Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion Review

Lelouch is the engine. He is intelligent, theatrical and wrong often enough to matter, and the series is disciplined about letting his plans fail for reasons he could have anticipated. The Geass is a good device because it has rules and the rules are load bearing, so most episodes turn on what he cannot make somebody do rather than on what he can. Suzaku works as an opposite number precisely because his position is coherent and infuriating. The CLAMP character designs and Sunrise's mecha work give the show a silhouette nothing else has, and the battles are staged as command problems rather than duels.

The second of the two seasons is where the seams show. Rolo, the Geass order and the escalating superweapons arrive faster than the writing can absorb them, and several plot corrections are visible in real time. Then the last three episodes retroactively justify a startling amount of it, in a finale that remains one of the few in the medium to land exactly as designed. It is not tidy and it has never wanted to be, and the theatricality is the point rather than an accident.