Roger Smith works as a negotiator, an ambiguous vocation that involves serving as a go between, an intermediary and an honest to god sleuth. As the first episode opens Roger attempts to complete a kidnapping case by shuttling the ransom money to an abandoned warehouse where he plans to retrieve his client's daughter, who turns out to be an android duplicate. From here the mystery behind the kidnapping turns into a story of deception, intrigue and high-level politics that's wrapped around the premise: Paradigm City is populated entirely by people that, forty years ago, completely lost their memories. The android, Dorothy, approaches Smith to now protect her, as a client, from villainous forces bent on using her technology for evil - forces that Smith must now combat with Big O, his gigantic battle mecha, which emerges from the subterranean depths of an abandoned subway system.

From amidst the rubble of a devastated city block, Big O lumbers away from its battle and descends back into the haunting labyrinth of yesteryear's metro tunnels, a place where no one else in Paradigm City will venture for fear of the unknown. Smith uses these tunnels to transport Big O. Back in the comforts of his cavernous and empty mansion, Smith can't get the loose ends of the mystery out of his head and decides to plunge back into the fray, despite that fact that he won't be paid for it. He finds Dorothy, the android, again outside a music club in the city accompanied by an old man who claims to be her grandfather. But before much more bubbles to the surface of the narrative, the villains kidnap Dorothy yet again and use her as a power conduit for the same gigantic mecha that threatened the city in the first episode.

Racing across the piano keys, Dorothy explores human forms of expression, stirring the slumbering Roger who, irate about being woken, accuses her playing of lacking emotion. Now a part of the Smith household along with his butler Norman, Dorothy begins to prove herself valuable around the house, especially when the power goes out and she illuminates the dining room. The power shortage, though, brings work for Smith from the government, who wants the famed negotiator to drive out to Electric City to convince its superstitious inhabitants to turn the turbines back on. Again, Smith's discoveries necessitate the use of Big O.

Negotiating with an elderly woman - who is convinced her son will remember who she is and visit her - to leave a building slated for demolition, Smith begins to muse on the nature of memory, how the city has lost it's history, and the irrational fear that wells up from beneath the city. The city hires him once again; this time to track down a journalist who has been ranting about discovering an enigmatic truth that no one seems to care about. Smith's investigation, driven in part by his own curiosity, leads him to unexplored depths of the subway system where he faces his fears, the missing journalist who has gone mad, and another giant mecha from days past. Big O comes again.

Either an homage to or a blatant rip off of "Batman," "The Big O" capitalizes on the concept of the American hero while infusing its adaptation with ill-timed juvenile comedy and an engrossing high-concept premise. Such a patchwork of disparate elements is Sunrise's production means that the whole definitely falls short of the sum of its parts.

Character designer Keiichi Satou, art designer Hajime Satou and art director Masau Ota generate a world rich with style and texture, dripping with noir juices and evoking the flavor of classic American comic books while preserving a distinctive Japanese sensibility. Creator Hajime Yatate delivers his iconic, loner, playboy hero geared with gadgets galore with a knowing nod to the caped crusader and some bold ideas about how to ease the melodrama but intensify the dark history of Roger Smith, the negotiator. Though seemingly tossed in to appeal to mecha lovers, Big O itself appears in the story a mysterious relic from before the amnesia that overcame Paradigm City. And the premise itself teems with potential, an entire city robbed of its history, identity and culture, built back up over forty years as a highly capitalistic, dog eat dog metropolis haunted by ghosts of the past that linger and howl below the stoic streets. And, finally, Roger's ostensibly lecherous but essentially fraternal relationship with Dorothy teeters on the brink of discovery.

Kazuyoshi Katayama's direction, like a wayward iceberg, sinks this titanic, and inherently flawed, script. Arduously setting up lame on-going gags - like Roger only letting young ladies unannounced into his house - Katayama plays his adolescent proclivities right at the surface. And injecting mecha battles into well paced mysteries - akin to dumping little children into sitcoms - compromises the sincerely good story and, what more, pummels other more sensitive themes - like the relationship between wealth and government, the tenants of class warfare, and even respecting natural wonders (at one point Big O tears into a sea serpent without literally understanding the nature of the beast, a new life form that has the ability to harness electricity. Bulling through the story, Smith simply hacks the living, breathing animal into bits … what kind of message is that sending to kids).

The show is steeped in symbolism and metaphor, however Katayama seldom composes a deeper context with this heightened vocabulary, leaving hourglasses and nightingales to be just hourglasses and nightingales.

To his credit, Katayama understands that a character's emotional investment in the action (and subsequent emotional investment from the audience that follows) drives story. His emotional moments, though, can be credited more to contrivance and ephemeral circumstance than rooted in the hearts of "The Big O's" main players.

Given all the right materials, "The Big O" falls apart from its sheer lack of cohesion - a chasm from whence it can claw itself back in the remaining nine episodes if focus shifts from fight to fancy.