Darker Than BLACK 01 - Hello…again…
Oh boy - my first-ever anime blog post! This is exciting stuff - and on a series I think is gonna be awesome. It’s also already been blogged to death, but you know what? There’s no stopping me.
After the initial very short scene of a girl standing in a lake at night and then a lone telescope against the dark sky, we open on a man in a suit running along the rooftops of city buildings, trying to keep away from the police who are following him in their squad cars below. When he stops for a moment, a few officers burst out of a door behind him onto the roof. The pursued man begins to glow and tosses one of the cops into the air, via his wacky mind powers, before leaping into the sky himself. Cops follow, including one especially good-looking woman in a Porsche. Nice touch.
Our guy touches down a bit later, exhausted, and then proceeds to break a few of his fingers, presumably to keep himself conscious. Suddenly - a voice! And then - a cat! He realizes he’s been followed (can’t get anything past our boy) but as he turns to run we see he isn’t alone on the rooftop. He’s joined by another creepy dude, dressed in black and wearing a mask. Evil-doers, begin crapping yourselves…now.
The man in the mask gives the other guy (Rui) the what-for (including a slap across the face that surprised me - and Rui, too, to judge by the look on his face) and then squeezes his face until he dies. Oh yeah, and there’s a blind chick acting as the look out (no, seriously) and a deep male voice who I guess is the Boss Man but the man in the mask (Hei) ignores him.
We get some history from the police woman with the Porsche, Kirihara. Ten years ago there was an “incident” that necessitated the building of a big wall, “Hell’s Gate.” What happened? She doesn’t know and neither do we, but now there’s a wall. “Contractors” have super powers and “dolls” are psychic (our blind friend is a doll, I assume).
Cue awesome OP.
Then the cops meet to discuss their failure to apprehend the Contractor Rui…blah blah blah…France…blah blah blah…some chick is missing.
We also find out that the general public doesn’t know about Contractors, just rumors about monsters and robots. This is the story, Kirihara tells us, of a Contractor called BK201 and his contract with her and her fellow employees of the Department of Public Peace.
Then we meet Lee-san, an adorable Chinese exchange student with floppy black hair, as he gets settled in his new residence. His landlady mistakes him for a service rep from the electronics store and he helps her out by bashing her TV a few times to fix it. Thanks, buddy. But actually, it works, and it only sparks a little and everyone’s happy.
As the landlady - who’s spunky and loud and I love her - takes him up to his room he sees his neighbor. She’s hot and he likes that, but she rushes off without barely a nod in hello and the landlady warns him not to get too friendly. She’s wearing a pair of ridiculous purple sunglasses and a long red dress, so I’m thinking prostitute.
Turns out, I’m sort of right. She works at Club Pinky and, lo and behold, who are her clients that evening? Yup, two of the cops. They have a little fun chasing tail - one more than the other, clearly - but eventually put two-and-two together and realize who this chick is: the girl who’s missing who they’re looking for! Whoa!
She runs, they chase, she runs into Lee-san in the park with his telescope. (Be still my heart!) He helps her out by kissing her so the cops won’t find her (good plan). It works, of course, but then she runs off again. As he watches her leave, his face gets very hard - there’s more to my adorable Lee-san than just a goofy amateur astronomer. Next she gets assaulted in an alley by a guy named Jean who she thought was her friend. Nope.
Who saves her ass? Lee-san!
Unfortunately, when they run off together, the guy shows up again, this time walking out of a pillar-thing on the bridge. Literally. The chick says something about “Light from the Russell Effect” (wait, I thought his name was Jean…). There’s a scuffle and Lee-san’s telescope is broken (I wept) and then Lee-san himself is tossed off the bridge into the path of a moving train.
When she wakes up, Jean and his buddies are sitting around a table watching Jean line up little rocks or something in neat rows. He makes a little speech about how it has to be perfect and it’s really hard to do (yeah right), then he throws half of it on the floor. I think he’s making it harder than it has to be, personally.
The chick realizes she’s in some trouble and tries to escape. Shockingly, the door won’t open. It appears the bad men know how to use the lock. Cut to the blind girl again, sitting with her feet in a pond. Cut back to a drippy faucet. It looks like our girl can “see” what the water “sees” by touching it. Sweet.
There’s a flash of light and the door opens and the chick can escape. She runs away, barefoot in the rain, and runs into…yup, Lee-san. She collapses into his arms (I would, too) and the episode closes with him holding her and the same hard, creepy look on his face.
As a first episode, I loved it. It raised enough questions to keep me interested and answered enough of them to keep me from getting frustrated. The art looks great, the music is wonderful, and I’m in love with Lee-san (and his dark side). This is definitely one I’m going to keep watching and I’m excited to see where the story is heading.
I don’t want to make too many guesses at this point, but I think it’s safe to say that the shocks of electricity, the cat, the blind girl, Lee-san and the Hei are all connected. I think Lee-san probably is Hei, but let’s wait and see how it all unfolds.
Next time: Lee-san and the chick canoodle a little bit and the cops get pwned hardcore.
