Genre: Mystery, action
Score: Excellent
Rating: 18 for violence
Length: 13 episodes
America, the early 1930s: mafia families, bank robberies, kidnappings… and immortals. There are people walking around who cannot die – and whether they intend to or not, whether they’re good people or bad, they have a bloody devastating effect on the world around them. And there are people who would do anything to get the secret of eternal life.
This is a strange show to watch because of its baffling habit of jumping backwards and forward through time – practically every scene. The central events take place on a cross-country train journey in 1931, in which at least two groups of villains simultaneously tried to hijack the same train, on which various unsavoury characters happened to be travelling. Around that are various events in 1930 and 1932, as well as flackbacks to a demonic rite a century earlier when most of the immortals in the story date from (though some are more recent, and there are allusions to earlier ones). But if you can follow its odd attention span, it’s worth it.
The characters are what make the show: there’s quite a lot of them in a short space, and immortal or not, they’re all interesting: an old alchemist who’s after power, an honest mafiosi who hopes to save lives, a criminally insane thug and his cohorts who just like killing, the cowardly leader of a small street gang, an immortal little kid who has to manipulate his way through the world, a girl who wants to know what’s happened to her brother, a newspaper office who deal in under-the-counter information (for a price), a naive young mafia recruit who’s starting to learn about the immortals, an assassin with a damned good secret identity, a ghost story, and a pair of petty crooks whose constant banter keeps stealing the scene.
It’s violent, it’s confusing, it’s insane and it’s great fun.