Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

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Somewhere on Mars, in a sci-fi future, the android Rouge Redstar [Yume Miyamoto] and her human partner Naomi Ortmann [Tomoyo Kurosawa] hunt down nine of Rouge’s own kind, a band of superpowered “immortals” that present a threat too great to let lie.

So says Metallic Rouge‘s summary, at any rate. I’m not sure you’d get much of that at all from the show’s first episode. Rouge is the latest in a long, proud lineage of sci-fi anime that just drop you head-first into things from the start of their first episode and leave filling in the gaps of just what is actually going on to you, the viewer. This can make them a bit disorienting to watch, especially to anyone not used to this storytelling style, but they’ve remained a present force in anime for decades. Even now, we tend to get one or two per year. (Last year, continuing into this very season, it was SynDuality: Noir. The most recent I covered in any detail was Vivy: Flourite Eye’s Song, not exactly a shining example of the form.) That kind of staying power comes from somewhere, and in the case of this particular sort of sci-fi, it’s from the genre’s ability to filter contemporary social problems through the lens of speculative fiction—itself a foundational purpose of sci-fi in general—and combine it with a sense of intrigue descended from film noir. Not for nothing, Naomi appears to be some kind of detective, with Rouge as her naïve but well-meaning assistant.

The setting has a fair bit of noir-y ambiance as well, with the rain-soaked Martian city that our story takes place in recalling the settings of genre classics like Ergo Proxy. The dominant art styles have changed in the past twenty years, so it’s not quite as heavy on the shadow as that show, but it’s at least speaking the same language. If we’re talking aesthetics though, one thing very much sets Metallic Rouge apart. Its very strong, obvious toku influence. I’ll admit I’m out of my wheelhouse here—I’m not a toku watcher, having perhaps not ascended to that level of otaku just yet—but the combat forms that some androids, including Rouge herself, can assume are definitely intentionally reminiscent of your Kamen Riders and such. In the final stretch of the episode, that influence is put to work in a pretty spectacular fight scene, where Rouge takes on the violet, toku armored “Gladiator” form of a singer android named Sarah Fitzgerald [Yuu Shimamura], herself one of the aforementioned immortals.

About Sarah; Metallic Rouge‘s actual plot is, as mentioned, fairly obscure. We’re dropped smack-dab in the middle of things in this first episode, and hit with a barrage of jumbled-up proper nouns and unelaborated-upon plot threads. Rouge seems to be living with Sarah, taken in, apparently-amnesiac, after the two met in a literal alley. Except Rouge’s entire situation here is some sort of deep cover thing; she’s taking orders from Naomi, controlling a talking bird-drone, and keeps tabs on Sarah.

The substance that keeps androids alive—Nectar, also usable by humans as a powerful drug—is involved, too. You have to straighten all of this out yourself, the storytelling is fragmented and seems deliberately obfuscated. Why that’s so is as yet unclear, but it’s not rare for this genre. The only thing we know is that all of this comes to a head in the episode’s last few minutes, where Rouge and Sarah fight. Not without the egging-on of a mysterious Joker-like figure who, one imagines, will be another major force going forward.

It’s too early to draw many conclusions about the show’s narrative or world, but it does seem to be actively attempting to set up dominos that will only really start falling much later on. That’s a nice feeling to open a series on, even if I’m sure it will unfortunately lose some people in the process, and if Rouge is great anything, it’s making you wonder where all this could be going. All told, this is a solid premiere, and it’s very distinct against the backdrop of the rest of the season. I don’t like to just drop my premiere impressions writeups into a solid “watch this” or “don’t watch this” box, but I do think this one is worth checking out.

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