There are very few times that an anime can elicit a significant emotional reaction from me. If an anime can make me laugh until it hurts or cry until I can't anymore, I know it's something special. In the case of Babylon, my significant emotional reaction almost made me put my fist through my monitor. Not even Charlotte in all of its terribleness has made me this heated.
Babylon is one anime that on every technical level, sells. The art and backgrounds are excellent, and help to bolster the generally okay animation. The soundtrack is absolutely kickass and subtly boosts every scene with a feeling of adrenaline. Whether that adrenaline comes from exhilaration at an action scene or anxiety at the unknown showcases the expert craft and how effective an OST can be in making or breaking an anime. The cinematography was also pretty good. In a series with a lot of grey and white tones, you need that little extra to keep your viewers' attention glued to the screen.
The first six or so episodes are expertly crafted. With an eerie, almost placid quality to the likes of Terror in Resonance, the anime draws you in. The first episode wastes no time in presenting the dilemma at hand. A doctor is found dead of an apparent anesthesia overdose, or was it? Past experience in such mysteries would indicate that the man was murdered, which is only confirmed by the presence of two people seen on a security camera shortly before his death.
The series then takes a sudden and shocking turn by killing off one of the supposed protagonists right at the end of episode one. Still, you are convinced something happened to him and the intrigue keeps you going until you reach the end of episode three and you desperately want to know how the deaths of dozens of people can all be linked back together. This pace is kept up to episode six, and the political thriller becomes a deftly woven web of cat and mouse between the investigation unit and the duo-team of a young politician and a mysterious woman.
Then episode seven happens. An episode that I can only compare on equal setup to The Tragedy from the Danganronpa franchise. In one series, a girl convinces people to kill each other; in the other, she convinces people to kill themselves. All this to cause despair. For all intents and purposes, these episodes are exactly the same. It's at this point that we conclusively see that the mysterious woman is one of the most psychotic anime characters ever to twistedly grace the silver screen.
So after all this, why did I give this the lowest score I've ever given an anime? To be perfectly blunt, this might be one of the single most offensive examples of fiction that I have ever seen, not just including anime. In fact, I was so thoroughly incensed by this, that I'm not even sure where to start.
I think the first thing I can think of right off the bat is the entire moral problem the show tries to discuss, or the concept of legalized suicide through the idealized lens of freedom. In episode six, the main opponents of "The Suicide Law" as it's put, discuss why legally endorsing such a practice would be wrong, and the (at this point) supposed primary antagonist rattles off a bunch of weak arguments, which is then subsequently treated as him "fighting off all the main points."
Are you fucking kidding me? That's it? You have an insane argument that some lunatic is making through the veneer of moral neutrality and you as critical thinkers can't come up with any rebuttals? What kind of politicians are you? Then the asshole goes into a big grandstanding of moral preaching of how "the option of suicide is good actually because then we can have organ donors!" Yes, this is actually an argument made that is presented as completely sound and rational and not like it's being made from an institutionalized patient. (Also "parallels" to legally assisted suicide are made to both homosexuality and the legalization of marijuana as if it's just a society's change of morals just as another fyi).
The characters in this show have such baffling reasonings behind their positions, that I can't even continue with the logic behind them. So much so that I found myself screaming, "Real people don't fucking think like this! This isn't how the real world works!" I mean, how can anyone that isn't a nihilist think that the legalization of literal suicide drugs would be a net positive for society?
Any reasonable person who watches this will come to the completely normal conclusion that suicide is universally bad for everyone involved. But yet the show tries to question what good and bad are so that they can hamfistedly answer if the concept of legally assisted suicide is good or not, only to state objectively that if something is good, it continues, and if it's bad, it ends. Bullshit. Plenty of evil things in this world still continue and plenty of good comes out of the ending of bad things. (I also found this entire scene incredibly ironic since I had just recently discussed Euthyphro's dilemma about goodness in my philosophy class and about how hard it was to come to a solution. The idea that objectivity could be found in a philosophical concept like this is laughable).
Speaking of evil things still continuing, let's talk about the mysterious woman. It's heavily implied from episode six onward that she is a supernatural being of some sort, being able to convince people to off themselves with nothing more than a few words. By episode eleven, the anime's title comes to light and aptly compares her to the Whore of Babylon, something that only then seems to make perfect sense since she visibly seems to have been the anthropomorphization of suicidal thoughts and the euphoria at the resolve to die. Not only that, but just like the suicides, she had no rational motivation. At. All.
We never find out why she wanted to do any of this. Why she wreaked so much havoc and destroyed so many lives. It is completely chalked up to the psychopathic nature of her being. The writing of the second half of this series is so bad that the previously interesting villain's primary motivation is completely handwaved. (We also never have any indication of what became of the Suicide Law. There is never a resolution).
To be fair, we never get answers to a lot of things in this show. What started off as two simple prompts (What is good/bad? Is legalized suicide morally acceptable?), metastasized into an enormous mess of unanswered questions. This anime literally leaves you with more questions than it does answers, which to be fair wasn't hard to do because it didn't answer anything anyway. (Adding salt to the wound, neither of the initial prompts are answered either).
(Also as an aside, the anime tries to take a religious approach to the concept of suicide and comes to the extremely offensive and wrong take that suicide should be a-ok in the eyes of Christians since the Bible never explicitly says anything about suicide and tries to play it off as investigative thinking. I'd like to think that even non-religious or non-Christian people could come to the conclusion that Christians still view suicide as a form of murder and morally wrong. The idea that a supposedly "strong" "Catholic" character could even entertain the idea is repugnant and borderline blasphemous).
Anything worth while the anime tried to build up comes crashing down and the viewer is left with the lingering sensation that trying to defeat suicidal thoughts is an impossible and ultimately meaningless task to pursue. I've been fortunate enough to not have had such struggles, but I know people who have. To be told that nothing will ever be enough and death is the only euphoric solution is nothing short of heinous.
Concluding this review, Babylon represents everything I hate. The disgusting and distortive take of liberty and freedom; the hopeless and bleak outlook on life and depression; perversion of societal morals; the complete lack of critical thinking; an utter disregard for meaningful storytelling, the list goes on. This show was an absolute waste of time, and I felt like absolutely nothing was gained from having watched it. It is not thought-provoking in any meaningful sense, and those who say it is are either lying or incredibly blinded to the spectacle.
I apologize for the length, but I needed to get this off of my chest and there was no way that such a heavy topic was going to have a short and trite review.
Thank you for reading.
(And know that you are loved by someone in your life; suicide will never be the answer).
