If you’re not aware of the crazy, cross-otaku-rhombus event Owen has instigated, here’s my very short summary: everybody watch two episodes of Darker than Black each day; if you want, post about it. It started on the fifth of April. It’s the seventh. I’m late. Without going into too much detail, I had a family emergency that kept me away for several days. It’s going well, considering, and I’m back in Memphis. I also finally watched the first two episodes of Darker than Black. I’ll try to catch up (of course, this means I haven’t even started any of the new season shows, so, uh, oops?).
The first two episodes reminded me of a novel I read this semester, called His Master’s Voice. It’s by a Polish author, Stanislaw Lem (so it’s originally Glos Pana, but whatever). That book is all about what might really happen if we got a message from an alien race: that is, if they’re alien, then evolutionary theory would necessarily posit they are incomprehensible to us. Why would we even assume they have language for us to decode? It’s a brilliant book.
This has to do with DtB because of the obvious encounters between the unhuman and the normal, in the first arc, but primarily (in my mind) because of the research. A huge team of researchers are put on the His Master’s Voice project, and they develop a handful of discoveries and technologies based on the “letter.” The same appears to have happened in DtB. The overtones are not exactly subtle. The mysterious area from which all the discoveries, the Contractors and Dolls, come from is generally called Hell’s Gate, and sometimes Pandora’s Box (though that could refer to something related, and not the area exactly).
The world of DtB has been shaken by some kind of cataclysm that left a region of mystery and stuff. At the end of episode two we have little to no idea of what’s happening — except we know scientists are on it. Chiaki was a researcher on a project similar to the HMV Project, and refers to the effects and powers of the Contractors by their scientific terms, inscribing physics onto what appears to be mysticism. The police study the skies very carefully to observe the movements of apparently false stars that each map to one of the powered individuals, in a new form of astrology that is, this time, accurate. The world, from inside, still functions under rational laws. We absorb it as though wizards are casting spells, though. We have no idea how anything is happening. One is led to suspect that the prime cause of all this is tied into the drama of the show, and thus our dis-entangling of the mystery will approximate the search for truth in shedding mystical beliefs and adopting sound scientific explanations. We will get bits and pieces of knowledge as we slip deeper into the drama.
I may be required, at this point, to quote Arthur C. Clarke: ”any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Ah, thanks for the fresh perspective on the show. It’s been a bit hard for me to view the Contractor/Doll system as outright science, but maybe that’s just because I like the idea of magic in an overtly urban setting. I mean, the Contractors do work on a principle of equivalent exchange!
Good point about Pandora, but don’t get your hopes up too high about what the acronym really means, since it’s all in Engrish. It’s probably a bit too early for you to notice right now, but your point does remind me that the way in which Dolls are used at some points are very precise and scientific–to the point of resembling the precogs in Minority Report.
@Owen S: it may very well be more appropriately a fantasy. I just like that, given something extraordinary has happened, scientists are studying it. We don’t really understand why gravity works, but we have a name and a theory for it. Eventually there would be the same for the phenomena associated with Hell’s Gate.