Darker Than Black caught my attention from the beginning, held it through each successive installment, and continues to keep me guessing and absorbed. Volume five, the next to last disc in the whole series, does what most penultimate volumes of any series do: it sets things up in preparation for what we anticipate will be their final resolutions. Some of this is by filling in backstory, and some of this is via breaking equilibriums that have held the story together until now.

The first half of the disc revolves around Huang — Li / Hei’s “controller”, a regular human who makes up in nerve and bluntness what he lacks in super-powers. He was once a cop, we learn, who lost a partner of his to a Contractor. That alone would be enough to instill the distrust of (and disgust with) Contractors that we see him evince throughout the series, but there’s more to it than that. It’s also precisely the sort of “more” not served by talking about her in detail, since the details go a long way towards providing the kind of character depth that has made this show a winner.

A show this good should not have to end.

And yet here we are at the sixth and final disc of Mushi-shi, as beautiful and original an anime as any I could ever dare to ask for, and I feel downright glum knowing there’s no more after this. There is the manga, courtesy of Del Rey, which I’ll be getting around to reviewing before too much longer, but this series works so well as anime, is so lush and evocative, I fear reading the manga is going to feel like a step down.

Don’t expect anything like a real climax, though. The final disc of Mushi-shi does not bring anything to a definitive end, because this series has never been about definitive beginnings and endings in the first place. It’s about the flow of life itself, which doesn’t start or conclude anywhere but is simply something you dip into and out of as your time on earth allows. I was worried the show would devolve into a manufactured conflict with some great enemy — maybe a sinister mushi-master who’s creating an army to do his bidding, etc. — but thankfully, nothing of the kind happens.

Most shows are about stuff like whether or not a given villain will be defeated, or whether or not the guy will get the girl. Mushi-shi takes place on a wholly different plane — it’s not about a hero or a violent competition, but about an entirely new world with its own nature and biology, its own laws of being, its own cycle of living and dying and being reborn. It has the same meditative beauty as Haibane Renmei or Kino’s Journey — shows that are not about fighting or blowing things up, but simply observing things as they are and knowing their true nature. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

The “mushi” (derived from the Japanese word for insect) are like primordial homunculi — large single-celled organisms that only a few people can see, but which interact with the real world in bizarre ways. Sometimes they latch onto people and cause afflictions that have to be dealt with, but they’re not inherently evil: they just have a life cycle of their own, and sometimes we are part of that life cycle whether or not we realize it. The mushi-shi or “mushi master” of the title is Ginko, a young man with a mop of pale hair and a cigarette perpetually dangling from a corner of his mouth, and the ability to detect and work with (or rout out) mushi when they manifest.

I generally have two kinds of experiences when reviewing a series I’ve already had under way. Experience #1 is, I put the disc in and for some reason have the worst time even watching a single episode all the way through. I eventually make it through to the DVD production credits and sit down to bash out the copy, but the whole experience has the aura of a chore. Experience #2 is, I put the disc in and after what feels like fifteen minutes I’m pasting the text into the CMS.

You get no prizes for guessing which of these two buckets Claymore falls into. It’s been said that no good show is too long and no bad show is too short. We have only one volume of this series left to go, and I’m dreading it being over so soon — although given that the manga is still an ongoing property, that doesn’t rule out there being another season. Please, let it be so.

There’s few things I like more than a smart show. By that I don’t mean a show with no jokes and no humor; even Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex had the Tachikomas for comic relief (and the Major’s love life for fanservice). A show that assumes its audience can think for itself, can follow along without being led by the hand, and can draw its own conclusions is worth sticking with through the end. To wit: Darker Than Black. I have the shrinkwrap off and the disc in the player within minutes of each volume hitting my doorstep.

Most shows break the plotting down into single-episode doses. DtB is a touch unusual in that every plot piece is broken across pairs of episodes, each billed as “Part One” and “Part Two”. The show’s writers and directors take their time with what goes on; they don’t try to wrap everything up right smack at the end of each episode, and are willing to let things spill over into future installments or leave them unresolved.

Explaining the appeal of Lucky Star to the uninitiated is enough to drive lesser men to drink. Suckers like me, writing reviews of this sort of thing, have to assume people will natively understand terms like moe and otaku (odds are they do, thank goodness) and get on with the explaining about the explaining. After four volumes, the best parallel I can come up with is either to Azumanga Daioh or, god help us, Seinfeld. It’s not about anything except its quirky roster of characters and the fluffy pop-culture vortex they all fly around in — but that’s exactly its appeal.

It does make any attempt at a plot synopsis nearly worthless, though. “This is the episode where the four girls sit around and talk about a bunch of stuff” could describe every episode in the whole series, and after watching a whole disc’s worth of Lucky Star the samey-ness of the whole thing does get to you. It’s best in small doses, leavened with something as unlike it as possible — say, Detroit Metal City — and appreciated for exactly what it is, not what it might turn into. It doesn’t aim to be about anything more than, say, the way Konata becomes the obsessive object of high-pressure sales tactics at the local comics-and-anime-goods store (all depicted in this hilariously wigged-out animation style).

Most stories about monsters follow a basic formula: you’re either predator or prey, so hurry up and pick a side. Or, you’re someone who stands between the light and the darkness, so it’s only a matter of time before you fall on one side or the other. Claymore followed that formula pretty reliably without succumbing to it, thanks to two things: strong writing and storytelling (which boosts any stock plot out of the mire); and a willingness to mess with the dividing lines between the different parties in the story.

By this I don’t just mean how friends can become enemies (or vice versa), or how predator and prey can change roles. Claymore started with three roles (human, yoma, Claymore), added a fourth as it went along (Awakened Beings), and then hinted the four are more like points along a line than four separate things. Claire found out before how even her own augmented body can be the same way — how her borrowed arm can be Awakened all by itself, and how even someone who might seem to be well on their way towards becoming an Awakened Being can do a U-turn and come back to humanity.

None of this stuff would add up to much unless it involved people we cared about. Claire didn’t inspire much caring at first glance: she was about as emotive as a pencil (and carried about as much body fat as one, too). But over time, a funny thing happened to both her and us: she became someone worth caring about, and we started having that much more of a reason to care about her. What few emotions she mustered were directed mostly at Raki, her young sidekick, and as of the last volume her emotions finally culminated in a kiss and a line of dialogue (“Don’t say you don’t care if you die”) that is probably as close to “I love you” as she’s going to get in this lifetime.

The mark of a skilled executioner in feudal Japan was to be able to slice off the head of a victim and yet still leave it attached to the corpse by a single shred of flesh. Here is a story that operates with the same level of merciless and inhumane skill, the better to systematically drain every ounce of humanity and compassion out of its characters.

It will also cause most people — those who aren’t gorehounds, anyway — to lose their lunch. Maybe even the gorehounds, too.

I’m torn. On the one hand, Shigurui is brilliant and artfully assembled — as much a cold-blooded dissection of depraved human behavior as it is a showcase for it, about how culture and circumstance and social abstracts can turn people into total monsters. On the other hand, it’s just nasty. People are disemboweled, dismembered, beheaded; have noses and jaws and faces torn off, sliced off, smashed off; are burnt, blinded, disfigured; raped, groped, tormented.

And yet this isn’t a cheap piece of exploitation trash like Eiken or Colorful!. Everyone involved had serious intentions, and believed they had good reasons for doing what they did: to hammer home how the almost coolly abstract “way of the sword” in classical Japan was bought and paid for in terms of mangled bodies and ruined lives. The whole package has been put together with consummate craft. It is brilliant and horrible at the same time, and while I do think it’s worth watching I’m not sure anyone — not even a fan of this material — needs to see it more than once.

The good news about Darker Than Black continues unabated. This has shaped up to be one of the best shows coming out in 2009 — not just a great anime, but a solid TV show even for people who would never label themselves as “anime fans”. So, yes: those of you thinking of using this as a gateway drug for that special someone, do it. You (and they) may need to stick with it for several episodes at a time for it to really click, but that’s actually one of the best things about DTB: it builds its impact cumulatively. The longer you stick with it, the more rewarding it is.

Disc three’s four episodes are actually best thought of as two double-length installments, and are in fact billed that way: “When One Takes Back What Was Lost Within The Wall…” and “A Heart Unswaying on the Water’s Surface…”, each with parts 1 and 2. In the first half, Li’s new assignment is to infiltrate the PANDORA research base that’s in the Hell’s Gate forbidden zone. There’s no way he can just waltz in there and use the full gamut of his powers, and for two reasons: a) the PANDORA people would skin him alive if he pulled a stunt like that, and b) Contractors, him included, tend to have serious trouble keeping their powers on a tight leash when they’re in or near the Gate. To that end, he’s given a cover story: he’ll apply for a job with the janitorial team and hide in plain sight. His ultimate goal is to recover an artifact from within the Gate that might have game-changing consequences for Contractors as a whole.

It’s been said that TV’s matured to the point where long-form dramatic shows (The Sopranos, The Shield, The Wire) provide the kind of depth of character and scope of story that we’d normally get from a novel. In a novel you can stretch out and explore at your leisure; you can create a whole world, populate it, examine each corner of it in turn, and allow the reader all the time he needs to do the same thing. We’re getting to that point now with episodic TV, too — thanks to DVD sets, video-on-demand, and round-the-week reruns, a good TV show can be savored just as thoroughly as a book you re-read and get that much more out of each time.

There’s been few anime that reach the same heights. The few that do are as good as anything else on TV, live-action or animated: Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex; Berserk; and a select handful of others. Darker Than Black is slightly shy of that category — but only slightly. Even before its first volume was released Stateside, I’d seen a few fansubbed episodes and been enthralled, and when FUNimation snapped it up for a domestic release I stuck my neck out for it and was not disappointed. It’s not just the intriguing concept or the broad roster of characters, but the consistently intelligent writing and storytelling. The premise, convoluted and complex as it is, has been subordinated to the needs of the characters. Usually it’s the other way around.