I thought about trying to write the review without any spoilers. Or at least, I thought about it for a split second and then immediately trashed the idea as impossible. Ergo Proxy is the kind of story that is very hard to talk about without spilling all of the beans. The first two sections of the review are appropriately spoiler tagged, but the spoilers in the third section are all unhidden. Those who haven't watched the show yet will want to skip that part, or just skip this review altogether.

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If there's one thing the city of Romdo values, it's efficiency. Autoreivs and humans work together in a strictly maintained balance. A place for everything and everything in its place, as they say. Fellow Citizens must be fitter, happier, more productive! Unrestrained emotions are a hindrance, and should be done away with! The people of Romdo are quite satisfied with this way of life, all things considered. They have no choice but to be satisfied, since leaving the dome city to find somewhere else to live is not an option. Where else would they go when the whole world is a barren wasteland? As controlled as it is, this static utopia is now threatening to break apart at the seams. An influx of refugees have come from the fallen Mosk dome, disrupting the delicate balance of Romdo. The autoreivs are being infected in droves by the Cogito virus that can give souls to the soulless machines. A monster cuts a swathe through the city's population in a shocking display of violence not seen in living memory. Yet still its Regent watches in cold silence, unable or unwilling to halt the steady decline of Romdo. However, the Regent's granddaughter Re-l is not content with just sitting by while the city crumbles around her. She'll need to find out what's really going on first though, which is easier said than done. In her attempt to find answers, she stumbles upon a single word: Proxy. Whether this ominous creature will bring Romdo's salvation with it, or the final nail in its coffin remains unknown. All she really knows is that she must find the proxy at all costs, and learn the truth about the stagnant world she lives in. For as long as the truth remains hidden, man and machine will have no future on this dead Earth.

"Can you hear it? The Pulse of the Awakening?"

*Precious is sleep, better to be of stone,
while the oppression and the shame still last;
not seeing and not hearing, I am blest;
so do not wake me, hush! Keep your voice down. *-
Risposta del Buonarroto, by Michaelangelo

In the first scene of the very first episode, we have a poem in Italian. No explanation, no translation, not even who wrote it. It's pretty clear right off the bat that Ergo Proxy will not be holding the viewer's hand. This is the only anime i've ever watched that gave me homework, and never have I watched a tv show that made feel as dumb as this one did. The anime is packed to the gills with subtle clues and obscure references to philosophy and classic literature. It's enough to bring a tear of joy to a scholar's eye, and a tear of pain to mine. Everything that the viewer needs to understand what's going on is there, but the show makes you work for it. While something like, say, Mob Psycho 100 is a friendly golden retriever more than happy to jump all over you and give you kisses, Ergo Proxy is a grouchy cat. If you want those cuddles, you'll have to come to it to get them. This is not an instant satisfaction type of show. It demands a lot of investment and patience from the viewer, and that kind of thing isn't for everyone. This unfortunately means that it's not very accessible to the casual viewer. However, it is also a vital part of its inimitable charm in my opinion. The plot of Ergo Proxy is a bit like a jigsaw puzzle, and as we all know jigsaw puzzles are the pinnacle of entertainment.

Ergo Proxy is one of the finest examples of 'show don't tell' i've seen. It very rarely tells you anything outright, preferring to instead imply through the environment and the characters' actions. And it's all done so naturally. I never felt like I was too lost to keep watching. I always had a pretty good handle on what was going on, even though it was never told to me directly. There are a few info dumps, but like everything else in the show they're delivered in such an unorthodox manner that they add to the mystique rather than clear it away.

The entire show has a muted, dark look to it. So dark in fact, that it can be very difficult to make out what's even happening at times, especially in the first few episodes. I suspect that makes it rather difficult to watch for some people. As for me, I have pretty bad eyesight at the best of times, so watching Ergo Proxy can be a downright painful experience. The animation is a bit of a mixed bag. At times it was beautifully fluid and expressive, other times it was off-model and awkward. However, I did find that it looked quite pleasing for the most part.

When I didn't have to squint myself into a headache to see it, that is. The people that worked on the show clearly knew what they were doing in regards to the visuals. They did their job very well, and I didn't find the errors distracting. For the most part.

An example of Ergo Proxy's deftness at telling the story through it's visuals is the character designs and how they trick you before you've even started watching the show. Re-l is a bit like an exotic bird bred to attract attention. She's the focus of much of the promotional material, and is a great example of a very marketable character design. She also makes for a good distraction. With her confident attitude and her striking looks, she does a splendid job of drawing the viewer's eyes away from the truth hidden in plain view. After all, where better to hide a secret from the audience than right under their noses? The genius of Vincent's character design lies in its inconsistency. His design is initially quite unassuming, tailor made to make the audience overlook him. It does an excellent job at tricking the audience into believing that he's a mere side character. It's only after he's revealed as one of the main protagonists that he begins to look the part.

Spoiler, click to viewclick to hide

His design is even more interesting if you remember that he's a proxy, which means he can change his appearance at will. It's quite possible that his features were so bland because of his desire to avoid attention and just be a normal, functioning member of society. He looked that way because that's the way he thought he was supposed to look. After he's exiled from Romdo and he no longer has to hide himself, he starts to revert to a look closer to his orginal form.

Ergo Proxy is not afraid to experiment and is very unpredictable as a result. The anime made very sure to keep me constantly on my toes, and everytime I thought I had a reasonable idea of what to expect, it threw yet another surreal curveball to knock me sideways again. One of the things that threw me for a loop was the anime's surprisingly playful, satirical sense of humor. The little moments of levity sprinkled in through the gloom show that despite being denser than the Iron Giant after eating a junk yard's worth of osmium, Ergo Proxy doesn't take itself too seriously. You can really tell that the writers had fun playing with the little changes in tone, and it makes the watching experience that much more enjoyable.

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God loves his children

Despite its disquieting, oppressive atmosphere and general strangeness, Ergo Proxy is a very human story told with a lot of compassion and respect for its characters. They're all so beautifully subtle in their characterization. Everything about them, from their flaws to their virtues, made each and every one so very endearing.

Re-l Mayer, registration number RE-L 124C 41+. She is a detective tasked with investigating the origin of the Cogito virus outbreak spreading through the autoreiv population. When she finds evidence of the proxy's rampage during her investigations, she sets out to find it and learn what it is. Re-l is somewhat of a decoy protagonist, and she takes more of a supporting role fairly early on. By no means is she only a decoy, however. Her role in the story and her influence on Vincent's character development should not be understated, not to mention she has some impressive character development of her own. Re-l has lived her whole life in a city where everything and everyone is controlled by the Regent, so she has no one that she can completely trust. As such, she is used to acting alone, and thinking only of herself. Her growth revolves around her lessening this deep seated distrust and selfishness. Vincent Law is one of the many immigrants displaced by the fall of the Mosk dome. He is described by Re-l as having the "the face of a perfect Fellow Citizen." In other words, a boring face. Indeed, the Vincent Law we see in the very beginning of Ergo Proxy is perhaps the most boring man in existence. He does what he's told with nary a complaint and keeps his head down with an almost infuriating passivity. Yet somehow this weedy, whiny, cowardly man always manages to leave death and chaos behind him wherever he goes, as if he were the angel of death itself. After being framed for the destruction of an autoreiv, he flees the city and spends the rest of the story drifting from place to place, trying to find out why he keeps attracting the proxy right to him.

Spoiler, click to viewclick to hide

His earliest memory is of leaving behind the smoldering wreckage of Mosk, as an exodus of displaced citizens set off for Romdo. But before then, there's nothing. He knows that he came from Mosk, but what did he do there? Who was he? The show plays with the amnesiac protagonist trope a little bit, in that it's not revealed that Vincent has holes in his memory until roughly halfway through the show. I don't know how it took him so long to notice that his memory is like swiss cheese, but there you go. It's kind of funny that he's such a mystery to everyone, including himself. A large part of the intrigue is centered around slowly filling in the blanks of Vincent's identity. He knows just about as much as the audience does, and he learns right along with them.

Vincent, or rather Ergo Proxy, turns out to be the long lost founder of Romdo. Which means the stifling requirements for being a Fellow Citizen that he tried so desperately to follow were something that he put in place. Yet in a cruel bit of irony, Vincent is unable to live up to the concept of a model citizen that he himself established. Much of his life seems to have been spent trying and failing to live up to his own unreasonably high standards of perfection. As Ergo Proxy, he was never able to connect with his creations the way he wanted to. They loved him, but he couldn't bring himself to love them back. He felt that he, and by extension his creations were imperfect, and this feeling tormented him for centuries. So he ran away and erased his own memories, in an attempt to stave off the creeping insanity that comes with hundreds of years' worth of painful experiences.

And of course, we mustn't forgot Pino, the sweetest, happiest little robot you'll ever see. Pino was the companion autoreiv of the Administration Bureau's chief, Raul Creed. After being infected with the Cogito virus, she aids Vincent's escape from Romdo, and travels with him on his journey back to Mosk. She is one of the most vital parts of the show, as her cheerful optimism and innocence prevent the anime from getting too bleak. As a matter of fact, the washed-out world she inhabits brings out her best qualities, and it makes this little ray of sunlight shine that much brighter in comparison. Being the recipient of a brand spanking new soul courtesy of the Cogito virus, Pino spends much of the show exploring her newfound emotions with a delightfully innocent enthusiasm. How funny it is, that despite being the least human of the main cast, she ends up understanding how to be human the best out of all of them. ___

Various Themes and Concepts

Caution: Unmarked spoilersIn Their Image

Ergo Proxy take some inspiration from Gnostic mythology. It's primarily just names, but it borrows certain ideas as well. In particular, the recurring theme of creators abusing and renouncing their own creations. The original humans created the proxies, then left them behind and fled into space. The proxies created the dome cities, but eventually went mad over the long centuries. Unable to die, they began to destroy their own creations out of despair. Or in Ergo's case, abandoned them to wither away on their own. Re-l floats the idea that Romdo's god did not abandon it, but that perhaps he was rejected by his own creation. Every time Ergo tried to connect with the city, it and its people always ended up turning him away. Perhaps it cast him aside him because that's what he thought he deserved. Who knows for sure? I certainly don't.

Cogito, Ergo Sum

I think, therefore I am is Descartes's principle that states that awareness of the self is the only truth that can be absolute. I perceive and acknowledge my existence, therefore I exist. The mind is a strange thing. We trick ourselves into thinking that we experience things that aren't actually real all the time, things like dreams and hearing things that aren't there. Therefore, how can we trust that what we perceive is the truth? The relationship between Ergo Proxy and Proxy One is based on the gaining of this true self awareness. The being known as Ergo Proxy is a shadow with no identity of his own, a clone of the entity called Proxy One.

"Incorrect. It is not 'I think, therefore I am', it is 'I think, therefore you are.'"

Ergo Proxy's existence was dependent on another being's perception of him rather than his own. In an attempt to differentiate himself from the original, he rebelled by creating a new identity and hiding behind it: Vincent Law, a human based on Ergo's idea of what a perfect citizen should be like. However, in order to gain independent self awareness, he first had to develop his own identity separate from the orginal. In order to do that, he had to think for himself and experience the world with his own senses. The sick betrayal of being condemned for something he didn't do, the sharp pain of starvation, the life-sucking burn of a fatal fever, the chilling excitement of an early morning snowball fight, the joy of playing silly games with a child. Only after he did that could Vincent grow beyond the Ergo identity created by Proxy One, and become a being based on his own ideals and experiences.

A Life's Purpose A large part of the story and themes are based around the concept of the raison d'etre, or "reason for living". What can you do when you're not needed anymore? If you pour everything you have into fulfilling your purpose, but still fail, what do you have left? Was it all for nothing? We get to see how each individual reacts in response to this, how they act when they lose their life's purpose, what lengths they go to fulfill it. We see Re-l neglect her friends in order to find the truth she so desperately wants. We see Vincent try to take his own life when the possiblity of becoming a Fellow Citizen is closed off to him. I could go on for hours, but I won't do that. This review is much too long as it is. As for the last theme......"Lies Make Us Happy" Many of the characters in Ergo Proxy are very committed liars. They lie to others, but they mostly lie to themselves. They would rather delude themselves into believing that everything is fine than face the harsh reality of the world they live in. Even if the truth is right in front in their faces, people can only see it if they are willing to see it. Romdo's leaders would rather lie to their subjects and grasp at straws than accept that the city is beyond saving. Vincent would rather close his eyes to the glaring inconsistencies in his own life than admit that he isn't human. It's obvious that living honestly is better in the long run, but that doesn't make it any less painful. As Re-l points out, the problem with asking questions is that you can't take them back. Once you learn the truth, you can never truly forget it.

Knowing the truth will not make us happy. However, that doesn't give us an excuse to turn away and live in ignorance. We need to look upon the truth ourselves, and do what we must to live out the time we're given as best we can. It's right there waiting for us. All we have to do open our eyes.