It grabs you by the collar in the first two minutes and does not bother explaining itself. Karen Senki runs on CG that actually knows what it wants to be, hard-edged and kinetic, throwing Resistance Group 11 into another robot hunt before you've caught your breath from the last one. The episodes are short enough that you tell yourself one more and then it's 1 a.m. and you've cleared all eleven. Yes, the machine-war skeleton is lifted straight out of Terminator and Matrix, and no, most of the crew never gets the character work they deserve. But the way it cuts between past and present, feeding you Karen's before alongside her now, is the part nobody talks about and the part that lands. Watch it in one sitting, the way it was clearly built to be watched, and it stops feeling derivative and starts feeling angry.

The machines won. After a war between machines and the people who built them, machines now rule the ruined world and humans live as their servants. Karen commands Resistance Group 11, a mixed band of humans who must fight to stay alive as robots hunt them from one episode to the next. Her fight puts her in a struggle between right and wrong and between indifference and love. It also raises deeper questions: what sets a thinking machine apart from a human being, and what is a soul?