The Marginal Service is an original sci-fi comedy anime produced by Cygames and animated by Studio 3Hz. The show began airing on October 7, 2022.
Set in an alternate timeline where the United Nations is trying to manage a worldwide immigration crisis while refugees are blamed for a heavy crime wave throughout Japan. American-born Shibujuku cop Brian Nightraider has just been fired from his job on the force after a failed drug bust ended in the death of his partner along with the suspect. While Brian escapes into the bottom of a bottle, he later receives an invitation to join a mysterious UN task force known only as the "Marginal Service."
With nothing left to lose, Brian reluctantly accepts the invitation, and discovers that the Marginal Service is a little-known part of the UN's Immigration Bureau Task Force that deals with extraterrestrial alien immigrants, known as Borderlanders. Borderlanders take on human forms and blend into normal society under heavy restrictions, but when they break their cover or commit crimes, it is up to the Marginal Service to take them down and cover up their presence before the rest of humanity finds out.
Marginal Tropes:
- An Asskicking Christmas: Episode 5 takes place during Christmas and the team need to stop a cybernetic virus from spreading across Japan.
- Big Damn Heroes: The entire team shows up to save the day in the first episode, complete with dramatic keyframes and an unseen announcer reading each Marginal Service member's name.
- Bland-Name Product: A lot of alcoholic beverages in the first episode have a few words changed around to avoid copyright issues.
- Chekhov's Gunman: Remember the frightened United Nations agent from the First Contact flashback? In the present he is older and has become a very influential politician. Also, he is the Big Bad.
- Culture Chop Suey: The version of Japan in this show is supposedly in the midst of an immigration crisis and yet full of Americans and other westerners who live and work there, overseen by the United Nations.
- Debate and Switch: The series ponders on the topic of immigration, but never comes with a definitive answer by the end of the story.
- "Do It Yourself" Theme Tune: The opening, "Quiet Explosion" is sung by Mamoru Miyano, who voices Brian Nightraider, while the ending, "Salt & Sugar", is sung by Yūma Uchida, who voices Rubber Suit.
- Drowning My Sorrows: After losing his job and his partner, Brian copes with heavy drinking.
- Full-Frontal Assault: A low-key one happens in episode 5. When questioned by Eddie Snow as to how is he supposed to know she won't have any tricks, Lyra unhesitatingly strips naked, rendering herself literally unarmed. Eddie lets her pass, and after waxing poetic about privacy and Orwellian societies and revealing he's actually a virtual ghost, Eddie threatens to render all of Japan's technology useless with a virus unless Lyra tells him she loves her. Lyra resorts to smashing Eddie's supercomputer with a chair, complete with a major explosion.
- Heroic Build: Aside of Cyrus, all the male members of the Marginal Service have muscular bodies, although Theodore is toned yet a lot leaner than his younger and bulkier colleagues.
- Inhumanable Alien Rights: Zeno hints at multiple points that the UN has established a legal framework for Borderlanders on Earth. For example, a Borderlander arrested by the Marginal Service is allowed to request a Public Defender from the UN to represent them.
- Lost Aesop: The series goes back and forth between contradicting messages about immigration before promptly forgetting them right before the last arc.
- Meaningful Background Event: Multiple news stories playing on broadcast TVs throughout the show about immigrants being blamed for the rise in crime around Japan.
- No Communities Were Harmed: The start of the show is set in "Shibujuku" (a mashup of real-life Shibuya and Harajuku districts of Tokyo). Whether they were merged and named that in the show's timeline or simply given a false name to avoid controversy is unknown.
- Our Cryptids Are More Mysterious: After first contact with grey aliens quickly turned hostile, Earth-native cryptids saved the remaining humans on the expedition by fighting them off. Theodore remarks they are similar to Borderlanders but not quite the same.
- Percussive Maintenance: The crisis of episode 5 is made worse when Zeno smashes the team's computer monitor with a chair when Lyra just needed three more seconds to block the virus. Funnily enough, the crisis ends up averted when the supercomputer is smashed with a chair by Lyra herself.
- Puny Earthlings: The average Borderlander is much stronger than any human, to the point that a rifle bullet to the head will only knock them down for a few seconds before their body pushes it out and heals the wound.
- Shout-Out: The show is full of references to western movies, some examples include:
- The plot of Episode 1: A young cop chases a suspect who turns out to be a paranormal entity, and is recruited to an orgnization to protect the public from those entities, has a lot of similarities with the first act of Men in Black
- Episode 2 has Bolts trying to camouflage with mud like in Predator and using a quip from Commando
- The laser corridor in episode 3 is lifted straight from Resident Evil (2002).
- Episode 8 is about a zombie crisis in a shopping mall, like Dawn of the Dead (1978).
- In Episode 9 Zeno suspects that one of the team members is a borderlander imposter, so he performs a tense blood test like the one in The Thing (1982)
- In the finale, while flying in a small ship to destroy a bigger one, Zeno ridicules the concept of trying to be the guy that sacrifices himself to explode the meteorite or the old alcoholic crashing into the big spaceship.
- Wham Episode: The last two episodes completely flip everything that the viewer was lead to believe on its head with The Reveal that that Zeno's son is still alive and was kidnapped by the United Nations as a part of a plot to finally unseal the secret alien technology from the spaceship that was briefly shown in the flashback earlier in the series, only to instead activate a system that heralds a second alien invasion.
