Captain Herlock Endless Odyssey:
Outside Legend Kobusha | VAP | NTV Original airdate: October 2003 - November 2003 13x30 minute
episodes
Presented
as director Rin Taro's version of Captain Harlock,
the
most recent addition to the Harlock legend, Endless Odyssey,
surprises with its apparent acknowledgement that this story
takes place some time after the close of the original Space
Pirate Captain Harlock television series (which Rin Taro did indeed direct). Characters
are introduced as former members of the Arcadia crew, causing
the viewer to wistfully remember the closing moments of Space
Pirate, when Harlock effectively abandoned the entire crew (with the
exception of Miimé and Tori-san) to whatever fate awaited them,
and took off in the Arcadia for parts unknown. Endless Odyssey does not
explain where Harlock went and what he has been doing since that
time, nor how the Arcadia changed from blue to green but
it (kind of) explains what some of the other main players have
been up to in that time.
But…
wait a minute. While the majority of characters from the Space
Pirate Captain Harlock television series have lived and grown beyond their first voyage on the Arcadia, Tadashi Daiba is back to square one again. Tadashi must watch
his father die again, must meet Harlock for the first time again, must board the Arcadia
for the first time... again. So… forget what is written above. This is not really a continuation. It is another universe, another
sphere of time, another chance for Harlock to take Tadashi under his piratical wing and teach him how to be a man. (Please refer to
Universal Predestiny if you're utterly confused.)
Endless Odyssey has a multitude of plots woven throughout:
--
Dr Daiba (Tadashi’s father, alive again) has previously
had a frightening brush with both death and forces beyond the
imagining of man. While teetering on the edge of the abyss he is
rescued by Harlock, and Dr Daiba extracts a promise from him
that when he, Daiba, should die, Harlock will take on the rearing
of young Tadashi and turn him into a man. While Harlock
apparently can never refuse the dying wishes of a noble man, he must
in this case surely have prayed that Dr Daiba might never
actually die…
--
Further, Dr Daiba’s earlier researches have led he and his companions
to unwittingly open a portal between this space-time and
another, where a being called Nuu has been trapped since the
universe was first created. Now that this being has escaped and
plans to turn our universe into ‘hell’, Harlock is called
upon to respond to the threat…
--
In the meantime, during the five years since Harlock abandoned them
on Earth, almost all the earlier members of the Arcadia crew have
been rounded up by authorities, imprisoned and slated for
execution. If Harlock wants to re-crew the ship and save the
universe, he first has to save them…
--
And, a certain Captain Irita seems hell-bent on destroying Captain
Harlock, by hook or by crook.
Familiar
Matsumoto themes re-emerge: the nature of man; promises that
must be kept; secrets of the universe concealed
within ancient ruins; pyramids rising from the dust of ages;
mountains with monsters in them; supernatural elements, and the
forces of good and evil.
On
a humanistic level, we are shown again through Tadashi Daiba
that people aren’t what they seem, that you don’t have to
live by rules and regulations, that there are ways and there are
ways to becoming a man. Tadashi’s eternal lament in almost all
his incarnations is that the crew of the Arcadia is lacking in discipline. Harlock, however, leads by
example and not by military tenets, and Tadashi will have to
learn to accept that. To his infuriation, the Harlock of Endless Odyssey
states, when questioned about this perceived lack of order onboard the
Arcadia: ‘At times I’ll give an order, but people don’t have to
obey.’ Tadashi’s eyebrows can only crawl into his hairline
at moments like these. After all, isn’t that what captains are
for? The giving of orders?
Harlock
in this incarnation seems to be in a slow spiral of
disassociation. He doesn’t much care where he’s going or
why. If he had not been forced to fulfill his promise to Dr
Daiba, he would not have been caught up in the events
surrounding Nuu and all that entails. Harlock has always
maintained that his ultimate goal in life is to ‘find a place
to die,’ which I have always taken to mean that when he finds
the right cause for which to lay down his life, he will. However
it does throw open the question: ‘Is Harlock that noble or is
he merely bored with living?’ When beseeched by Nuu’s feminine
antithesis to save the universe, Harlock's response is in the
negative, claiming that the entire situation has nothing to do
with him and that the outcome won’t alter his life either way.
Of course he does end up saving the universe, but for his own
reasons — and ultimately because his 'dead' friend Tochirō wants him to.
That the Arcadia
has a personality — that being the personality and
consciousness of Harlock's friend Tochirō — is far more obvious
in this series than it has ever been. In Endless Odyssey the Arcadia
is exceedingly willful, deciding where it wants to go and
when, and turning itself off when it's had enough. Perversely,
Harlock seems to find these moments pleasurable; reassurance,
perhaps, that his old friend is alive and still kicking. In Endless Odyssey
Harlock spends far more time in communion with the
Arcadia’s central computer than ever before, and in fact the
‘bad guys’ eventually realise that the Arcadia is the true
threat to their plans for universal domination, and not Harlock himself.
In the early episodes of Endless Odyssey we find the ship has embedded itself
into a mound of ruined and ancient artefacts. When questioned as to why the
Arcadia rests here, Harlock replies musingly that the Arcadia ‘seems to like it here.’ He doesn’t question it, he
doesn’t try to change it. And it seems the Arcadia was set on saving the universe from the beginning
and has taken Harlock everywhere it wanted him to go. More importantly,
at the end of the series we find Tochirō himself awaiting Harlock, preparing
to do what is necessary to send Nuu back where it belongs.
The quiet surreality of that final episode, which begins with
Tadashi’s sad ‘Father, I had a dream…’ is an entrée into worlds within worlds, and a crash course on theories of
time and space might be in order before viewing. Harlock is not
even slightly perturbed to enter a surrealistic landscape where he finds his
dead friend seemingly alive again and preparing to destroy Nuu.
Said dead friend, Tochirō, apparently knows he is dead, and
has made his home in a place where the dead can meet the living. In this same continuum
Tadashi meets his dead father, and is confused enough (or
wistful enough) to imagine his entire life aboard the Arcadia
was the dream. The surprising culmination of the series comes in the closing scenes: learning
that Harlock had made not one promise to Dr Daiba but two… and
the final scene, when the audience realises that they really are
not going to find out what happens next. (Although the
closing credits at least give some kind of outcome to chew on,
they really don’t help much and it is left to the audience to
decide what exactly did happen on the bridge between Tadashi and Harlock.)
Endless Odyssey does feel like a return to the Harlock we fell in love
with. The animation is strongly reminiscent of the original
television series; Harlock himself is a physical morph between
the Harlock of the Space Pirate series and the Harlock of My Youth in
Arcadia. He appears both older and harder, yet he hasn’t changed a
bit. There are beautiful and startling moments contained
throughout: the dark empty corridors of the great pirate ship filled with the haunting music of
Miimé’s harp; the Arcadia drifting slowly through the aftermath of a battle, surrounded by
weightless corpses and the debris of war; the unexpectedly harsh
moment when Harlock smilingly salutes an enemy as he tumbles towards death.
Matsumoto’s
spherical universes concurrently contain the highest science and
the most ancient of spiritual powers. But at the core of this
particular story is the strength of friendship, the bonds that
form from a common cause, the price of freedom and the nature of
reality. And, of course, choosing the right flag to live beneath.
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