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Series name:

Divergence Eve
Divergence Eve: Misaki Chronicles

Review date: 20060517

Genre: Science Fiction, Horror

Length: 26 episodes on 6 DVDs

Fan service: Quite a lot of jiggle and some nudity in Divergence Eve; a lot less of both in Misaki Chronicles

Rewatch: medium

Summary: Wormholes permit access to parallel universes where interstellar travel is much faster. But they also permit hostile creatures from parallel universes to access this one, and with the discovery of the wormholes, the human race finds itself at war. (The human race also finds that all of its women have immense breasts, but no one seems to notice.)

Comments: Over the course of the next 250 years, we're going to discover wormholes in space which connect to alternate universes, and by great good fortune there's one in the middle of Titan (which is why we haven't noticed it yet). One of the alternate universes they find is in its inflationary phase, and as a result it's possible to go into that universe and to move to another wormhole in our universe and reemerge, 30 light years away, in less than an hour.

By 2317 that other wormhole has a colony of 10 million people built around it, and part of the reason why is that there seem to be other things trying to come through it. They're huge, they're powerful, and they seem to be hostile. They're known by the codename Ghoul, but I'd call them demons. That colony is known as "Watcher's Nest" and some of the people there, a military organization known as Seraphim, are engaged in a war against the ghouls, using various high tech weapons to prevent them from entering our universe.

This is a story about a new recruit, a spunky, klutzy young teenage girl who turns out to have special abilities -- and where have we heard that a hundred times before? Fortunately, that's not actually the story they want to tell us.

Luxandra, Misaki, Suzanna, and Kiri waiting for a medical examination

It is the story, but it isn't what they want the audience to be worried about. So in Divergence Eve they did something that isn't unprecedented but is quite uncommon: they showed us the 12th episode (of 13) first. Then they rewound and showed us 11 episodes, skipped over where the 12th episode would have been with a quick reprise, and finally showed us the 13th episode.

I think that worked, because it answered a lot of questions right off which otherwise would have been a distraction. In the classic genki-girl story, we are supposed to be concerned about whether she washes out, whether she makes friends, how people react to her once her special ability comes out, what her special ability is, and how she uses it. They showed us all of those things in the first (i.e. the 12th) episode, which means we don't worry about them while we're watching the show. Instead, we worry about the war and the enemy.

Misaki doesn't wash out. She does get her commission. Her special ability is quite spectacular: when she gets afraid and is seriously threatened, she transforms into a giant figure the same size as the ghouls, with power similar to theirs. The others in Seraphim know this, and they mainly feel pity towards her because of it. It's seen as more of a curse than a blessing, by her and by everyone else. When she's in that form she is very powerful, but not overwhelmingly more powerful than the ghouls, and she can't win the war just by snapping her fingers.

We're shown all that in the first episode, which is why I don't mind talking about it here; it's part of the series foundation and not a spoiler. But though there's a lot going on in that first (12th) episode we don't really understand a lot of what we're seeing -- and that's deliberate. There isn't any plot exposition in that episode.

The second episode starts the real story, three months before. Misaki and the other new recruits are shown getting ready to transit the Titan wormhole to travel to Watcher's Nest in order to join Seraphim as candidate pilots. As we watch the next 11 episodes, things from the first episode start falling into place, and by the time we reach the point where that episode should have been in the continuity, it all makes sense.

So that initial glimpse of the future doesn't ruin the suspense or really give much away that's important. What it does is to give away a lot of things that are not really important so that we'll concentrate on the other stuff, the story they do want to tell us.

If there's any really major flaw in Divergence Eve, it's that there's too much fan service. It gets rather distracting because it doesn't make any sense in either character or story terms. For instance, you've got all these women with immense breasts, and no one, no one, seems to notice. Apparently it's normal; that's just how women in that place and time are built, and not even the men seem to pay any attention. Nonetheless, we get a lot of images of the central four girls in skimpy clothing and skin-tight pressure suits, and their boobs jiggle and bounce at every opportunity, and a lot of times which shouldn't have been opportunities, too. It's like there was someone whose job it was to go through the completed storyboards and to find places where boob-bounces could be added, without reference to the story that was being told.

That got toned way down beginning with episode 3 of Misaki Chronicles. The basic character designs are still the same, and the women are still preposterously over-endowed, and there's still a fair amount of skimpy clothing and even some outright nudity, but there's a lot less of it and a whole lot less jiggle and bounce. And I think the reason is pretty straightforward: by that point they'd hooked their audience on the story, and didn't need to use gratuitous fan service to pull them in any more.

It's really hard to say whether this is a single series or two closely related ones. Neither series makes any sense without the other one, and that's why I'm reviewing them together. If you started watching Misaki Chronicles without having watched Divergence Eve first, you'd be totally bewildered. And if you watch Divergence Eve without then watching Misaki Chronicles you'd be completely frustrated, because Divergence Eve doesn't end at a satisfactory point. Misaki Chronicles isn't a sequel to Divergence Eve, it's a continuation of the same story.

Nonetheless, there is a major dividing line between the two, not just in quantity of fan service, but also in terms of story and attitude and situation. A lot of things come to a head in the 13th episode of Divergence Eve and the situation changes completely, but not in ways that anyone expects because competing plots and plans all interfere with one another.

In one sense, Divergence Eve is about how Misaki comes into her full power, and Misaki Chronicles is about how she gains the wisdom to use her power well. But there's a lot more to it than that.

This is a desperate struggle, and people die in it. I don't just mean unimportant cannon-fodder characters, either. Characters we come to know well will die before our eyes before the series is over. But that's handled well; it makes sense in plot terms, and it affects the other characters in ways that it should. It isn't gratuitous and it isn't done just for shock value. This is a horror title but it isn't a slasher feature, though one of the deaths is pretty grisly.

Despite that, Misaki Chronicles has an upbeat ending. It left me with damp eyes and a lump in my throat.

Another good thing is that they don't cheat. They take some serious liberties with physics and biology as we know it in setting up their basic story, but that's permitted. What's important is that they stay true to their basic assumptions through the rest of the story. There are things which happen which are confusing, but they're not inconsistent, and though there's one particular thing that happens in Misaki Chronicles which is not explained as well as I would have liked, they do explain it and their explanation does make sense. (Basically, where the young version of Misaki comes from. They did explain it but I didn't find their explanation totally satisfying.)

What's notably missing is complete contrivances, deus ex machinas. In fact, they crossed me up: I thought they were hinting at one that was coming, and then it didn't actually turn out the way I thought it would. (I thought that when Prim woke up she was going to kick ass some way or other.)

This series is also notably lacking in "refrigerator" moments. And perhaps the greatest virtue of all: it's notably lacking in "stupid" moments, moments where a character is about to do something and the audience feels like shouting "Baka!" at the character because it's obviously a mistake. I don't recall a single case of that. These characters are smart and tough and dedicated and the reason they have a hard time is because they're facing titanic adversity -- and that's how it should be.

Divergence Eve is darker and more downbeat than Misaki Chronicles. Misaki Chronicles is by no means light fluff, but overall it doesn't have the same feeling of claustrophobia and oppressiveness, and the horror aspects are also toned down. And though the final battle is tense and scary, they allow themselves a full episode to explore the results of that battle, and of the decision that Misaki finally makes.

In the end, despite how disjointed the series feels as you're watching it, it becomes clear that everything that happened, in both Divergence Eve and in Misaki Chronicles, was intended to build up to that point and to lay the groundwork for what happened in that last desperate battle.

Complaints: I have never seen a series where the OP was as unrepresentative of the series as a whole as Misaki Chronicles. The OP has one and only one message to tell us: "Misaki has big tits". Which is true, but there isn't a single scene in the OP which comes from the series itself. The music is happy and jiggly, and so is Misaki, and if you watched the OP without knowing what the series was about you'd come away with the idea that Misaki Chronicles was a fan service comedy about a high school girl in contemporary Japan. (UPDATE: Actually, once you've watched the series, there are several references in the OP to what actually happens in it. But without having watched the series, the OP would completely deceive you about what you were going to be seeing in it.)

The ED of Divergence Eve is just as unrepresentative. But the OP for Divergence Eve is very good. What's odd about it is that it contains a couple of images from Misaki Chronicles.

Recommended? Yes, very much so. Don't let the fan service scare you away -- and don't start watching it with the idea that it's only about boobs.