What a view | Unsettling anime Babylon uncovers a dark conspiracy on Amazon Prime Video
- Adapted from the novels of Mado Nozaki, the show delves into deep territory, including questioning what constitutes good and evil
- Plus, Medical Police on Netflix offers some light relief in the form of a hapless duo of doctor cops
If you come to Babylon expecting a regulation Japanese anime shock-horror show, you might leave feeling disappointed – having discovered that mental not visceral gears are those that must be engaged, for the most part anyway.
Granted, dashes of extreme violence and a lingering obsession with voluntary, personal annihilation do lend an occasional flavour, but there’s plenty more on which to ruminate.
Adapted from the novels of Mado Nozaki, Babylon – its full season-one complement now available on Amazon Prime Video – begins with Tokyo district public prosecutor Zen Seizaki investigating false drug-test results emanating from the big, bad pharmaceutical industry. This, however, is hardly the bitterest pill: unravelling behind the fake data is a shape-shifting network of corruption that seeps into the controversial expansion of the city, politics, prostitution, murder, suicide, corruption in officialdom, foggy notions of justice and the especially tricky philosophical questions of what constitutes good and evil.
Phew. But that’s not all. Japanese anime wouldn’t be its often brooding, dark, unsettling self without a supernatural seismic spike in the narrative fabric. Which arrives here in the form of Ai Magase, the true villain of the piece.
Irresistibly seductive and arguably a modern incarnation of the biblical Whore of Babylon, Magase is the fount of all macabre mayhem: physically violent, she is also a master of mental manipulation, men being her sadistic speciality. When her apocalyptic ambitions go global, Magase is able, in effect, to possess whomever she wishes, including the United States president. (Then again, if that plot strand was inspired by the incumbent, Magase can hardly have been given a simpler mind to manipulate.)
She’s a bad girl, no doubt, but naturally she does elicit sympathy: were it not for the fact that it’s still a man’s world, and a misogynistic one at that, Magase wouldn’t be the demon she is. As for Japan’s ever-expanding capital, this is cast as the illustrated edition of the notorious ancient city of Babylon of greed and debauchery, complete with a sly reference to the Hanging Gardens of Tokyo, brought to mind when a junior prosecutor is discovered at the end of a rope.