Twelve episodes, no filler, and it keeps quietly moving the goalposts on you: every time you think you've clocked what ID-0 is about, it reveals another floor beneath the one you were standing on. Maya Mikuri's ride-along with the Escavator crew starts as a mining gig and turns into a running argument about what's left of a person once consciousness can be poured into an I-Machine, which is exactly the question Ido embodies, a man with nowhere to go home to. Tow Ubukata writes it smart without ever getting smug about it, so the orichalcum runs and the mind-trance rules land as plot rather than lecture. Yes, the CGI is competent instead of gorgeous and the soundtrack won't live in your head, and if that's a dealbreaker you were never the audience. Planetes and Ghost in the Shell fans keep finding this one late and getting mad nobody told them. Consider this being told.

Maya Mikuri, a student at the Alliance Academy, is operating an I-Machine when she is caught up in an incident with pirates and left behind by her own crew. I-Machines are robots built for extreme environments, and a rare ore called orichalt lets people move their consciousness into them, though some never make it back to their bodies. The Excavate Company, a reckless band of miners led by the notorious Grayman, rescues her. Accused by her former colleagues of stealing secret data on orichalt, Maya joins them to clear her name, while their ace, Ido, has no memory of his past.