I can’t rightly say that No. 6 succeeds as a dystopian story. The city of Number 6 is a bare-bones utopia, with a caste system based on intellect and academic success, a secret police who kidnap all those suspected of harboring doubts about the city’s perfection, and futuristic technology and glass/stainless steel-based architecture accompanied by well-kept parks and forests, with a large wall surrounding it to keep out the filthy slums and decayed world that lie just outside their view. This isn’t enough to be “dystopian,” as the solution would just be to not think critically of the government and then nothing would happen, so there needs to be a moral imperative to think ill of the city, so of course we have a plot of people disappearing for the sake of an unknown experiment, as well as abuse of the citizens outside the wall. The guarantee for this story is that our protagonist will be a citizen of Number 6 whose eyes are opened by a rebel who has fallen prey to the city’s machinations, and that our story will primarily lie outside the wall.
But even though we know the story, No. 6 tells it quite well, even while following all the classic tropes by the book. The first episode gives the encounter between our upstanding citizen Shion and our rebellious victim Nezumi, two twelve year old boys from opposite ends of the social spectrum. Shion is the student who is too smart for his classes, too wrapped up in his mind to act socially even towards his longtime friend Safu and her grandmother. Amidst a storm on his twelfth birthday he stands at his balcony and screams out as if something would happen to reveal some greater truth to him, and as if in reply after walking back inside he turns around to see Nezumi, with his worn clothes covered in blood dripping from his left shoulder. Nezumi grabs him by the throat and tells him to stay quiet, but Shion takes it all in stride and tells his mom over the intercom to stay out of his room in a collected tone, before helping to bandage Nezumi and bring him food. A series of cuts back and forth show some banter between the two that walks a line between comedic and strained, but we also learn the extent of Shion’s curiosity, excitedly asking how Nezumi managed to immobilize him by the neck even as cold metal is pressed against the side of his neck. After some laughter they fall asleep holding hands, as if that were a proof of Nezumi being safe even in this dangerous place, or maybe as if that were proof that Shion finally found something worthwhile.
The next morning the episode draws to a close with the implication that the police suspect him of hiding the wanted Nezumi, but it is only when the next episode begins and Shion looks much older that we learn that they did indeed catch him, and instantly removed him from his position as one of the elites of Number 6. For his curious night with Nezumi he has been a worker drone for four long years, managing a public park far removed from his academics, his curiosity of the world at large. Put together with the masterful opening, composing the twelve year old Shion against an ever-rising Number 6 and Nezumi against the looming forest, coloring their forlorn bodies with bitter snapshots of their lives of boredom and trauma before putting them face to face and stripping all the sadness away, this first episode perfectly introduces us to the cloying world of No. 6 as well as these two boys who struggle against it in their own ways.
After the pilot the actual story begins with Shion stumbling across a supernatural accident that kills his coworker, and when the Number 6 officials try to silence him and send him away he is rescued by an older Nezumi, who brings him beyond the wall and opens his eyes to the truth. Things slow down as Shion adjusts to his new life, more plot points about the city are slowly introduced by his interactions with Nezumi as well as a few other personas, and we see some scenes of Shion’s friend Safu and Shion’s mother both starting to discover the truth of the city themselves while trying to understand Shion’s disappearance. This center is to build up the characters as well as the final confrontation, less gripping or worthwhile than the opening or closing, but with a number of gripping scenes and beautifully composed shots that pull us into the otherwise familiar world.
While the ending doesn’t quite feel rushed, there’s a sense that the final revelations about the city and the swelling conclusion were built around the fact that there were only 11 episodes available, as many of the points were never fully fleshed out until the last second. Safu flies under the radar for most of the story other than the parallel to Shion from within the city, but in the span of three or four shots she becomes the lynchpin of the city’s secrets, only for her final confrontation with Shion to pass in the blink of an eye, completely without incident. Meanwhile Shion’s mother seems to function primarily as an emotional counterpart to the otherwise jaded cast, somehow being worked into even the most foundational stories of Number 6 but never actually being relevant to the plot. The buildup to the end also feels a bit absentminded; most of the discussion in the last few episodes revolve around who will carry out the final attack on the city, but ultimately despite it being the natural pair of Shion and Nezumi it seems that any one person could have done both of their jobs combined, possibly with less incident.
However the twin issues of an oppressive dystopian city and a string of deaths caused by giant hornets hatching from within people’s skin and sucking them dry come together in a more interesting way than I had initially predicted, and it does cause a legitimate tension between the city and the forces of nature the city has crushed underfoot to reach the top. With the constant framing of the city center, a honeycomb-shaped steel building, I was sure the show would reach an absent-minded conclusion of a citywide experiment causing the deaths, pulling everything together and making the city the lone antagonist of the story. In reality while things do follow a similar trajectory, the deaths actually do represent a certain lack of control on the part of the city, a level of irony and existential danger that Shion is concerned about from the very beginning. Nezumi’s place in the deaths feels somewhat contrived, shoehorned in at the eleventh hour, but it causes a three-way tension between the hornets, the bitter Nezumi, and the kindhearted Shion, and in a way that seems to actually choose a side rather than copping out and striking a balance between their stark modes of thinking, or lazily choosing empathy and love over all.
The progression of the story itself finds a few tiny holes, such as why Shion avoids total erasure as a twelve-year-old harboring a fugitive when we see people vanish into thin air for the mere implication that the city is less than ideal, or why his innate and somewhat morbid curiosity and lack of boundaries transformed into pure empathy and idealism after the first episode, but the general atmosphere and use of static shots to frame the striking imagery and contrast between the city and the slums maintain a generally tense and engaging story throughout. The use of gender, while not highlighted, does contrast with what we might expect, from the two boys who develop a close friendship with tangible romantic overtones to the person named Dogloan who runs an inn for the homeless, a character whose gender becomes more and more ambiguous from their first appearance before a single shot of them embracing Shion implies that he has figured out Dogloan’s gender, yet never says it to us. The use of language between Shion and Safu also implies some gendered issues, with the biologist Safu stating her attractions to him plainly and in (explicit) biological terms, while Shion’s confusion about them paints him as someone who has never thought about his, her, or anyone else’s gender for a moment. These small idiosyncrasies, as well as a deeper characterization of the otherwise bland utopia through the clever choice of shots, ultimately force us to engage with this as a character piece against a dystopian backdrop, elevating the setting past its flaws and shortcomings.