It’s Phantom: Requiem for the Phantom episode 1, and some guy wakes up in an empty room without memories when a masked woman suddenly starts to attack him.

A man invades a mansion near a tropical beach, killing to guards outside along the way. Inside, he runs into one of his fellow assassins disguised as a maid.

Then in the middle of a gunfight, we are shown a flashback. The man wakes up in a nearly empty room, with almost no memories of the past and no memory of what his name is. The only thing he can remember is a masked girl pointing a gun at him. As the man uses some steel bars that were in the room to break out of the room, a pair of scientists elsewhere monitor him, remarking about his amazing ability, and then has a girl whom they call “Phantom” attack him. Phantom tells the man that the only way he can live is to fight seriously, and she opens fire on him. The man tries to run away, but is eventually cornered. There, the girl tosses away her gun, grabs to knives, throwing one to the man. In the meantime, a woman named Kuro shows up at a tractor trailer, to join the scientists in monitoring the situation.

The girl opens up by beating up the man pretty badly. However he soon slides his shirt off and is able to grab Phantom’s knife, blade first, by sliding his shirt sleeve over his hand, slicing off part of Phantom’s mask while he’s at it. At this point, he has a vision of a an empty swing set, with the girl speaking about how she has no memories, and wants to escape the “empty freedom” of murder. When he snaps back from the dream, the man almost kills Phantom, but then stops, and walks away.

The man opens the door of the hanger they were in, only to find that they are in the middle of nowhere. The girl shows back up and tells him that his name is Zwei, while her name is Ein. She then shoots him with a tranquilizer gun. Kuro and the scientists then show up, and they talk about how they use drugs and hypnotism to brainwash the assassins for Inferno, the organization they work for. The lead scientists, who’s named Scythe Master, also notes Zwei’s natural ability, pointing to how he defeated Ein without any training or experience.

From this, we return to the battle, with Zwei and Ein’s target arriving at his mansion via helicopter, and Ein there to greet him, obviously having infiltrated the mansion previously as a maid. From there, Ein kill the man’s bodyguard while Zwei kills their target. That night, Kuro tells a room full of criminal-looking men that they’ve now taken down two of the five mafia groups in LA.

If this first episode is a preview of what’s to come, I’m glad I picked this series to blog. It has action, mystery, drama, and so on. The action is obvious: with Zwei and Ein going around assassinating people. Then there is mystery: how exactly, did these two come under the services of Inferno? The lead scientist noted that Zwei was basically at the wrong place at the wrong time (or perhaps, in the scientist’s view point, the right place at the right time). However, we know nothing about Ein.

The drama is there in the sense that the pair – especially Ein – are well aware that what they’re doing is wrong, but due to their lack of memories and brainwashing, they still see their jobs as assassins as the only way to stay alive. Ein is also obviously attracted to Zwei, but again, due to having her memories nuked and the brainwashing, she doesn’t really seem sure how to react to her feelings.

There is also quite a bit of imagery in this episode. There are the obvious images and references to Zwei and Ein being puppets (and they are), but the scene with the swing set intrigued me perhaps most of all, with the empty, yet swinging, middle swing. Yet, when Zwei looked at the ground, the shadow showed a shadow of Ein on the swing. There were also two empty backpacks there, as if equating the Zwei and Ein almost with a pair of lost children. I think there is a lot to chew on in regards to that scene, and I wonder whether we’ll see more of it.

I have a feeling this series will end in one of two ways: Either Zwei and Ein will basically revolt and destroy Inferno and kill everybody and then live together from then on, or they’re going to die trying. The intrigue in this story, I think, is how they get there.