Darker than Black: The Black Contractor

Name(s): Darker than Black: Kuro no Keiyakusha / Darker than BLACK -黒の契約者-
Format: TV series (25 episodes)
Studio(s): Bones
Originally Published: October 29, 2016 2:22 am EST

Well, this was pretty boring. A total “less than the sum of its parts” show. I want to show it some base level of respect in that it was an earnest attempt at an anime-original series that at least seemed to have some ambition, but not really the wits to make it into anything of worth. It jams a bunch of interesting ideas into a single space but there’s a lot more to writing than a good premise.

In a nutshell, Darker Than Black (DTB) follows a group of four people working for “The Syndicate” (its only given name) who take on various secret missions involving contractors, a group of humans who suddenly awake to having supernatural abilities. There’s also a heavy political thriller overlay with a red tape talk among the police and government, mostly from the perspective of the deuteragonist Misaki Kirahara. The protagonist is Hei, a Syndicate member who’s a contractor himself with the ability to control electricity.

Darker Than Black takes off with little exposition, beginning at the start of nothing in particular as it follows just another one of Hei’s missions. The majority of the setting has to be picked up in context, which is something I prefer at the expense of unnatural dialogue that’s addressing the audience, but none of this effort in deciphering Darker Than Black‘s majorly bloated world ever pays off.

There’s a paranormal mystery here, with the rise of the contractors being started by the sudden appearance of “Gates” several years ago that cause a bunch of unknown phenomena that’s being researched. Most of the time spent elaborating on anything about the gates and contractors ends up being useless because you’re given an explanation of how both work at best but never what any of it means in the story or thematically, nor do you learn anything’s origin. It’s hard to put into words how completely nothing this story ends up being. It literally goes nowhere by the end of the show.

But if the overarching plot isn’t the focus, which makes all the chicken feed details about the Gate and political jurisdiction boring as shit and pointless for not adding to any other finalized elements of the show such as the characters, then you’d at least hope the setting and self-contained stories would be worth the price of involvement. You’d be wrong, though.

Any details or character development regarding our main characters is at the lowest priority and instead most of Darker Than Black is centered on two-part episodic adventures with one-off characters and stories that are derivative, too minor to get attached to, and delivered with a lackluster script with poorly placed comedy and straight character archetypes and listless art direction, animation, and direction.

Every two-parter ends up in excessive melodrama that’s difficult to buy into as minor characters dump their life stories on Hei or whatever, and our main characters are stoic and repetitive to the point that seeing them interact with these new situations isn’t interesting in the way Cowboy Bebop could make it with a more dynamic cast and smoother dialogue. Speaking of, there’s a one-off character in one of the episodes who’s a carbon-copy of one from Cowboy Bebop, both being spirited young guys who get involved with the mob to protect a girl in some way and they keep pestering the main character to teach them their “kung-fu” techniques.

The political drama elements are complete fluff, a lot of whining about international governments and jurisdictions between Kirahara and her crew with very little of this extraneous detail being necessary or interesting. It often feels like episode padding as Kirahara stands around in her office being prattled about the technicalities of her mission. Who fucking cares? You don’t even see a single country other than Japan to understand their perspective.

This rarely effects the big picture or the main characters and these parts don’t offer unique insight on society or give an interesting twist to the setting. It’s just dull procedural red tape being carried about by nobodies far away from where the action is. We don’t need five to ten minutes explaining Kirahara’s mission or why she can’t go into a building because the U.N. or whatever the fuck won’t allow it, goddamn get on with it. Talk about something we actually need to know.

One of the most recurring parts of DTB’s setting is the contractors, something that sounds like it could be impossible not to have some fun with. An interesting idea about contractors is that each one has a “price” to pay for using their power, hence the name. These vary wildly and someone’s price can be smoking a cigarette while another one has to painstakingly arrange rocks in a certain pattern.

You’d expect them to play with this element in some way, basing the contracts off the characters somehow to add development or some sort of psychological hang-up, but this happens only once or twice and most prices are completely arbitrary. Not to mention, they’re also useless. It’s said at one point in the series that it’s (merely) rumored that a contractor who doesn’t pay their price will die a gruesome death, but you will literally never see this happen nor is it ever a threat.

Despite this purported restriction on contractors that might make the characters and the use of their powers more interesting, there are never any rules given on when a contractor needs to make their payment, and you get several scenes throughout the series of contractors just firing off their powers constantly without needing to stop or never having to consider that they’d need to pay their price. Imagine if, in the middle of battle, someone had to avoid using their power but couldn’t because they were in a position where they couldn’t fulfill their contract if they did so.

It seems so obvious, but this caveat is written into the series for absolutely no reason. If you want superpowered mutants then just have them, don’t include a rule that’s not going to be upheld for any sort of world consistency just so you can have the occasionally stupid scene of a woman eating a bunch of cigarettes as her price.

Another thing about contractors is that they’re kept hidden from society and to those that know of them they’re seen as calculating, self-centered, and emotionless. This is such a bogus part of the story’s drama because in as early as the first episode the viewer can clearly see this isn’t true at all, and it all feels artificial when it’s obvious that contractors behave no differently than humans.

There are also “Dolls,” which aren’t contractors but completely emotionless (for reals this time I guess) humans who have the ability to survey the landscape in different ways, such as through water or glass. This is such a weirdly specific distinction that I don’t know why there needed to be another class of humans running around and it goes to show how bloated (and dare I say, pretentious) the setting is for no reason.

There’s so much extraneous detail and organizations that the show comes across as complex, and perhaps it is, but that has nothing to do with the intelligence of its building blocks or the cleverness of their chemistry. Who the fuck is the old lady star gazer, why is the whole bit with star monitoring and contractors each representing a star a thing, and why is Kirihara so stupid that she doesn’t realize Hei is in every area where his star activates when he’s undercover.

Yoko Kanno does the music here but it’s easily the worst soundtrack I’ve heard from her. It’s nothing special, and I never would’ve looked up the composer—I coincidentally found out. This show is really lame. I wish it lived up to even a fraction of its potential but it doesn’t. The stand-alone stories are long, dull, and bland. The main characters are a base level of likable somehow, but aren’t given enough development, or have all of their development backloaded in the finale of the series for weak payoff, and the writing is frequently hammy (“Grrr, hey, stop right there!”) with a poorly placed sense of humor.

The superpowers are either highly specific, like JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, but barely used to make any creative scenes, or so generic in concept and the wasted idea of “prices,” that they’re really no better in execution than a standard shonen series. I’d call this one of the most overrated anime I’ve seen, but it didn’t have times where it made me want to kill myself, so that’s a plus. I just felt very bored and disappointed.

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Darker Than Black Episode 26: “Beneath the Fully Bloomed Cherry Blossoms”

AKA: DTB / Darker than Black: Kuro no Keiyakusha Special / DARKER THAN BLACK -黒の契約者- 桜の花の満開の下 / Darker Than Black: Unter Voll Erblühten Kirschbäumen
Format: Special (1 episode)
Studio(s): Bones
Originally Published: October 29, 2016 12:41 pm EST

It’s not over yet, because this bonus episode was included in my download. It’s a non-canon (or rather, inconsequential) stand-alone story that takes place sometime in the middle of the series. It’s a very comedy-centric episode, but it works because the tone is consistent. It’s actually kind of clever how nearly every element to this episode has some kind of callback to it in the form of a joke before it’s over. Everything wraps up pretty nicely, such as the suspicious tenant shown throughout the episode being revealed to think Otsuka is waiting for him. That said, it’s not like it’s that funny, so it’s just an unessential diversion on an already average series.

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Darker Than Black: Gemini of the Meteor Side Story

AKA: Darker than Black: Kuro no Keiyakusha Gaiden / Darker than Black: Ryuusei no Gemini Specials / Darker than BLACK 2 OVA / Darker than Black: Ryuusei no Gemini Episode 12 / Darker than BLACK -黒の契約者 外伝
Format: Original video animation [OVA] (4 episodes)
Studio(s): Bones
Originally Published: March 2, 2018 12:00 am EST (for original, lost review)

I used to have a review for this on MyAnimeList, but I lost it. I had a habit of keeping my smaller reviews in the “Comments” tab of my list entries, which is from where I transferred the bulk of my material for this site. MAL added the feature to edit this field while viewing your list, which I was utilizing to quickly cut and paste my writing.

However, the field automatically saves the moment it’s edited, and when I went to paste the text here, I accidentally hit CTRL+C and overwrote the clipboard with the blank text field on my site. Clipboard history wasn’t turned on, so I had no backup. MAL staff kindly offered to help me see if it could be recovered, but I was told it wasn’t possible.

To add insult to injury, my computer auto-updated a few days later and reopened my Chrome tab for my list using an archive of the page that likely contained the original text. By the time I realized I probably could have recovered it, I had refreshed the page to continue my importing and lost it forever. And wouldn’t you fucking know it, this is one of the only things I ever wrote that wasn’t posted on a second source.

Out of bitterness, I am keeping this page as a memorial for that one or two paragraphs I wrote. I have no interest in rewatching this, and I apparently didn’t feel that positively about it. I recall pointing out some inconsistencies in characterizations and motivations, but that’s it. Rest in peace, my old review that has now gone to a place… Darker Than Black.