It's a question that seems relevant to me because it's the first of many questions that came to me upon a repeat viewing of The Big O. Not the second season; questions in the second season were practically nonexistent until the end, the only one sticking with me being "why did they even bother"? It's not that I don't like the second season, really, I loved it, but, well, it's just not the first season; it doesn't even seem very much like Big O. That sounds a tad ridiculous, I admit, very narrow minded considering that the first season is only thirteen episodes that were always intended to be followed up by another thirteen, but I couldn't help but feel upon viewing the two back to back that the second lacked so much of what made the first so amazing. It never lacked for quality writing, for a fantastic score, for an interesting story, for solid pacing, smooth animation or superb directing. In some aspects, particularly animation and directing, it was its other half's better. In all the others it was at the very least its equal. The fundamental aspect it lacked was something more than all of that. No, not a soul; the second season had plenty of that as well and not originality (both seasons have committed their fair share of aping, honoring and parodying). It lacked mystery.
Well,that's not entirely fair to say. More than a fair number of entirely ambiguous questions worm into the heart of things, more than a number of enigmas (particularly that ending) go unanswered and still have fans up in arms, locked in endless debates about the nature of the show's reality: was it just The Truman show, minus Jim Carrey and that awful scarecrow's grin, or was it something entirely more postmodern, a commentary on identity, free will, a modern day 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead'? The conversations are endlessly fascinating, intellectually stoking and entirely pointless. Fascinating because the second season truly did introduce an entirely new series of questions to wrestle with, intellectually stoking because of the themes previously mentioned, and entirely pointless because, as was always Big O's strength, there wasn't a point to begin with.
The first season is largely standalone. Not because the second season can stand without it; it can't by any means. It's because the first season can stand entirely well without the second season. If the second season were to disappear, become no more than the show's vaguely defined memories, and if all possibilities of such a season were to be discarded forever, the first season would still be worth every frame of animation, every note composed for it. The same cannot be said of the second; certainly this is the case for all sequels worth their name, I'm well aware of this fundamental fact. It's not the plausibility of the second season I'm calling into question, nor is it it's connection to the first season. What I'm asking is why it was necessary at all. The most obvious response is that it was essential for typing up the loose ends.
As it stands, there is absolutely no reason these loose ends up had to be tied up. None at all. Watching The Big O for these answers is akin to watching a magician simply so his act may later be picked apart for posterity. Yes, you'll certainly feel smug later as you sit in his subsequent shows informing his audience that it's all just smoke and mirrors, that the woman is not so much being sawed in half as she and her counterpart are sitting in two completely separate boxes with only the illusion of a sawing occurring, and when he cries himself off of the stage and the show closes down you'll feel a sense of self-righteous superiority but what you'll grasp is the spirit of such shows. That's what the second season misses that the first one understands so beautifully: a mystery is something entirely magical in and of its being a mystery.
Watching the first season, it's astoundingly easy to feel lost, this being entirely the writers' fault. It's not because they lack cohesion or competence, far from it really. It's because they want you to be. They want you to be every bit as ignorant of this world as its own inhabitants are; hell, you don't even know just how ignorant it's inhabitants are (not until the second season shows up and tells you), just that even those who seem to have it together are themselves floundering in a world of mass illusion. You're handed puzzle pieces to entirely different jig-saw puzzles; some of these pieces aren't even jig-saw pieces but rather rubix cube pieces, maybe a few pieces to one of those massively convoluted 'alternate reality games' here and there. You're also told to find the solution to this puzzle, and that's it's going to be a 3-D puzzle and it's not going to make sense. And you work with these pieces because they're just so bizarre, so utterly disparate that it's impossible to resist playing with them. How was Dastun in that movie killing an actress some 40 years dead when he's living it after the fact? What in the world was that archetype and what was it doing in that cavern? Metropolis, foreigners, huh? Just what is 'the truth' of the cataclysm? And most importantly of all, WHAT THE HELL ARE MEMORIES?
You work at it, though, taking scraps of information from interviews here and there, discussing with your entirely uninterested friends just why it's so important that these robots are called "megadeuses" and what in the world 'R-D' means. You watch that absolutely stellar episode 12, what is undisputedly the finest giant robot fight in the world because it's so sluggish, to see Schwarzvald one more time in the hopes that he reveals something in his rantings, you pay attention to the score, to that insane 'Flash Gordon' intro and you hope that the musical direction has some baring on the whole, that it connects events no matter how nebulously, and learn. And eventually, you finish it up. The end result is too nonsensical to describe, by no means does it look like a finished puzzle, but you know somewhere that it is. Somehow, someway you know your solution to the puzzle makes sense. What you know also is that your friends' puzzles, though entirely contradictory, also make their own sense. There's no debating now: the puzzles are too delicate for that, this project never intended to be taken apart once put together. What you're meant to do is bask in the otherworldliness of it and take it as seems best.
Season Two wants nothing to do with mystery. It says it does, surely, turning Schwartzvald's demise into an impossible set of circumstances that couldn't happen within the show's established framework, throwing out that mind-warping ending, but the mysteries don't mean anything anymore. They're thrown in there as a way to make up for the answers it has given us, a bartering tool. It wants to replace pieces of your puzzle with its own and wants to give you direction as to the real fitting of the pieces. And by god, it's a boring new puzzle it's given you. In throwing away the mystery, the second season robs the show of its identity. The excellent if unconnected episodic nature of the first season is gone save for one or two instances of tangently related episodes that really do nothing. They offer no new characterization, at times bastardizing an already established one (Alex's regression from the aloof egotist to spoiled child is really the worse), never offering a mystery that can even fit into the bigger puzzle, and what's worse, answering mysteries they proffer before the end of the episode. Like I've said, they're excellent enough, but just don't fit with the first season's experience.
The second season, then, is the younger brother of an up and coming magician and as such is privy to his entire catalogue of illusions; being that he had to practice and had a ready audience in his younger brother, why not? Oh, he means well, telling everyone after the show just how it's all done, but he doesn't understand at all that the people never wanted such information. They wanted the mystery, the illusion, not the cold science of things. "But wait, don't you want to know that he's got another show after this one, with entirely new tricks?" implores the younger boy. "No, I do not," you reply testily, because in spoiling those first tricks, in taking away your write to reason your way to the answers, he's forced you into a mode of thinking guaranteed to ruin further such experiences. The boy meant well, really, he was a clear speaker and interesting enough to talk to, but damn it, he gave away the magic, tarnished it for once and all. And illusions, magic, once spoiled are very much like all things else once spoiled: irreparable.
When it's all said and done, that's the shame of the follow up: It really is a fine show and complements the story of its first half quite well but it doesn't let its first half be. It insists on showing things its way and because it's linked so integrally to the first, insists that it do so too. It's not that the second season should be avoided, it's that the second season should be avoided if you truly loved the first. If you merely enjoyed it, then by all rights do dig in. If it holds a valuable place to you though, as it does for me, if you're one of those who thinks it's the mystery itself that's so rewarding and not the answer, then don't touch it with a ten-foot pole. Please. The innocence, relatively speaking, inherent in the first cannot be regained if lost. But hey, at least the second never revealed the identity of the enigmatic Lester Young, and for that I'll remain forever grateful.
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