Jinto and Lafiel's love becomes the actual plot. Not decoration, not motivation for some bigger thing, the show builds its entire architecture around whether two people can stay together when everything else is demanding they split apart. The prison planet is just the stage. By the end you're not thinking about the thousand-prisoner crisis. You're thinking about a man choosing to follow a woman into command, and what that costs him when she can't choose him back.
Lafiel steps into her new role as Territorial Ambassador to Lobnas II, one of the worlds recently taken by a fast-moving fleet that has left too few ambassadors behind. When she and Jinto arrive, they learn the United Mankind used the planet as a prison, and a million inmates now live on its only inhabited island. The prisoners are split into three blocks: women in the west, men in the east, and a mixed central block whose residents are all sterilized. The delicate balance holding the island together shatters when the women, afraid of the men, seek to emigrate. The men in the east rise up, overpower the guards and take Jinto captive to stop the women from leaving. At the same moment, an enemy fleet closes on the system, and Lafiel is forced to leave Jinto behind. The series blends science fiction action with romance.
