They also stumble upon a crew of heavily-armed strangers collecting the eggs of an aquatic Kaiju (think a crocodile mixed with a Komodo dragon). The siblings’ search for a new power cell puts them into perilous contact with a pair of rabid four-legged fiends that resemble a cross between a Doberman and a velociraptor, and leads to the discovery of a mysterious mute boy whom Hayley finds in a vat of green liquid in a PPDC recruitment center.

As one might expect from such a serialized affair, their quest is immediately complicated by a variety of factors, beginning with Atlas Destroyer collapsing on its face due to a lack of power. the abandoned, decimated stretch of Australia). Shortly thereafter, Taylor and Hayley set out across “The Black” (i.e. Though they survive this encounter, it’s not without its cost, putting Taylor and Hayley in a desperate situation. Or, at least, so they think, since as soon as Atlas Destroyer goes online, a Kaiju arrives. Better still, Atlas Destroyer is functional (if lacking any weapons, since it’s a training model), and boasts an AI named Loa (Erica Lindbeck), which means Taylor and Hayley can finally do something about their predicament. Maintaining the status quo, however, becomes impossible when Hayley falls through a hole in the ground and discovers Shadow Basin’s abandoned Pan-Pacific Defense Corps (PPDC) facility and, more importantly, an abandoned Jaeger named Atlas Destroyer. Hayley wants to look for their parents, but gruff Taylor-who as an adolescent trained to be a Jaeger pilot-is convinced that they’re dead and thinks it’s best to lay low. Knowing that Australia is lost, and that they can’t make it to Sydney, Ford and Brina leave their kids and everyone else in the hidden desert enclave Shadow Basin, promising to return with help.įive years later, that help hasn’t materialized, nor have Ford and Brina, and the now-grown Taylor (Calum Worthy) and Hayley (Gideon Adlon) run the commune themselves.

In winning this skirmish, Ford and Brina save a truck filled with evacuees, including their young children Taylor (Cole Keriazakos) and Hayley (Camryn Jones). Consequently, the government has ordered that the continent be evacuated-a surrender that plays out in real time during the episode’s initial action, which finds one Jaeger falling victim to a Kaiju, and another one, piloted by husband and wife Ford (Jason Spisak) and Brina (Alexandra MacDonald), defeating a collection of tentacled monsters, the last of which is felled when the heroes physically jam a missile down its throat. With Kaijus now running rampant across the region, Australia has found itself incapable of fending off the invaders, its legion of Jaegers no match for their alien opponents. News soundbites playing over the premiere’s credit sequence succinctly set the context for Pacific Rim: The Black. ‘Murder Among the Mormons’ Exposes a Bomber and Master Forger’s Plot to Destroy Mormonism Pacific Rim: The Black feels like both a novel and natural evolution of the series, even if it is missing some of the monumental crunch and snarl of Del Toro’s live-action (if massively CGI-enhanced) original. The loss of sheer enormity, however, is made up for by the fact that Greg Johnson and Craig Kyle’s show returns Pacific Rim to its animé roots, replete with stellar animation from Polygon Pictures that melds throwback style with computer-assisted 3-D effects. It’s thus somewhat surprising to find that, following a deflating theatrical sequel (2018’s insubstantial John Boyega-headlined Pacific Rim: Uprising), the franchise has now moved to the small screen, courtesy of Pacific Rim: The Black, a seven-episode animated affair premiering on Netflix on March 4.

In every respect, Pacific Rim was all about size. Operated by two pilots (via a mind-meld process called “The Drift”), the Jaegers were striking humanoid machines inspired by those found in Gundam, Neon Genesis Evangelion and Macross (not to mention Robotech and Voltron), while their Kaiju adversaries resembled distant cousins of Japan’s most famous radioactive beast, as well as his various land-sea-air adversaries. It was a hybrid concept predicated on scale, with titanic armored warriors dubbed Jaegers doing thunderous weaponized and hand-to-hand combat with creatures known as Kaiju who’d appeared on Earth through interdimensional Pacific Ocean portals. Guillermo Del Toro’s 2013 hit Pacific Rim was a case of two entertaining things that went well together-namely, enormous Godzilla-style monsters and equally gargantuan robot animé mechas.

Pacific rim mind meld