

We don't see a single person speak in anything beyond generic platitudes or cryptic allusions to the various unanswered questions.Ĭharacters act in a certain way because of how it serves the plot: there's nothing to leave the viewer feeling any of them have any kind of inner life. People talk about attending school, but you don't see it happen.

Sure, the heroine has a job, but it's working at a maid café - hardly relatable if you're not into nerd culture. There's no explanation of why anyone conducts themselves in such an esoteric way in what seems to all intents and purposes to be 20th century Japan. Absolutely nothing suggests there's a world out there beyond all these mysteries within mysteries. The thing is there's nothing to the show so far beyond these bare bones. Her friends may not be all they seem, and when she passes in and out of consciousness yet again for various story-related reasons, they seem to act completely differently, changing personalities or withholding information from her. Someone means our heroine harm, possibly as retribution for something she's done.

Orion's frantic demands the heroine not let on what's happened make for an interesting aura of menace in the opening stretch, along with the shadowy figure who keeps turning up to rattle off enigmatic little bon mots from the background. It's easy to believe in as a place where magic could happen, or at least weird stuff. It's an obvious bit of fanservice for the core audience of dedicated otaku - look how fantastically wacky they all are! Don't you wish you had the balls to dress like that? - but it's genuinely distinctive, with some surprisingly subtle touches, like the soft, rich, almost watercolour palette and the strange half-circle designs you see in everyone's eyes. Only then she's accosted by Orion, a hovering, Puckish sprite who tells her he's a spirit from a parallel reality, and his trying to bridge the divide is what dislodged her memories.Īmnesia's world is a strange one recognisably contemporary, but where everyone dresses like escapees from a travelling Ren Fayre who've decided to start a visual kei band on a whim. The anonymous heroine wakes up with no idea of who she is, or where, surrounded by people professing to be friends or co-workers whom she doesn't recognise. Which is a shame, because there are things about the show that at least hint at something a good deal better than your average harem comedy, or long-running shonen show that refuses to lay down and die. Just this over-riding sense of maddeningly generic mystery, in that Something's Going On and it's terribly important, but the writers refuse to even hint at why that might be. Four episodes down the line and no character changes in any meaningful way, no secret gets revealed, intentionally or otherwise, there's no sense anything's really at stake.

Amnesia television show episodes tv#
You've all come across something, a TV show, a film, a book, that left you silently mouthing "What the hell", right? Unable to figure out what on earth was going on? Now this is okay as ideas go, as the catalyst to start building a basic framework for your story and get an audience involved, but you need some meat on them bones, son! Much as I eventually grew to hate Lost - indeed, gave up on it some way into the third season - it's not as if I couldn't see its appeal was based around more than the question of what the island was.Īmnesia (the Japanese animated show, not the psychological condition) is what happens when your story offers nothing of any interest beyond the burning question of what the hell any of it means.
