t the end of the opening episodes of Outlaw Star, overconfident odd-jobbers Gene Starwind and Jim Hawking had lost an employer and gained an experimental ship they dubbed the Outlaw Star. The ship itself is a phenomenal asset, but it also represents a phenomenal financial drain. Between port fees and the need for a proper ship's registration, weapons, supplies and equipment, Starwind & Hawking is suddenly firmly in the red.
Gene deals with half the problem by hitting up his new Outlaw acquaintances for help, blithely promising he'll pay them back when he makes it big. After some comic relief involving a miffed cat-girl out for revenge, he makes the same promise to an old friend, a swishy space merchant whose flirtations make both Gene and Jim twitchy. The equipment Gene wants is dauntingly expensive, but he sees a chance to make a deal when a famous assassin, "Twilight" Suzuka, comes after the merchant. Gene intervenes and gets hired as an impromptu bodyguard. Holding off Suzuka gets him the material he needs, and he, Jim and Melfina begin refitting and repairing the Outlaw Star.
Meanwhile, a band of pirates still stalks Gene and company, and a clash with an inhumanly powerful enemy leaves Gene near death. A spur-of-the-moment alliance and an emergency takeoff get the Outlaw Star's crew back into space, where they face more pirates and a difficult decision. They've got a fantastic ship and a full load of supplies, but virtually no money and no off-planet reputation that could be parlayed into cash. Jim's temper begins to boil over as he tries to convince Gene that the situation is serious and can't be cheerfully ignored, but Gene refuses to discuss the future. "When you're a big guy like me, you gotta do big things!" he boasts, but if he has any specific big things in mind, he doesn't feel like discussing them with his partner. His mixture of secretiveness and seeming irresponsibility infuriates Jim, who alternates between nagging, yelling and ignoring Gene altogether--at least until they arrive on Heiphon III, where Gene exhibits the beginnings of a plan.
Moving in the right direction
Gene Starwind is a memorable, if not entirely appealing, protagonist.
He's sarcastic, cocky, self-centered and not particularly smart, although he's lucky and a bit cunning. Whenever he begins to reveal hidden depths, he immediately dives back into shallowness with a line like "I'm awesome at absolutely everything I set out to do with my life!" A lecherous, arrogant, supercilious hero in a genre better known for its wide-eyed, good-hearted heroines, Gene is simultaneously the most intriguing and the most annoying thing about Outlaw Star. He's the prototypical star that viewers love to hate.
Gene's peccadilloes aside, the main problem with Outlaw Star's early episodes was a lack of either nuanced characterization or a sense of originality. With these installments, it's still hard to get into the characters' heads, but the series itself is developing a personality. The basic "good guys fighting bad guys over the big unique weapon" plot continues in the background, but has taken a back seat to a more relaxed sojourn through a sprawling interstellar community. The slower pacing may irritate fans of the early episodes, which featured more serious action and less slapstick and intrigue, but this meandering story at least avoids the combat-of-the-week scenario in favor of a looser approach.
Not that these three tapes lack action. The fight sequences include mano a mano combats and starship battles, both full of dizzying blurs of motion and flamboyant perspective tricks. Once again, the barely humanoid pirates provide a lot of style and color. The space battles take anime gun fetishism to a whole new level--the Outlaw Star, like many of the pirate vessels, is a "grappler ship," meaning a spaceship with arms. This lends itself to spaceships arm-wrestling at top speed, not to mention spaceships that actually wave around guns bigger than themselves. (In the most exaggerated case, the ship actually looks like a small tick on top of the gun it's carrying.)
Outlaw Star still hasn't fully chosen a course or found its stride, but it's moving in the right direction. As both its grating-yet-charming main character and its big Western-style universe come into sharper focus, they're developing a smarmy charm that makes it hard to actively dislike the series ... although it's still easy to turn it off without too much regret.
