Darker Than Black

Like so many anime protagonists, Hei (or, as he calls himself, Li Shengshun) of Darker Than Black appears to be made entirely out of quirk: He's a deadly killer one minute, an affable, hapless student the next. He walks around with a team that includes a talking cat, a slouch-hatted cabbie type and a blank-eyed girl who spends most of her time touching water. He also has incredible powers over electricity. And by the end of the first five episodes of the series, that's about all we know about him: The series is more plot-and-mystery-driven than character-driven, and it's committed to keeping its secrets about the world and how it works.

In the future of Darker Than Black, an unexplained phenomenon has created a space in Tokyo known as Hell's Gate; at the same time, the stars were blotted out and replaced with "fakes," each of which corresponds with an enhanced human with a special power—gravity nullification, teleportation, transformation, elemental control and so forth. They're known as "contractors" because they all have different prices to pay whenever they use their powers: One man has to smoke a cigarette, another must take time to obsessively line up tiny rocks on a flat surface, a third has to break his own fingers. What's behind all of it isn't clear, but from the brief glimpse these opening episodes offer of Hell's Gate, it isn't exactly heaven on the other side.

The initial episodes of Darker Than Black are divided into two-episode plot arcs that have Hei and his team obliquely referencing the Syndicate they work for, then chasing down things that that Syndicate—and everyone else—wants. In the first arc, they're looking for a hotly contested cache of information about the Gate. In the second, it's the daughter of the last survivor of a Hell's Gate expedition; while he tried to keep her from it, she's become an out-of-control contractor. In the third arc, it's a former contractor who has lost her powers and who has a connection to Hei's one bit of personal business in all this noir-style object-of-desire chasing.

Slow reveals

Mystery series that set out to be coy about their central facts often fill a lot of time with repetition or silly comedy side plots. Darker Than Black doesn't bother with either: It tears straight ahead into a series of tightly focused stories that bring up information casually instead of making it the focus of the episodes. Still, there's a steep learning curve in these opening installments as more and more new concepts get thrown out: No sooner have the rules for contractors been established than the series is introducing exceptions to those rules.

The show is a bit of an exception to the rules itself: Stylistically, it feels like yet another late-generation descendant of Cowboy Bebop, with loose, hip semi-criminal protagonists, tight action sequences, a good ear for cool dialogue and—naturally—a diverse score by Yoko Kanno. But unlike a lot of the wannabes, it also has a solid vision for itself that isn't just about style. The animation has an appealingly loose feel and a lot of texture; it is a sleek, chic series, no mistake. But more importantly, it has a lot of depth, which by the time of episode five is starting to feel almost novelistic, or at least like a Raymond Chandler film adaptation.

Granted, it could still stand to slow down a little and actually introduce its characters properly, if only so the audience would have some stake in whether Hei wins or loses his battles. The first plot arc in particular isn't a hero's quest or a villain's plot so much as a sequence of all-but-random events. Hei, his opposition and his target are all so secretive and two-faced that by the end there's no telling who, if anyone, to root for. Possibly no one—Darker Than Black takes place in a fairly amoral universe, where virtually everyone with power may literally be inhuman. That tends to make it easy to stay detached from all the details of their inhumanity to each other. Still, finding out exactly what they are and why is more than enough reason to tune in for the next disc.