Canaan is intriguing by staff alone. It’s not obvious why I skipped over it initially. Maybe my fascination with P.A. Works didn't exist yet. Maybe Type-Moon and Mari Okada weren't the rock stars they are now. Or maybe the whole affair seemed so passé, even in its time.

Some things age like wine, but Canaan is Pepsi Blue. If you have nostalgia for laser blue consumer products, perhaps you also have nostalgia for the George W. Bush era of blockbuster terrorism, dubious US military operations in tandem with evil paramilitary forces, black hawk choppers circling bombed out desert villages, a shadowy vice president and his cabal pulling the strings, the pervasive browns of tactical shooter video games, and more time bombs than you can shake a stick at. Canaan offers all this and more.

That said, it's watchable. Takashi Takeuchi’s familiar character designs are rendered crisply in its acrobatic bullet-opera shootouts. And Kinoko Nasu & Mari Okada’s grim sensibilities align in a story about a warrior of fate burdened by her supernatural “synesthesia” vision (or one could call like it is: The Mystic Eyes of Death Perception), and the web of guilt and envy that surrounds her.

Unfortunately, it rarely transcends the mundane of its era. Okada’s now-familiar brand of over-the-top melodrama makes for some entertainingly grotesque moments, but its drama is shortchanged by a semi-supernatural global conspiracy story that reaches for Metal Gear Solid levels of convolution. The hows or whys are hard to keep track of, and lack Hideo Kojima’s eccentric knack for camp and absurdist levity.

Though Canaan is only P.A. Works’ second TV series, proceeding Okada’s True Tears, it feels older than it is. Perhaps by its 2009 release, it already missed the zeitgeist. The inauguration of Barack Obama was the culmination of post-9/11 fatigue reflected in popular media. "24" was already in its final seasons. The apocalyptic, terrorism-packed Battlestar Galactica just aired its tortured finale. Metal Gear Solid 4 wrapped up its canon a year earlier.

The market was not ripe for a terrorism-flavored action anime in the desert with cartoony analogs of Bush, Cheney and Blackwater. Oh, and Pepsi Blue ended its distribution in 2004. Perhaps it’s better to experience this anime with curious nostalgia than with the contemporaneous verisimilitude it never fully grasped.