aving braved the lasers of the Planet Link Plan system and found the hidden base of the terrorist group called Solomon, Major Jim Hyatt and his crack squad of loudmouthed mavericks are ready to save the Earth. As revealed in earlier episodes of AWOL, glowering villain Duran Gash has stolen seven planet-buster missiles, and when the interplanetary Allied Forces refuse to accede to his demands, he smugly declares that Earth is next on the chopping block. The AF, thinking Hyatt and his team dead, continue their ill-timed infighting. They ignore the missile threat and slap together a fairly predictable and obviously doomed last-ditch plan to destroy the PLP. Even this misdirected effort proves too controversial for the AF elite, as the ranking military representative insists that the terrorists' unbreakable control of a lethal interplanetary secret weapon is just "a temporary problem."
Meanwhile, Hyatt and company split into teams and cut a bloody swath through Gash's soldiers, as Gash watches expressionlessly and mad hacker Peat Culten, the power behind the PLP, flails and panics. Culten, who previously considered Hyatt and his AWOL team mere blips in a universe-sized video game, has mentally upgraded them to a dangerous computer virus that must be eradicated. Gash, by contrast, continues to underestimate his enemies, and keeps issuing detached, unimaginative orders ("Send more soldiers." "Kill them all." "Fix the computer.") right up until the moment Hyatt arrives at his door.
Despite their earlier contempt for one another, Hyatt's gathering of misfits coheres into a real military team under pressure. Most of them say very little during the series' remaining episodes, apart from quick acknowledgments of orders. Where the series so far has consisted of laborious setup broken by quick combats, the final two episodes of AWOL are almost nonstop action, as Solomon's plans come apart under an interminable barrage of bullets.
Just guns, no glory
Having come this far without anything as prosaic as a backstory or character motivations, AWOL doesn't bother backing up to explain. The series never reveals Gash's reason for blowing up planets nor divulges a history that might justify his indifference toward the billions he kills. Right up to the end, he's just a two-dimensional barrier for our heroes, little more than a sock puppet with a scowl. Not that his intrepid opponents have much more going for them. Their newly bland, gung-ho personalities and their ability to run unscathed through walls of machine-gun fire (or to shrug off crippling wounds at will) strongly recalls the cheerful excesses of the G.I. Joe TV cartoon of the 1980s. But even G.I. Joe had more character development. Gash's khaki-colored, cookie-cutter soldiers are as faceless as COBRA's infinite supply of masked goons. The resemblance is so striking that it's a shock when Gash's men are repeatedly mowed down in gouts of blood. But the protagonists are also physically generic and have by this point sacrificed individuality in favor of heroic stoicism. Only Culten, resplendent in purple shirt, orange pants and red glasses, really stands out as a personality.
To be fair, Gash's determined lieutenant, the oft-betrayed Amanda Kessler, is also possessed of a strong individual will and a focused determination to keep the story from getting dull. But her behavior is so erratic and her ongoing survival so implausible that it's hard to take her seriously.
AWOL has no pretensions to being more than a raw hunk of guns-guts-and-glory science fiction. It achieves this minor goal moderately well. To some degree it's the spiritual child of the classic Armored Trooper VOTOMS, another uneven space saga about an expressionless super-soldier who blasts mercilessly through anything that gets in his way. VOTOMS at least had scope and ambition to counteract its limited color palette, stiff animation and boys-with-toys obsession with war and weaponry. AWOL is myopic, plodding and eventually disposable.
