I'm watching the Interrogator animated series on Warhammer+, and this is my review. There are spoilers in this post, so don't read on if you haven't seen the show and have a good memory.
In this episode, Jurgen and Baldur make their way to the factory producing a bunch of drugs. I feel like this is actually a pretty strange plot point, given that the protagonist has been taking drugs from the start of the series. It's a little difficult to drum up outrage, as a viewer, over the drug production after we've already seen that our protagonist relies on them, and that they're made from humans.
The difference, I guess, is that these drugs are worse than the other ones. Jurgen says so.
I'm along for the ride, though. I feel like the drugs are a good-enough plot vehicle to uncover the truth about Bellona. We don't know anything about Bellona, but we see that the main characters had trusted her, valued her, and are now questioning everything they'd believed about her. This is all working for me.
Almost more than the exploration of Bellona, though, is the setting. Gheisthaven is big, industrial, dark, rainy. There's a lot of classic cyberpunk happening in this series, and it's so good that I really am taking the story as a secondary component.
I think the atmosphere, far from being a crime of style over substance, is a major feature of the series. There's a reveal of what the factory is doing to the captive psykers (astropaths, specifically) about halfway through the episode. It doesn't come as much of a shock, but the morbid beauty of the tanks draining the people of their psychic and life energy is what makes the impact. The plot function of the factory is one thing, but what stands out are the visuals. It's a cheap thrill, and it's practically every other shot in the series, but I guess when one of the main appeals of the Warhammer universe are physical models, it makes sense.
I'm not being pejorative, either. I'm enjoying being in the world so much that the specifics of what Jurgen and Baldur are doing don't matter all that much. They're a pretty grumpy duo, but no more than you'd expect from a down-and-out noir team. It's a good story, I'm following along, I keep wondering where everything's headed. I've been known to play video games more for the world and soundtrack than the story, and I'm comfortable with that. In this series, I happen to get distracted by set dressing a lot. And that's not a bad thing, for me.
All images in this post copyright Games Workshop.