A crew of synthetic humans is tasked with terraforming an alien planet ahead of a slower colony ship. Sounds like an interesting science fiction premise, right? But then this plot is basically abandoned and replaced with some silly philosophical questions. The themes are a bit tedious if you've ever read any short stories by Philip K. Dick, but it's certainly watchable.
The art is reasonably good. Sometimes it seems pretty detailed, and other times not so much. It looks like they were given a decent budget and made good use of it. It's definitely better than average for the stuff on Netflix. The animation itself was usually fine, but the frame rate occasionally made character movements seem unnatural. I remember once being abruptly snapped out of watching an episode because someone's movements seemed to fall into the uncanny valley.
Character design is a bit odd. Each character has a color theme, like a blue uniform, blue hair, blue socks, blue blue blue. You know, I like blue quite a lot, but I sometimes wear other colors, too. It's an attention-getting stylistic choice but a bit perplexing, even for anime. For example, the blue characters sometimes seem to have blue-tinted skin, too. I'm not sure exactly why certain characters were blue-themed, but others were green. Maybe it was based on temperament or job?
The plot is generally fine, and I liked it. However, it's likely that, at any given point in time, you'll already know the next two upcoming plot twists, which can make the show seem more slow-paced than it is. Unfortunately, the characters routinely overexplain their motivations or recite overt exposition to each other. The way everything is spoon-fed makes it seem like the dialogue wasn't written for an adult audience.
There are a small handful of scenes with nudity that look like they were included solely for the reason of a check mark. However, on the positive side, all of the characters are adult scientists. Amazingly, there are no high school children in the entire show. It makes me feel a bit better about recommending this to other adults.
So, if you're over 30, and you're not an obsessive anime fan, should you watch this? Sure, why not. If you're a science fiction fan, you'll probably be pretty forgiving of its flaws.
