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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Planetes

  
 
Mysterious Transfer Student
21:21 / 10.05.07
This delightful show is the ideal means to build bridges with your friend who loves shows like Firefly for the drama, comedy and romance, but won't watch anime because it's full of big-eyed schoolgirls, crummy music and dumb robots. If you know such a person - or are one - prepare to love Planetes.

2075, and the Earth is increasingly dependent on space commerce for its resources. With orbital and lunar colonisation in full swing, the vast quantities of junk and waste surrounding the Earth are potentially deadly hazards to shipping; even the tiniest screw moving at escape velocity can put a hole in a passenger ship. Companies like the Technora Corporation delegate the safe disposal of such junk to their Debris Section, but needless to say low-orbit garbage collection is not a prestigious business and the cruelly nicknamed 'Half Section' (having as they do half the usual budget and staff) have to struggle by on meagre resources, enduring the contempt of the rest of the company.

Into Half Section comes Ai Tanabe, an idealistic young Japanese, new to space travel and bubbling with gratingly naive ideas about justice, hard work and the power of love to save the world and everyone in it. Immediately inducted into the crew of the garbage scow Toy Box, she's partnered with Hachirota 'Hachimaki' Hoshino, an abrasive young premature burnout secretly nurturing dreams of owning his very own spaceship - still the preserve of billionaires. Hachi's a boy racer obsessed with speed, power and overcoming limits, devoid of social graces and manners, but seemingly basically decent. His and Tanabe's not atypically clashing relationship is the heart of the series and the conflict between his ambitions and his affections makes Hachi one of the most convincing male leads in anime.

What really makes this show is the realism. Space travel, everyday as it is, remains a slow, complicated and perennially deadly business. To get to the Moon takes three days; spend too long in space and the medical complications, if they don't kill you, will ensure you never set foot on Earth again. We're a long way from the magical plot-solvent science of Star Trek, something underlined by the show's politics. Earth's resources remain monopolised by the rich nations and, under the guidance of the treaty organisation INTO (a cold-bloodedly cynical, worryingly credible amalgam of NATO, the UN and the IMF) space is set to be carved up just the same. Opposing INTO is the Space Defense Front, a Greenpeace-meets-Al Qaeda guerilla group bent on using terror to dissuade Earth from carrying its unsustainable standard of living into the solar system. The project that consumes the second half of the series, the immensely costly and grand effort to send the first humans to Jupiter, is the focus for this conflict - and for Hachi's dreams and fears.

But characterisation is what we love most about any series, and Planetes has it in spades. Hachimaki and Tanabe are wonderful, truly rounded leads, lovable and infuriating. Joining them are melancholic Russian crewman Yuri Mikhailokhov, chain-smoking pilot queen Fee Carmichael (a proud social leper in the oxygen-deprived environment of space), spineless office yes-men Myers and Ravie and scarily taciturn temp Edelgard. And Hachi's space-dog of a dad Goro Hoshino, sexy, intense Claire Rondo, overclass creep Colin Clifford and the mighty Gigalt Gangaragash are just a few of the terrific characters that this series serves up, each perfectly portrayed.

A personal note: This show reduces me to tears occasionally with the damn title sequence. It's a beautiful, concise evocation of the heroism of space travel accompanied by the most ecstatic opening song since Vision of Escaflowne, and the subtle variations in the visuals as the series progresses are a commentary on the drama in their own right. Watch Planetes once for the plot, twice for the characters, three times for the detail. You'll find it's worth it.
 
 
Seth
22:03 / 10.05.07
I've had this for months and haven't got round to it. It's highly likely to be the next show that pin and I burn through in a day though.
 
 
Ness
16:05 / 11.10.07
I somehow missed the September launch but animecentral has started up on Sky digital channel 199 and is showing Planetes, among others. You can catch episode one from this Friday and then nightly.

http://www.animecentral.com/

edit: cough, of course by Friday I mean Saturday.
 
 
Ness
09:58 / 12.10.07
Uuuuh I'm an idiot. Episode 1 was on the 9th. I should go back to watching anime on the web since TV schedules are obviously too complicated for me.
 
 
Seth
16:27 / 29.10.07
I've had this show for months and months and have only just got round to seeing the first five episodes. I'm aware it's early days so far... while the characters are great and the humour is often nicely done the writer's hand can be seen in the plotting of each episode a little too much. The science behind it is ace, though. I'll finish it and post my thoughts once the whole thing is done.
 
 
Seth
15:55 / 06.11.07
Two episodes on from that last post and I've been introduced to the pros and cons of the Moon's gravity... the pros for visitors (Moon Ninja!), and cons for natives (the twelve year old Lunarian whose organs can't support her size). A fantastic two episode riff on an apsect of physics that often gets ignored in sci-fi.
 
 
Seth
00:44 / 30.11.07
Done.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course I bloody cried at the end. Fantastic series.

More to come when it isn't quarter to three in the morning. You copy?
 
 
Mysterious Transfer Student
04:30 / 30.11.07
I copy, Big Tank.

(You want Gigalt Gangaragash-sensei to give you a nickname, and you want it now.)
 
 
Seth
22:13 / 24.02.08
The Guardian reckons we need a Half Section:

The amount of debris orbiting the Earth has reached a critical level. Old satellite parts, solar panels and the odd astronaut's lost glove now pose serious risks to space missions. A report from the International Association for the Advancement of Space Safety is calling for stringent international laws to be brought in urgently to avert a tragedy.

The threat posed by orbiting debris can only be allayed by extending civil aviation standards into space, says the report, which is to be presented to the United Nations in April. 'Failure to act now to regulate space to protect property and human life would be pure folly,' says the association's director, Tommaso Sgobba. Professor Richard Crowther, who is representing the UK at a UN space safety meeting in Vienna, agrees: 'Eventually binding international civil aviation style laws will have to come.'

Last week, the United States courted an international row after shooting down a disabled spy satellite, saying its fuel could cause serious damage if it crashed to Earth. Russia, however, claimed that the operation was a US cover-up to test its anti-satellite weapons.

According to the space agency Nasa, there are now 9,000 pieces of orbiting junk, weighing a total of more than 5,500 tonnes: old rocket launchers, tools and instruments dropped by astronauts, and pieces of exploded spacecraft. Examples include a glove lost by astronaut Ed White during a 1965 space walk, a camera that Michael Collins let slip in space in 1966 and a pair of pliers that an International Space Station astronaut recently let slip through their fingers.

Space junk varies in size from tiny bolts and screws to huge lumps of fuselage and are to be found in two main regions: low Earth orbit, a few hundred miles above Earth, and geostationary orbit, 22,300 miles up, where communication satellites are programmed to hover above the planet.

In low Earth orbit, pieces of debris pose particular problems. They could strike manned spacecraft and lead to fatal depressurisation, space experts warn. In 1991, a space shuttle had to carry out an emergency seven-second burn of its engines to avoid being struck by part of a Russian Cosmos satellite.

Low-orbiting debris also poses a risk to Earth itself. In 2006, pieces of a Russian spy satellite burnt up in the atmosphere, passing perilously close to a Latin American Airbus carrying 270 passengers over the Pacific.

To date, only one person has been injured by space debris, however: an Oklahoma woman who was hit in the shoulder by a piece of a Delta rocket's fuel tank, but who was uninjured by this extraterrestrial attack.

The problem, according to the Association for the Advancement of Space Safety report, is that up to 20 countries are now able to launch objects into space - but very few of these have rigid safety protocols. Nor is the problem of space debris confined to near Earth, it adds. Satellites in geostationary orbit are supposed to be moved farther into space after they become defunct - but often that obligation is not met.

More than 200 dead satellites now litter this vital part of space. Within 10 years that number could increase fivefold, warns the report. The resulting chaos could lead to serious damage or loss of a spacecraft.

'Unfortunately we may have to wait for something to happen, perhaps a big near miss, before people realise we can't go on as we are,' Crowther said.

...which is where we begin in the first episode, I believe.
 
  
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