I’ve been making a *very* good pace at lopping resolutions off the list – after last month I was able to take care of beating Marvel’s Midnight Suns, this month I was able to finish watching Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water.

Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water fits a place in Gainax’s trajectory as a studio where, on the one hand, they are very early in their life – coming off of Royal Space Force and Gunbuster – with a bunch of their best work ahead of them. On the other hand, it’s probably one of their biggest stumbling blocks, due to the production difficulties in the back half of the series.

Let’s get to what works – this series does a great job of starting off as a sort of steampunk/gaslamp fantasy directly taking inspiration from the works of Jules Verne – particularly 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea and (to a lesser extent) The Mysterious Island. It also does a great job with its original characters. Nadia & Jean, while Nadia is somewhat obnoxious (deliberately so), have tremendous chemistry, with Nadia’s character flaws very much being set up to serve as an avenue for her character growth over the course of the series (same with Jean). The Grandis gang – while starting out as your Goldfish Poop Gang antagonists as of the start of the series, very quickly become endearing characters, and a valued part of the supporting cast. Over the course of the series it slowly and methodically shifts gears to something more space-opera influenced, making for a very fun journey as the plot evolves.

Additionally, the ways that Hideaki Anno fleshes out the crew of the Nautilus, along with setting up the mystery of their connection to Atlantis, and the forces of Neo-Atlantis (the series main antagonists). The characters have their own interesting dynamics with each other, separate from their interactions with our main protagonists, giving them their own interior lives in ways that the supporting casts in other anime don’t always get (like much of the Bridge Crew of the Macross outside of Claudia & Misa). This is something that Anno and Yoshiyuki Sadamoto would also do a great job with in Evangelion with the NERV Command Center crew.

However, what keeps the show from being a completely unreserved recommendation is the issues around the midpoint of the series when we get into what’s known as the Island Arc, which is followed by the shorter Africa arc. The core problem with these is that Gainax got a request late in the series for more episodes from NHK, the network that was carrying the series, and Anno decided to pass those episodes off so he could focus on the story essential episodes during this period, and the show’s climax. The problem is that these episodes aren’t just “not great” they’re “objectively bad” – in some cases painfully so – and because of Anno’s lack of involvement subsequent parts of the series that he did work on effectively don’t reference them.

This isn’t like the Long Dark Coffee-Break of the Soul partway through the second season of Twin Peaks, where Mark Frost is still somewhat involved, but David Lynch had effectively checked out. Those episodes always had something that tied into the larger plot that made them worth watching (especially related to the Black Lodge), even if everything or almost else (The Andy Paternity nonsense, Nadine’s superstrength and mental regression, etc.) wasn’t. Here – except for episodes 30 and 31 – you can literally skip all those episodes and miss nothing from doing so – not even character development, which is normally the kind of thing you can take advantage of filler to work on.

That said, I’m glad I watched the show – and I did ultimately end up skipping basically all the filler – as I think it serves an important role in the history of Gainax – and like Dunbine (which I watched last year) will play a role in Super Robot Wars X to enough of a degree that I think I benefited by watching the show before playing the game (instead of vice versa). So, I think this worked out pretty well.

The GKids release is rather disappointingly barebones – though the quality of the remaster that they did for the series is fantastic, and the included artbook is nice.

Nadia & The Secret of Blue Water is available for streaming on Retrocrush, and has received a physical release from GKids (Amazon Affiliate Link).

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