I’ve watched through episode five, but I find it hard to talk about the episodes individually since the plotting is so peripheral and discontinuous. I’m blown away by the series so far. This is easily among the most stylistically original shows I’ve ever seen and I’m amazed that the show has stayed so fragmentary and impressionistic for this long.
Others have pointed out the subjective soundtrack and disorienting narrative effects, but I’m also continually surprised by the show’s animation. It subverts expectations of the medium in ways that add to Sausage’s reading of the show’s absurdism. Most obviously, facial expressions tend to be blank. Or, weirder, they’re sometimes depicted subjectively, as in the conversation about the Wired between Lain and her dad in episode four, where her face is blank in the medium shot, a creepy smirk in close-up, and a zombielike, bloodshot exhaustion in the long shot, giving us three different ways to interpret Lain’s new relationship to technology in that scene—neutral, dominant, compulsive. There are also a handful of times in the first few episodes where characters mouth words silently, which is counterintuitive for animation since there’s no chance of ever figuring out what someone is saying, and this adds to the show’s eerie, almost gnostic(?) wavelength. I love this formal playfulness and I’m with Michael that the show is more of a mood piece than it is symbolic sci-fi in the vein of
Evangelion. Even the scenes with conventional genre set-ups get emptied out and destabilized in unusual ways. As I see it, the intense emotional and aesthetic effects are “the point”, more so than the themes or psychology, at least so far.
Episode five has one of my favorite bits of inventive staging.
In general, the show has a great, expressionistic use of objects. Even just sticking with drinks, we have the refraction from a Coke bottle in a club that kickstarts a drug-induced hallucination, the forbidden nighttime snack of orange soda, and the coffee spill in episode five, as well as the great point-of-view shot of Mika looking into a swirling water cup that ends the above dinner scene, kickstarting her own visions of some sort.
In addition to these coups of mise-en-scène, the animation also features
an unusual mix of textures—both abstract and photographic backgrounds, blown-out film inserts, glitchy CGI, blocky 3D video game animation, simulated VHS artifacts, &c. The palette keeps expanding with every episode.
IIRC the board members who took up my recommendation last time didn’t like it, but
Serial Experiments Lain exists in the same mental space for me as
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. That film is much more minimal, but the two works have a similarly vivid sense of digital-age alienation and adolescence, as well as, for my money, definitive portraits of the excitement and terror in the unreality of the internet and all of its possibilities. The other comparison that comes to mind is
Twin Peaks: The Return, as feihong also brought up, including the fact that the two shows share the motif of humming telephone poles and power lines, seemingly an all-powerful, near metaphysical image in both shows.