Ergo Proxy – Balancing Act

Production

Full disclosure, I did read a few excerpts of reviews for Ergo Proxy before writing my own. More specifically professional reviews that came out at the time it was first released. One of the common threads is that the visuals are universally praised. And this is how I know I won’t make it as a professional. Where we watching the same series???

Look, the character designs and some of the backgrounds are very nice. The AutoReivs are also all really well designed and interesting to look at. They are intricate and striking. Re-l’s day after raccoon smokey eye look is pretty much iconic and everyone that has seen it will recognize it for years afterwards. And the art style is nice enough. Actually, it is very good, just not my very favourite.

However, the visuals are drastically inconsistent. There is at least one shot per episode where you got to ask yourself. oh my, what happened there? And when they get bad, they get really bad. Angles and distance make characters look like their bone structure had morphed and details go straight out the door. The Proxys seem dull compared to the robots, although I will say that the mask is very effective. And a lot of the show takes place in barren wastelands so there go the interesting backgrounds.

The animation is pretty good though and remains fluid throughout the show.

Finally, there are those colours. Now there is a narrative reason for Ergo Proxy to be sort of desaturated. Namely, there is no sun. Also, I figure that the dingy colour gradient is meant to heighten the mood and created that good ol cyberpunk aesthetic. I’m not sure about when it came out, in 2006, but by now this specific palette is something I have seen so many times that I just found it dull. There is one episode that takes place in a sort of dreamscape where the palette is just back to regular normal colours and it was so refreshing.

Actually, now that I write this, I guess I can’t argue that the colours didn’t do their job! You do get the feel for the suffocating and slightly hopeless situation of the characters. It’s just not that interesting to look at.

Finally, the voice acting is very theatrical. I prefer the Japanese version by far but even there you can hear how deliberate the line delivery is. It sounds like acting. In this case, though, I think it’s a good thing.

Story & Characters

Ok. so I’m going to go into spoilers but before I do let me try to summarize my experience without any details. Ergo Proxy is a tale with some interesting ideas and a lot of lofty themes in the vein of classic dystopian sci fi. It’s overstuffed with allegories, some wittier than others. And it chooses to explore those themes and ideas by concentrating on the one everyman character that becomes super awesome and gets the girl.

Basically, there is a lot that I really liked about Ergo Proxy. Nothing about it is particularly new but it’s an ambitious show and it succeeded in some tricky and impressive ways. Also, the OP is fantastic. But for me, Ergo Proxy fell short in a lot of ways. And its biggest drawback, in my opinion, was to really focus the story on Vincent’s personal experience turning a large-scale social-political musing into a generally mundane hero’s journey with limited scope.

And NOw We Spoil!

If you want to avoid details and revelations about the plot of Ergo Proxy, you can skip this section. A lot of Ergo Proxy is presented as a mystery so if you haven’t seen it, there is reason to want to avoid spoilers.

Here is the actual plot of Ergo Proxy. In the latter half of the 21st century, humans discover a new type of fuel that can create a lot more energy but isn’t all that stable. Of course, a disaster that leads to a complete ecological collapse happens, rendering Earth uninhabitable by humans and shrouding the sky in eternal smog so the sun can’t shine through. The tragedy takes out 85% of the human race and part of the remaining humans exile themselves on a spaceship called Boomerang. (I assume cause they are planning to come back!)

From space, the remaining humans create the Proxy Project. They put together Proxys which are highly evolved biological machines. They are humanoid but essentially super-powered and immortal due to the presence of magical cells called Amrita. They aren’t magical in the series, they just aren’t explained. Amrita is a Sanskrit word for immortality. The cells are however vulnerable to high-frequency electricity (high-frequency something…), the pulse of the awakening (more on that later) and natural sunlight. I don’t know what happened to the humans that didn’t make it to the ship. Presumably, bad times!

The programmed goal of all Proxys is to go back on earth and create a series of enclosed ecosystems (domes) and seed them with cloned humans in an effort to reset the Earth’s ecosystem. More or less like fertilizer. Other than setting up the liveable domes and getting those mini colonies to work, the Proxys are free to create whatever type of society they want and pretty much do what they please. They are also fully sentient and emotional beings but they do mention a few times being “programmed”.

The official mission statement is that the proxies are to create these civilizations and await the rebirth of the Earth, at which time the space humans will return and everyone will live happily ever after. The new humans (called pseudo humans) are also a bit of a backup should the project fail and can serve as humanity’s second wave. There is also another backup in the form of the Cogito virus which gives AI a soul. That way if all organic life fails on Earth, some semblance of humanity can live on in machines.

The problem is that proxies realize that the pseudo humans are infertile and their populations can only be replenished through growing more in pods, powered by the proxies themselves. Moreover, Proxy one discovers that the real plan had always been for the pseudo humans to be infertile. In fact, as soon as the planet recovers enough for sunlight to once again shine through, it will jump-start a preinstalled protocol in all proxies called the Pulse of the Awakening which is essentially an autodestruct sequence. After the proxies are gone, the pseudo humans will no longer be able to reproduce and die out within a generation, leaving behind a nice clean planet for the humans to come back to, complete with all this advanced technology to make things easier.

When hearing that, Proxy one gets rather miffed and creates a copy of himself called Ergo Proxy (I think therefore I am) whose mission is to destroy everything and exact revenge on the humans upon their return. Unfortunately for Proxy one, Ergo Proxy is also a feeling creature who is unable to cope with the weight of his knowledge and mission so he decides to lock away his memories and attempts to just live as a normal human.

Ok, so why did I explain all that? Well because it’s a bit convoluted through the series but you can understand it easily if you pay attention. Also, when you flatten out the narrative like that, in the series you get it through little non-linear bits of information as Ergo rediscovers his memories, you can see that the themes are pretty obvious. There’s of course the notion of divinity and man’s seemingly instinctive need for faith and something greater. To the proxies, the space humans are gods, to the pseudo humans the proxy are and in both cases, they are literally their creators.

There’s also the exploration of sentience. I think therefore I am is present in every aspect of the series. There’s a repeated theme of finding meaning in existence, a raison d’être, and whether that meaning is something that comes from without or from within. Whether it is inherently existent, given to you by someone else or something you create for yourself.

Heck, even the domes are independent critiques of social-economical systems. Smileland being a traditional capitalist dream where working hard will grant you any wish and the appearance of happiness and prosperity is as important as actual happiness. Rondeau by contrast seems to modelled on a greek city-state with a collective of European philosophers ruling over it.

Then there’s the fact that upon realizing that the humans are infertile, a number of proxies called them failed creations and decided to just let their domes die out. The implications in that are pretty wide-ranging and pessimistic.

And these are just some of the main themes, there are more coiled in there and more than a few messages. Maybe it went over my head, but you see, I found most if not all of the themes to be explored in only the most superficial way. And that’s where I took issue.

If you want to get literal and pedantic about it, there are a lot of plot holes or just confusing elements about Ergo Proxy. The humans’ plan is a house of cards and they could have avoided so many problems so easily. Why make the proxies emotional? Why give them free will? Why not make them autodestruct when they find out the truth or when they wish harm upon humans? Why not let the humans reproduce and just have everyone with Amrita cells so they all die out in the sun? Why try to restart Earth instead of colonizing a planet with an already liveable atmosphere? Why the Cogito virus…

The Cogito virus is the only one that bothers me because it’s essentially Blade Runner and they kind of drop that thread in the first third. I wanted to see more of that. As for the rest, it doesn’t matter. At least not to me. A lot of dystopian fiction asks the audience to make some pretty big concessions to the plot. Because the stories aren’t really about the events, it’s about the ideas those events illustrate. And I think that’s swell.

Unfortunately, the balance wasn’t there. None of these ideas get explored that much, and we get a bunch of events that don’t always make the point they are going for. Rondeau is run by a council of four AutoReivs (androids) named Derrida, Lacan, Husserl and Berkeley. It’s easy to think that they would be imbued with the philosophies of their namesakes. That’s amazing. First, the idea of a robot without an independent will, being a philosopher, in and of itself brings up so many questions and possibilities. It’s a very interesting idea. Second, that is a very specific and deliberate group. And it would be really interesting to see how their ideas would apply to governing, together! However, aside from Lacan whose influence can be seen (somewhat) in the policing of the city. I really couldn’t see the other’s influence at all. And Berkeley is such an odd man out!

From what I saw of the series, I couldn’t tell you if the authors picked four names at random, only used the basic defining principles of these men, picked them for something other than their philosophical theories or pricked them specifically for those theories. That’s not explored. I can’t tell you why the pseudo humans decided to immediately eliminate any Androids that show signs of the Cogito virus or how anyone feels about that decision. I can’t tell you if there are any organized religions in this new world and if their dogma mirrors the events of the story. I can’t really tell you what anyone thinks about the themes of the story only what Vincent feels about his situation.

I can’t even tell you why Proxy one was the only Proxy to rebel. Was he special? Did he have information that others didn’t? Is it a Christian analogy? Did he fall from grace through knowledge?

I can’t tell you any of those things but I can tell you about all the people that got slaughtered through the show. I can tell you that Re-l is a super cool character that I liked but is also a basic though girl archetype and you could remove her more or less entirely from the story and it would just impact the fact that Vincent doesn’t get a girl at the end. The basic story can remain the same.

Ergo Proxy is not a bad show. Look at how much it made me write and think. And I’m cutting myself off. I could go on. Easily. But it also had the potential to give me so much more just by fleshing a few of these elements out.

You might like this anime if:

You wanted an anime version of Balde Runner and didn’t like the last one! You like speculative science fiction but with a lot of action.

I save all my screencaps on my Pinterest and you can find more there if you are interested. But I still like to show you a few in the post. If you’re like me, screencaps are something that really helps you decide to watch an anime or not.