Finally!  Something Good!

I try to be a good guy, and when something is commercially available, I get it from Netflix instead of torrents.  Well, usually.  But some schmuck lost or destroyed disk 4, and they are probably never going to get it replaced.  Surprisingly there are a couple of active torrents (one is insanely big, BD dumps and tons of extras (but who really needs 6 meg png files?) 27 gig is just too much.)

The show is near-is future, 2075, Earth orbit is very commercialized, and very full of junk. Our heroes work in the very lowly-regarded Debris Collection department of one of the space companies, Technora. Tanabe Ai is a young girl who just got her job with the company, and as she and her three other friends who came up with her go to their new departments, she begins to realize that her low test scores have literally landed her at the bottom.  But in spite of the weird crew of misfits she's been assigned to, she takes her work of making space safe very seriously.

Hachimaki - Hachirota Hoshino is their ace EVA guy, Fee Carmichael is the pilot of the Toy Box, a retrieval vessel with a big cargo bay that opens, for the big stuff, and a compliment of "Fishbones" bare-bones crew transport sleds for the smaller bits. Yuri Mihairokoh is another crew member, who has a side business running a kennel for people's pets, plus there's an assistant manager who is a bit of a clown, but always eager to make sure he's licking the shoes of the company superiors properly, and a manager who is thoroughly inept but very close to retirement.  Fortunately they have a temp worker secretary who is utterly by the books to keep the paperwork straight.

In 26 episodes the manage to cover a LOT of story arcs. There is a good amount of soap opera, Office politics, international politics, Space terrorism, disasters, philosophy, and a mission to Jupiter.

Some of the characters are tropes, of course, Ai is naive, but outspoken, and true to her name believes in the power of love, even when she's screaming at Hachimaki for being such a sullen lump. He has a pilot buddy who is moving up in the world, graduating from freighters to a passenger shuttle, while he's been in neutral collecting debris for the last three years. Fee is an excellent pilot, but nothing had better come between her and her cigarettes. Yuri's personal arc starts with him getting into debris collection because he and his new wife were on a shuttle that got hit by a very fast-moving bolt. She and her effects weren't found, but he's hoping to find something of hers.  He does, a Compass she was wearing around her neck, and while that helps, it's not until it gets crushed in an accident that he's finally able to let go of his grief.

The Terrorists, the Space Defense Force, don't like it that first world countries benefit the most from space resources, they want mankind out of space and the money spent on them and their problems. By odd chance, it's the crew of the Toy Box that fouls their plans again and again. But this isn't low-comedy, Saturday morning "Curses, Foiled again" plot foiling. At one point the Toy Box is destroyed on re-entry, almost taking Fee with it when a satellite designated as junk turns out to be a powered kinetic kill vehicle aimed at the big twin-wheel station that is their home. The resulting debris field will take out the other 11 stations, and pollute orbit with enough junk to basically confine mankind to the surface.

This is a show that loves space, and in spite of the politics of resource allocation in the backdrop, it unabashedly promotes the idea that humanity's future is out there, although it is a cruel and unforgiving mistress.

Yeah, I can recommend this.  I watched it straight through over the course of two days.

The Deadfish torrent is 6.84 gigs, contains just the 26 episodes in 720p, but, alas is hardsubbed.

Posted by: Mauser at 07:39 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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