Western X Ep.2 “Old Desert Demon”

X walks the wastelands of the Demon Valley and comes face to face with evil.

4 Swirlies

“Oh good, you’re awake. It’s eatin’ time.”

This is beautifully produced and acted series. The music is stirring and epic.

It reminds me very strongly of Karma Kula, a show that I wish they still kept available. Last I checked they pulled it down. This show is stylistically very much the same.

But unlike Karma Kula, there’s way more atmosphere than fighting. What gets me is that, from what I can tell, X doesn’t remember who he is or how he got there, but he doesn’t ask the old man any questions – like where am I? How do I get to the nearest town?

And then he gets captured by the old man (I guess he’s a demon) and then it ends.

What does X want? Where is X going? Shows like this make me think of Aeon Flux. The awesome cartoon, not the movie. It is hard to get inside Aeon Flux’s mind – but you know that she wants something as a character. Even if you won’t know what that is. Here you don’t get the impression this character is anything more than a reason the show’s atmosphere.

But I still gave it 4 swirlies, because it looks so damned good. And it may be all atmosphere, but they nail it.

Western X: Ep. 1 “X Marks The Beginning”

“X Marks The Beginning” – On the plains of a desert wasteland, a man known only as X is on the verge of death. Among a pile of dead bodies he awakens, with no memories of his past and hunted by an unknown enemy, he struggles to uncover the truth behind his identity; this is the beginning of his journey.

2 Swirlies

“The four evils will unite and the darkness will surrender.”

The only reason this episode got 2 swirlies instead of one is that, despite the general lack of action or story, I’m a sucker for a good mystery.  Good being the key word there.

So far, this first episode is all tease.  It starts off with dead bodies in the desert—always a great hook!  But it also does something else: inflict the longest opening credits ever upon the audience.  I know this is a Western, and pacing tends to be leisurely in the genre, but having titles interrupt the opening scene past the two minute mark is a bit… distracting.

Visually, the filmmakers put a lot of effort into the beer-bottle look of this series, and there’s some interesting “experimental-ish” sound and picture editing here (a necessity since there is no dialogue)—used to convey the main protagonist’s madness or confusion or amnesia or… something.  Guess we’ll find out later!

The episode also ends with more violence, another dead body, and much general story confusion.  In fact, clarity is this episode’s enemy.  The audience has no real idea what’s going on, and if you didn’t read the episode description beforehand, you’d be totally lost.

As one of the first title cards reads: “The Mystery Begins Now.”  The filmmakers seemed to have put a lot of effort into the technical aspects of this series, so let’s hope that the story and mystery live up to these efforts in the episodes to come.