The first four episodes sell you on something the show can't quite deliver for thirteen. Canaan moves like nothing else from 2009, all kinetic precision and color-saturated Shanghai noir, but the plot fractures halfway through and never reassembles itself into anything coherent. Watch it for the animation and the relationship between Maria and Canaan, the real heart buried under everything else that falls apart. Everything else is scaffolding for moments that genuinely land.

Maria's work as a photographer in Shanghai takes a dangerous turn when she and her partner Mino investigate strange events at a local festival and witness masked men clashing with a mysterious white-haired woman. Before Maria is caught in the fighting, her old friend Canaan, an assassin gifted with synesthesia, gets her out. Two years earlier, a terrorist attack with the deadly Ua virus devastated Shibuya. Maria survived because her father inoculated her, but the shock left her with partial amnesia. Now a terrorist squad called Snake is hunting Canaan, and several groups are converging on Shanghai in pursuit of Canaan or Maria. As a plot involving the virus takes shape, Canaan realizes that stopping the culprit and saving her friends means facing her own past. The result is a supernatural sci-fi action series.