You watch Lain and realize the internet isn't a place you visit, it's a place that visits you, whether you consent or not. Every episode strips another layer of certainty away, replacing plot with pure philosophical vertigo, until you're not sure if Lain is discovering the Wired or if the Wired is discovering her through her. The show knows it's opaque to the point of cruelty, and it doesn't apologize, it just keeps moving forward, letting you drown in the implications.

Lain Iwakura, a shy and withdrawn fourteen-year-old, receives an impossible message: an email from Chisa Yomoda, a classmate who recently took her own life. The dead girl writes that she has left her body behind but still lives on. Lain has little interest in technology, yet opening the email draws her into the Wired, a virtual network much like the internet. Soon mysterious men in black appear wherever she goes, questioning her and seeming to know more about her than she does. As the line between reality and cyberspace blurs, Lain faces ever stranger events in a psychological sci-fi mystery about identity, consciousness and perception.