Ӕon Flux (TV series)

Ten-part animated series about… uh…

Like The Prisoner and VR.5, Ӕon Flux takes some decoding. It's therefore the kind of series that probably stands up well to repeated viewings.

This box set contains all ten episodes, plus the pilot and five shorts. Unfortunately it doesn't tell you what order to watch them in, and although the series proper has transmission dates, it appears that these do not denote same order as the episode numbers. So has the order been fixed for this release, or messed-up?

Maybe it doesn't matter, especially if you have a slow brain like mine. Here is a quick break down of the way I watched them, but with the proviso that if you've come to this page looking for an episode guide, try Wikipedia.

The first six contain no dialogue.

War

Aeon is killed by a guy with a sword, who seems to take over for the rest of the short.

Gravity

Kissing through the open windows of a speeding train and an aircraft, Trevor passes a tiny scroll into Aeon's hollow tooth. She subsequently looks at it, eats it, climbs out of the plane, misses her footing and falls. During her minutes in freefall, she uses her binoculars to watch two operatives hauling a bright light up over a cliff edge below her.

Leisure

Stealing some eggs, Aeon cracks one of them open and observes through a microscope two tiny insects fighting each other. She is then caught by the giant insect mother (twice her height) and devoured.

Mirror

Aeon has a really bad day. She clumsily falls while breaking into a place, and the whole thing is caught on videotape. She spills cold coffee down her arm, and then turns the wrong tap on to wash it, drenching her hair. Then she gets shot dead. They should have called this Bad Hair Day.

Tide

In the easiest to follow short of the series, Aeon… oh what the heck, yes, she gets killed again.

Pilot

Aeon steals a case off of someone whose veins are turning green. He perceives a can turn into a fish, which then explodes. While watching the news about the green vein disease in gibberish, Trevor makes himself a biscuit using a spread he keeps inside his finger. Aeon treads on a tack, falls to her death and is then suspended over a red sea while her feet are licked by a blue man.


Meanwhile a teenage boy buys a magazine with a picture of her on the cover tickling her own feet with a feather.

This is the last episode with no dialogue. Whew - this should make things easier.

Utopia Or Deuteranopia?

From this point until the end, as well as a dialogue track, each episode begins with credits and a voice-over. You know how credits with a voice-over work, right? The words are there to clue in new viewers as to what the show is all about, just like on that start of Star Trek.

Trevor: "The dream to awaken our world."

Aeon: "You're out of control."

Trevor: "I take control. Whose side are you on?"

Aeon: "I take no side."

Trevor: "You're skating the edge."

Aeon: "I am the edge."

Trevor: "What you truly want, only I can give."

Aeon: "You can't give it, can't even buy it, and you just don't get it."

Yes. Yes I don't.

Okay, so let's flag the theme and just dive into the episode's opening narration.

Trevor: "The unobserved state is a fog of probabilities. A window of and for error. The watcher observes, the fog collapses, an event resolves. A theory becomes a fact.

What is the truth? Tell me, if you know, heh, and I will not believe you. Things are never what they seem. Clean gloves hide dirty hands, and mine are dirtier than most."

Trevor seizes power over the country of Bregna from Clavius, but holds him captive underneath his bedroom by keeping his body at a specific vibration. By wearing a particular pair of braces, Trevor can match the vibration, open a door in Clavius' chest and walk down a corridor inside him to a red-curtained cave where he keeps a blue dress for Aeon to wear.

Thanatophobia

There's a wall around the country that contains a very thin railway. People have small tubes in their lower backs. At the end there's a girl with no arms. Is she supposed to have dreamt this?

A Last Time For Everything

Trevor wants to go to bed with Aeon, so he steals her DNA and clones her several times. Unfortunately she's already resolved a counter-plan, which her clone begins to carry out upon awakening.

Ether Drift Theory

Aeon infiltrates a floating cube full of artificial life-forms inside an ocean formed entirely of a paralytic substance. Then the cube gets eaten away by a powerful super-acid. With transport destroyed, Aeon must merge with another being in order to escape, but by that point there’s no-one else left. So, in a somewhat unexpected ending, she gets entombed forever under the paralytic sea. Drag.

The Purge

Trevor is implanting his subjects with artificial consciences. When Aeon passes-out and gets captured, she awakens on a TV chat show, and finds she is unable to kill Trevor. Is this because of her own conscience, or his artificial one? Then ‘Trevor’ turns out to be a robot duplicate with a flip-top head. So was her desire to kill him a false instruction?

The Demiurge

With Howard Baker taking over the direction from Peter Chung, everything gets quite a bit more philosophical.

Trevor: "Light, in the absence of eyes, illuminates nothing. Visible forms are not inherent in the world, but are granted by the act of seeing. Though the world, and events, do exist independent of mind, they obtain of no meaning in themselves none that the mind is not guilty of imposing on them."

Tonight, Aeon captures a god-like being and tries to expel it into space. Trevor is determined to keep it on Earth. Weird, blue stuff ensues.

Trevor: "The height of tension in any game occurs when the rules allow for the influence of human judgement. The advantage in this instance is held by the player who drops the ball to allow the opponent a hollow victory. Half of eternity is still eternity… Infinity and zero are different degrees of the same value… Pain isn't real beyond the individual who feels it, but the nail is real."

Isthmus Crypticus

Trevor is keeping two half-human, half-birds in captivity, both of whom are lusted after by various factions, including himself.

Reraizure

These are getting harder to summarise.

Chronophasia

In a lab under the jungle, Aeon is attacked by a giant baby with fangs, and contracts a disease that traps her in a time loop, until a naked child gives her new life in another world.

End Sinister

Aliens. Using suspended animation, Aeon chases Trevor a thousand years into the future, despite the fact that neither of them has a way back. All right so I took most of that off the DVD jacket. It's come to this.

There, now that wasn't so hard.

In Summary:

Whuh?

(with thanks to Herschel)

Available here.