Reviews

I'm just going to state it outright. This show is still one of the top three worst shows I've seen even after deciding to finish it to see if it got better. You could literally skip 80-90% of this shows content and still understand some of the main messages like: your online life can affect your real life, online friends are not equal to an in real life friend, and how new technology changes the world so quickly, etc; Those are just some messages that I took from the show. Basically, the majority of scenes are filler, no matter what other viewers try to say; there was no need for most of them; this show could've got the same messages across in half the episodes.

Also, the characters are so annoying. I don't care if characters are highly developed because that's not a necessary component for an anime to be good, but at least make them likable. Honestly, I made the right decision at first by not finishing this show after viewing it at a club meeting. I should've left it as a dropped anime, but at least I skipped most of it and got the messages still so it didn't waste too much of my time. If you want something good with some Psychological stuff watch Psycho-Pass.

Edit:I should probably add more to this review since I didn't really add much when I first wrote it.

This anime is really not as deep as it's made out to be. As I already said, so many of the scenes were pointless still shots; way too many seemed to be there just for suspense and they helped make the show into an abomination because they were used rather than useful scenes that could actually improve the show and advance the plot, and actually took away from the show.

Also, there's no reason to care about the characters. Lain is basically just a pretty emotionless girl most of the time and somehow she gets some great power to control the world through the wired for no good reason; there's not even just a given reason like in harem anime when the protagonist has some really powerful skill that no-one else does (at least the descriptions give you the assumption for them). Every other character just didn't really do anything of importance.

Overall, I think you know where I'm going. If this show didn't try so hard to seem deep and appear to have so many good messages, it could've been a lot better; honestly, considering the main point is to show how much technology, specially the internet, changes/rules people's lives, this is not anywhere near as deep as people make it ou to be, since the theme becomes very clear within the first few episodes. Unfortunately, this show would need to be totally re-written to actually make significant improvements, since a lot are needed. In the end, Serial Experiments Lain is just another horrible/ that gets what I call "pre-2000 protection". I'm not going to pick on you for liking it, but I'm not going to leave my opinions out of a conversation if I'm steered into one. If the show was about 6 episodes long, only, it wouldn't be nearly as bad.