The premise hits you like a gut punch in episode one, then the show immediately betrays it by sprinting through everything that could have mattered. You get multiverse-spanning gunfights and time paradoxes stacked on top of a plague turning people to sand, but none of it breathes long enough to land. If you can tolerate watching a show cannibalize its own ideas at breakneck speed, the action sequences and core concept are sharp enough to keep you watching even as the pacing sabotages everything around them.

In 2115, the island nation once known as Japan has become the 17th Far East Imperial City Management District, where citizens gave up some of their comforts in return for a promise of lasting peace. Few expect anything to change, yet a rare disease called Degradation, which breaks the human body down into sand, is gradually spreading around the globe. Tohru Kazasumi, an ordinary student, is pulled into a conflict between his world and a parallel world called Frontier S, and he finds himself facing an alternate version of himself from the other side. A sci-fi action series, it also exists in two versions whose small differences lead to a different final episode.