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The episode opens with a hyper-industrial urban vista, the animated “camera” panning over a dollhouse-style slice of city life: a cart laden with boxes pulls to a stop in front of an elevator, a man drops a box over a ledge-intentionally or not, we never learn. Æon distorted by the lens of an in-fiction security camera, delivering a taunt to the ever-watchful Trevor Goodchild, but also implicating us, the viewers. Even the combat scenes are distorted by the episode’s fixation on looking at one point Æon kicks Gildemere off a ladder, and we’re inexplicably jolted from a third-person perspective that allows us to easily track the action to Æon’s perspective as the man bounces off the hard ground below.

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The way our look is funneled through camera lenses time and again, the mediated images further distorting the characters’ bodies (at one point, Æon addresses a camera and looks like a bobblehead doll, she’s so foreshortened) the scene in which Æon restrains Trevor and makes him watch while a worshipful security guard rubs and kisses her feet the way all of the buildings in Bregna are built with large, uncovered windows facing the street, and one another, creating a total urban panopticon in which everyone has the pleasure (duty?) to watch and be watched. What sticks much better than the slippery plot is the style, the little architectural and technological details, and the visual setpieces: Trevor naked, lithe and triumphant, in front of the buzzing drone the doubling of the shocked eye of the journalist with the impassive camera lens the repeated shots of Chung’s serpentine-bodied characters wrapping themselves like bundles of sinew without bones around corners and pillars, furtively watching one another the security camera that broadcasts Goodchild sleeping, and the Ferris Bueller–esque contraption that slides him secretly under the bed and replaces him with a dummy.

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The first longer episode, “Utopia or Deuteranopia?” is particularly concerned with surveillance, transparency, and voyeurism-and, happily, is currently available for free online streaming at MTV’s website. In 1995, the network aired a 10-episode season of half-hour episodes, with dialogue, flirting with if not settling on more continuity.

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Æon Flux started as a series of dialogue-free vignettes of two to five minutes, aired by MTV in 19, with the main character dying (!) at the end of each episode. Its science fictional world helps us to appreciate why it remains so difficult to define our terms when we try to talk about ubiquitous surveillance and its consequences. What it does superbly is to dramatize the difficulty of disentangling surveillance from curiosity, eroticism and desire, our hopes to hold power to account, and the pleasures we take in putting on a show. Alas, the series doesn’t have any answers for us-it doesn’t make policy prescriptions or stake out any philosophical terrain. Which might lead you to believe that Æon Flux is eerily prescient, or freighted with invaluable lessons for grappling with the messy landscape of technology and society today.

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Æon and her counterparts are clad in high-tech fashions that marry the patent leather and harnesses of BDSM scenes with techno-fetishistic spy thriller touches (think James Bond’s ziplines, spyglasses, and fancifully enhanced handguns), plus stormtrooper-esque helmets and body armor drawn from steampunk and dystopian science fiction, calling to mind the fascist military raiment of World War II. Bregna is the locus of much of the series’ action, with the titular Æon, a trickster secret agent, navigating the byways and interstices of the city, a surveillance state run by the irresistible rascal Trevor Goodchild. The series unfolds in Monica and Bregna, two neighboring futuristic cities that find themselves perennially warring, though the cause and stakes of the conflict always remain murky. His angular, spare, often brutalist urban landscapes are populated by elongated, distorted, fluid human characters drawn in the style of 19 th-century Austrian portrait painter Egon Schiele. Chung, a veteran animator known for his work on Rugrats, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and The Transformers, builds an aesthetic that blends Japanese anime, German Expressionism, and cyberpunk.

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