It's not a good sign when the most compelling scene of a new anime series occurs before the opening credits in the first episode. Clockwork Planet was pretty much all downhill from there.
I recall noticing a comment on some website or other noting that this was the ultimate chuunibyou show, and I'd say that's about right. Clockwork Planet plays out as an endless variation on weird anime-centric fetishes instead of something resembling a real story. I was initially attracted to the show because I thought it might involve some kind of steampunk aesthetic, but I was quickly disabused of that potentiality. Instead, you have a ludicrous notion that the entirety of planet Earth was reconstructed with gears, cogs, and endless other mechanisms. Evidently this world also includes artificial intelligences that are also made entirely of clockwork parts.
Now, this is not necessarily a bad premise for a series, but Clockwork Planet makes absolutely no effort to explain, justify, or even marginally expand on this initial concept. Instead, you get a lot of incredibly dull bickering between the two protagonists, and even more ridiculous interactions between them and a few clockwork-based humanoid creatures. It's barely worth expanding on this aspect of the show, but the male protagonist spends a ton of screen-time obsessing over two female clockwork entities to the point that it really becomes creepy. Obviously this is the intent, and it's acknowledged quite a few times during the 12-episode run. But why? Who cares? Not me, at any rate.
I didn't care because, for all of its action scenes and supposedly intense narrative drive, Clockwork Planet had nowhere to go. The characters don't really develop, and really it's pretty generous to even call them characters at all. You're essentially given a set of archetypes and asked to care about their actions and choices when (a) they're really just constructs serving as mechanisms to advance the plot, and (b) they never really develop in any noticeable way. If the overall plot had been at all interesting, then I think it would be possible to forgive some lack of decent characterization, but I couldn't be bothered to care about that aspect of the show either. As far as I could tell, things happened, characters popped up when necessary to advance the rather meaningless story, and then it all ended. That's it.
I was incredibly disappointed by this show and I would not recommend it to anyone. It's not vile, but it's pointless. I know that the goal was to create some really cool show with "meaningful" plot developments and genuine emotional depth, but I cannot possibly imagine how the mess that is Clockwork Planet could ever attain even the level of an average but uninspiring series. In a way, perhaps that's appropriate. Clockwork Planet, in a sense, lived up to its name. The show runs like an odd little machine ticking away, without a point or purpose. By the time its mechanism ran down at the end of episode 12, could anyone really have been bothered to wind it up again? I certainly could not be bothered.