hand she can turn almost any seemingly harmless object into a lethal weapon. Kirika is the undisputed master of the improvised weapon, like some kind of tiny, deadlier Jackie Chan. Many of the series’ “Holy crap!” moments arise from seeing just what innocuous item she’s found a new use for. But while her knowledge of the assassin’s art is encyclopedic, her knowledge of everything else is pretty limited. She speaks multiple languages, but has never heard of Alice in Wonderland. Kirika is a strange mix of dangerous and naïve.
The two members of Noir are in some ways polar opposites-Mireille angry, driven and worldly; Kirika sad, reflective and inexperienced-and in others exactly the same. Small wonder, then, that their relationship is the very core of the series. The two fall into synch as they live and work together, but for a long time are frustratingly unable to connect: Mireille isn’t yet willing to show any vulnerability by bridging the distance and Kirika doesn’t know how to.
Things don’t get any simpler when a new player arrives on the scene, either. Chloe is another assassin, roughly the same age as Kirika, who is trying to also lay claim to the title of Noir. Somehow tied to the group that Mireille and Kirika are investigating, Chloe shows up and interferes with their lives seemingly at whim: sometimes stealing their kills out from under them or arranging to have them attacked, and other times helping them out of dangerous situations (which she may or may not have caused in the first place). Nor does she seem to expect them to hold a grudge over her constant meddling: she acts as if the three of them can be expected to all get along and hold casual conversation mere hours after sending a platoon of hitmen to try to kill the other two. (“I knew you’d win,” she tells Kirika, as if that makes it okay. She seems to have a lot of interest in Kirika. In Mireille… not so much.) Chloe clearly knows a lot more about the forces behind this than Mireille and Kirika do, but she reveals only the information she’s supposed to reveal. She seems well suited to the mysterious act, always showing up out of nowhere and then leaving suddenly without a word, ignoring any direct questions and dropping vague hints... possibly just for the enjoyment of frustrating Mireille. And while almost everyone else in the series wears normal, everyday clothes that wouldn’t seem out of place, Chloe prefers to wear a voluminous green cloak-with a high collar that sometimes covers the lower half of her face, just so she can play extra mysterious-and goes everywhere wearing shin and forearm guards and a pair of really hardcore boots. The cloak also serves to conceal the multitude of throwing knives she seems to always carry. Knives are Chloe’s weapons of choice, mostly thrown with deadly accuracy but she also has some larger daggers for close combat work. Chloe does her work silently, efficiently and without hesitation or remorse. Shepherd Book would say that Chloe “believes hard; kills and never asks why.” Chloe kills whoever she is ordered to kill without ever questioning the reasons or wondering whether or not the target deserves to die. She even kills people she likes, if that’s the mission. It’s debatable whether or not anyone’s ever told her killing is wrong. At the very least, she seems to believe any act done under the orders of the one she’s given her loyalty to must be for the greater good, and doesn’t seem to be bothered by it at all. This makes her more cold-blooded than our two protagonists, but also, in a way, more child-like. Mireille rationalizes, Kirika angsts, Chloe… is happy. She’s having fun. She’s doing what she was meant to do. And she’s doing it for her surrogate mother figure, so it must be the right thing to do. Because ultimately, Chloe acts on the will of only one person: Altena.
There’s little that I can say about Altena without revealing too much. We see her from the very first episode, but learn almost nothing about her. Yet her hand can be felt in everything that happens. She never has direct contact with Mireille and Kirika-they don’t even know she exists. She stays hidden and manipulates things from the shadows; the puppetmaster pulling all the strings, even the ones that don’t know they’re being pulled. Simultaneously loving Chloe as if she were her own child and sacrificing dozens of lives for her ends, among other horrible acts, Altena raises the question of whether or not an antagonist can be both a Complete Monster and a sympathetic Anti-Villain. The entire series is her Xanatos Gambit, and it’s brilliant and horrible and outplayed everyone. I’ve already said too much. You’ll just have to watch and see for yourself.
There are a multitude of minor characters, as well, mostly only appearing in a single episode. But despite their brief time on the screen, they’re often quite interesting. Many of the assassination targets are surprisingly well-developed characters. They may all be crooks and monsters, but some are very human. And the nameless mooks that are sent to kill Noir and get mowed down by the score often all have unique faces and voices and a surprising amount of emotion. (Even if the emotion is just “Oh crap, we are so gonna die.”) There are also other assassins besides Noir to worry about. The most notable is probably Silvana Greone-the Intoccabile-a Mafia heiress known as “the brutal princess” (a title she’s in no danger of losing to Azula) and the only person alive that Mireille fears. She’s just one of many killers lining up for a piece of our heroes: to be Noir is to be the best, and everyone wants to take your place at the top.
Qualities and Flaws
Noir is an incredible series, one of the great works of the medium. I felt so when I first saw it in 2001 and feel so even more strongly now. It’s visually impressive, highly entertaining, extremely emotional and very intelligent.
The art is not as shiny and smooth as the newer stuff, but it is incredibly detailed. Everything is rendered with loving accuracy: scenery and locales based on real locations from all across the globe, the design and action of the guns, setting-appropriate furniture and vehicles, and a myriad of background objects that most artists wouldn’t take the effort to include. Painstaking research and copious visual reference must have been needed for the sake of the visual style. There was a point in one of the episodes, a fairly unimportant establishing shot of some railroad tracks, that I just had to pause and stare at, gobsmacked: every single little piece of gravel had been drawn in full detail. Clearly, they didn’t go in for half measures.
Given how much firearms are used in the series, it’s no surprise that great pains were also taken to depict those accurately as well. Every gun shown actually exists, and the operation and disassembly is true to the actual article. The actual sound produced by each was recreated, rather than employing generic gunshot noises. And none fires more rounds than it actually holds without an opportunity for it to be reloaded. Mireille and Kirika’s aim may border on the superhuman, but the weapons are firmly rooted in reality.
The action sequences are stunning and original. In most the choreography, the staging and the atmosphere are almost balletic in their beauty, as despite the sheer quantity of violence there’s very little blood shown, giving it a sense of artistry and grace. Many of the fights are jaw-dropping in their creativity and sheer badass factor, especially when Kirika finds some new thing to use as a weapon or some new trick to get the drop on the enemy. (Mireille may get the job done the most efficiently, but Kirika is the most fun to watch.) I saw things in Noir that I’d never seen before, although many of them have since appeared in later works. There are even a few instances of Kirika taking a pistol into melee combat, mixing gunplay and martial arts even if it’s a long way short of a true gun kata, a year before the film Equilibrium popularized the idea. And fights happen fast. There’s a shot in one of the episodes which can’t be more than ten seconds long, but which simply must be rewound and rewatched a few times to fully appreciate, because with two major characters both on-screen at the same time fighting a horde of bad guys, there’s so much going on that it’s impossible to follow it all at once. Those who come for the action won’t be disappointed.
The plot is smart and well-executed. I often complain these days about how many shows that are centered around a mystery and driven by unanswered questions and big reveals are poorly planned and don’t decide the answers ahead of time-they make it up as they go and the result is that they’re inconsistent, riddled with contradictions and revelations that are shocking only because they don’t make any sense. Noir is not one of those. The series was planned in advance, and remains consistent throughout. Almost anything that doesn’t seem logical at the time makes perfect sense in retrospect once you know the whole truth. The mysteries of Mireille and Kirika’s pasts, of the organization hunting them, of the origins of Noir, all reveal themselves a little bit at a time, layer by layer. Many of the revelations are shocking and completely unexpected, but they always make perfect sense in retrospect. The clues were always there, we just couldn’t see it… sometimes simply because we didn’t want to see it. And Altena’s plans are masterfully executed, yet understated and never exposited on. I’ll admit that it took me more than one viewing to truly grasp her master stroke… the series doesn’t explain it to your face, instead expecting you to be able to connect the dots yourself.
Noir is a series that expects a lot of its audience and doesn’t insult their intelligence. Close attention and careful viewing is a must. Many things are implied rather than exposited. Characters often don’t express their thoughts and feelings out loud or in voiceover and sometimes can’t even let it show on their face, so you have to read what’s going on inside their head from their eyes and the subtle undertones of their voices. (I always recommend watching anime in the original language with subtitles instead of dubbed-it’s the voice the original creators of the work chose, Japan has better standards of voice acting overall, American voice actors record their lines alone while Japanese voice casts record theirs together and play off each other, and the dub sometimes changes lines to fit the mouth movements or dumb it down for a wider audience-but that goes even more so for Noir than for other series. The dub’s voice actors are tolerable, but they just plain did not and could not put the sort of nuance into their dialogue that the originals did, and in this series nuance is key. I can’t stress this enough: use subtitles.) Noir is a series that makes much use of subtext, and not in the way that fandom usually uses the word (although there’s that, too) but the actual definition of subtext: another layer of meaning hidden beneath the obvious. Dialogue and actions often have multiple interpretations. A lot more is often being communicated than is being said, if you’re willing to dig deep enough to find it. Getting into these characters’ heads takes effort, but is also rewarding. Symbolism and themes range from the obvious to the subtle, from the simple to the complicated, and each viewer can choose how deeply to dig and enjoy the show on many different levels. After five or six viewings of this series, I’m finally starting to feel like I might actually have peeled back all the layers and grasped all the themes, but the next rewatch may well result in me discovering something new. But perhaps the great thing is that you don’t necessarily have to dig into the deeper layers to enjoy the series. If one so chooses, one can just look at what’s on the surface and still find a very pretty show with lots of action and emotional drama set to really good music.
Dramatically, the story is quite effective. As I noted above, it’s character-based, and the characters are complex and interesting individuals, many carrying a lot of emotional damage. Their needs and motivations drive the plot, and their complicated and dysfunctional interactions with each other are at the center of many of the conflicts. Mireille and Kirika’s relationship is the very heart of the series, and key to the myth arc in ways I can’t explain without spoiling everything. Watching their partnership go from a tentative team-up to a very screwed-up sort of friendship to what I can only describe as love is a painful and touching process. (The show allows the audience to decide for themselves whether or not that love is platonic or not, but it’s definitely love. I know which way I’d vote-the subtext is practically text, in my opinion, and I’m not usually one of those people who gets all worked up about supposed “subtext”-but those who would prefer to think otherwise are given the option.) But it’s not just the relationship between them that tugs the heartstrings. Individually they go through a lot of emotional experiences. As the name would imply, Noir is frequently a dark, sad story, but not unrelentingly so. They face sorrow and loss. They make difficult decisions, their commitment to each other and their search for the truth tested again and again. Revelations bring unpleasant truths that they’d rather not believe. It’s a rare series that puts its protagonists through quite this much emotional cruelty. Even my fairly stoic self teared up a little bit at times. But all that suffering is building towards something heartwarming and triumphant.
The soundtrack is impressive. And I don’t generally give that much thought to the soundtrack of a series, so if I’m talking it up, you know it must really be something. It’s not the equal of the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack-I doubt any soundtrack ever will be, given how integral music was to the mindset of that series, the number of styles represented, and the sheer awesomeness of Yoko Kanno-but it’s the next best thing to it. Rather than cranking out a few generic background tracks to be reused over and over, composer Yuki Kaijura custom-crafted a variety of rather unique pieces of music. The opening theme, “Coppelia’s Coffin”, at first seems like it’s too upbeat for a series this dark… until you read the lyrics and remember who Coppelia was. The main action theme is “Salva Nos”, a techno-rock piece whose lyrics are a Catholic Mass in the original Latin, which is appropriate in a way you’ll have to watch the series to understand, and which is quite badass. Each major character also gets their own theme. Kirika’s is “Canta Per Me”, a love song in Italian full of sadness and longing. Mireille gets “Corsican Corridor”, a more energetic and classic instrumental. “Chloe” is just the right mix of perky and unsettling to suit its namesake. There are many more, but those are some of the key pieces. They didn’t go for half measures on the music any more than they did with the art: the series is a feast for the senses.
Noir also appeals to the feminist in me by not only having a cast of so many strong women, but by having much less fan service (as gratuitous T&A is called in anime fandom) than most of the series I’ve seen. Hell, the box art for the DVDs has more fan service than the series itself. There are no absurdly-revealing outfits. No one bends over for the camera. There is no bouncing or jiggling. (Kirika doesn’t even have anything to jiggle. She’s petite and wiry, all awkward limbs and fast-twitch muscle, about what you’d expect for a highly athletic and underdeveloped teenager rather than a fantasy object.) Skirts stay in place, no matter what sort of acrobatic movements the wearer undertakes. Nudity occurs very rarely. There isn’t a lot of sexualization of the characters-even when there’s subtext being piled on, it doesn’t present opportunities for voyeurism. Unlike most of the anime that gets shown on American TV, the target audience of Noir isn’t hormonal adolescents but rather adults age 18-40, and it’s a series that clearly knows the difference between having “maturity” and merely having “mature content”.
However, Noir is not without its flaws. There’s less fan service than the average, but there is still some. Mostly this is in the form of showing some leg, and the characters (Mireille especially) sometimes wear a skirt or shorts even when it’s not particularly practical. Yes, Mireille makes good use of the fact that she can walk casually away from the scene of a hit and nobody would for an instant think that such a well-dressed woman could possibly be suspicious, but there’s times when it’s not an issue and she really should have gone more utilitarian. And we know she has more practical boots than the ones she’s usually wearing. (Both the security professional and the Shadowrun player in me want to scream, “Gloves! Masks! Body armor! You should be wearing these things!” but not very loudly: it’s not a procedural or a crime drama but an epic tale, and suspension of disbelief is a must. Anyway, facial expression is too important to this series to go covering up the protagonists’ faces.) There are spots where the art is not up to the usual quality. And since they needed three character designers to keep up with the sheer quantity of extras the visual styles aren’t always consistent, but there’s only one episode where it’s really noticeable. There are also a couple points where the sheer quantity of incoming fire that manages to miss the main characters starts to strain credulity. And there are a few other things that bother me. These are all small flaws amid the whole of the series, but they’re still flaws.
Also, as much as it pains me to admit it, Noir might not be a show everyone can enjoy. Not only does it, as I mentioned earlier, expect the viewer to watch closely and figure things out on their own, but it’s also very morally ambiguous. Yes, Mireille and Kirika only ever take contracts on people who pretty much have it coming, but they’re still killing people for a living, and the series examines both the psychological cost and the ethical dilemmas this presents. (The president of a company that arranges coup d'états for profit may not deserve our sympathy, but what of the daughter who’s left fatherless? Should a war criminal who’s now repentant and trying to atone be killed to give the surviving victims satisfaction?) That on top of the sadness would make it a tough watch for many. There isn’t a lot of humor in the series, either. Certainly there are moments of levity, some chuckles. It’s not unrelentingly dark by any means. (And if your sense of humor is pretty morbid, you’ll probably get some amusement out of Kirika’s creative methods.) But there aren’t a lot of laughs. It’s a show where things are usually dead serious, and people are often dead.
But despite all that, I still strongly believe that this show is well worth watching. I think that if you do watch it, you will enjoy it, even with all the emotional gut-punches it gives the audience. I think that visually, aurally, emotionally and intellectually, I’ve rarely had this satisfying an experience from a show, and I think if you get even half the enjoyment out of it that I do, that will still be more than enough to justify taking the time to give it a try.