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akinoameSo let’s take a moment and discuss what’s probably my favorite season in the Showa era of Ultraman, Ultraman Leo.
To summarize the story, it begins with Ultra Seven facing twin monsters, Black and Red Giras, who are controlled by Alien Magma. The monsters are calling forth a storm that threatens to flood Tokyo, and during the battle, they horrifically break Seven’s leg, twisting it until it snaps. Though Seven tries to continue the fight, he’s completely defeated, to the point that he can no longer transform—when he tries to use the Ultra Eye again, it melts. However, he is saved by the brash young Ultraman Leo, the lone survivor of Planet L77 in the Leo constellation, which had been destroyed one month prior by Magma. Since taking refuge on Earth, Leo assumed the identity of Gen Ootori and took up a job coaching an afterschool athletics program at the Jounan Sports Center (because Kamen Rider’s Jounan University is everywhere). Dan Moroboshi, now captain of the new defense team MAC, recruits Gen as a fellow alien and Ultra who can do far more than he can to keep the Earth safe from aliens and monsters. But Gen is temperamental and untrained, and Dan is impatient, using brutal training tactics to teach Leo how to survive aliens who are far crueler than he is.
Leo eventually settles into a rhythm as he begins to succeed against the various monsters, even though his personal life as Gen continues to have its difficulties. Various aliens continue to target his friends from the gym, particularly two children, Tooru and Kaoru Umeda, who were orphaned in an early episode when an alien serial killer tried to frame Leo for killing their father. But he has victories as well, such as reuniting with his beloved pet Ron, and discovering that his twin brother, Astra, had also survived Magma’s attack and would occasionally come to his rescue in particularly deadly fights. He also gains the respect of the legendary Ultraman King, who declares the twins the newest two Ultra Brothers after they succeed in saving the Land of Light.
And then episode 40 happens.
After spending several episodes lightening up and settling into a typical 1970s Ultra series format, Leo remembers its darker days and decides to end its run with the “Terror of the Flying Saucer” arc, which kicks off with the Black Star flying saucer monsters launching a surprise attack on MAC’s base during a quiet moment of celebration, overwhelming them immediately and killing the entire team—including Captain Dan Moroboshi. Instead of saving himself, Dan tells Gen to live and continue fighting, and Leo only barely escapes in time. To make matters worse, the same monster lands on a department store building, and Gen learns to his horror that his friends Takashi and Momoko were inside, along with little Kaoru, all of whom were killed in the attack. Gen takes charge of Tooru and moves in with an ER nurse, Sachiko Miyama and her daughters, while doing the legwork of trying to track down the Black Star’s movements and defeat them alone. Eventually, Black Star’s Commander hires an assassin, Alien Bunyo, who puts together Leo’s human identity and targets his new adoptive family in order to kill him. It’s only thanks to King that Leo survives, but Commander Black goes at it again by holding Tooru hostage while Leo fights the final saucer creature, ordering him to lose if he wants Tooru to live. In the end, Tooru is rescued by the neighborhood kids, who proceed to beat Commander Black to death in an incredibly cathartic display, before retrieving the crystal ball he uses to control the saucer creatures and communicate with Black Star, throwing it to Leo so he can finish them for good. Gen then decides to leave the Miyamas and Tooru to explore the Earth as a human for a little while, admitting he finally feels like the planet is his home.
To say that Leo is controversial is probably pretty accurate. It is a series I don’t necessarily recommend for everybody—it’s probably a no for little kids, and it can probably best be described as the Ryuki or the Faiz of the franchise: it goes in dark places. MAC officers die with alarming regularity, and there’s a lot of episodes for which the “bitter” part of “bittersweet ending” is probably a little too pronounced. Gen especially goes through the wringer, which literally nobody in MAC liking him, considering Dan’s treatment of him to be favoritism—which does have a point, although this doesn’t make it Gen’s fault. And the writers didn’t seem inclined to give him much of a break either. Torture, both physical and psychological, wasn’t exactly unknown in earlierUltra series, including in Seven. However, the episode with Alien Bunyo is a pretty good example of what can happen here: Gen surrenders to Bunyo in order to save Sachiko’s life, and even though he manages to transform and shatter Commander Black’s sword, his restraints keep him from reaching giant size and limit his power, resulting in a crack in his crest from the sword. Commander Black then orders Bunyo to take Leo to the “body processing plant,” which is a freezing cellar, where Bunyo beats the crap out of Leo before he freezes over completely. Then, while Leo is still alive and conscious, Bunyo and Commander Black take a saw and begin dismembering him.
Now, this isn’t to say that it’s a completely grimdark take on Ultraman—consider, for instance, that Ryuki had some utterly hilarious episodes and moments, including the first fight, when Shinji broke his sword. And in the time between maybe episodes 20 through 40, we get some lighter-hearted fare, such as the story of an alien who controls a monster that eats rainbows, or the time Leo got shrunk down by a creepy wizard and had to paddle across a river and was represented by what was very obviously a toy (and probably inspired the entirety of Ginga for that matter), or a battle that I swear was originally scripted for Taro, given it’s a boxing match (boxing being the specialty of Kotaro Higashi, Taro’s host) and absolutely bonkers.
And in a lot of ways, I feel like Leo is the opposite side of the same coin as Taro: remembered for being darker while it still had plenty of silliness; Taro, in turn, may be remembered for being light-hearted and silly, but it also had some deeply fucked up stories that Leo wouldn’t even touch. About 10 monsters return from Taro in later media, whether it’s the Ultraman manga, Mebius, Ginga, the Galaxy Rescue Force voice drama, etc., not counting ones that only appear as Spark Dolls or cards. Likewise, about 7 monsters from Leo in later series, with the janky robot Sevenger becoming a one-hit wonder resurrected for Ultraman Z and its spinoff, Sevenger Fight. Even their finales are similar, almost as if Leo’s was a direct response to Taro’s. In the finale of Taro, Kotaro learns that a ship captain he’d befriended in the first episode, whose adult daughter and preteen son he’d been staying with, was killed by the monster Samekujira. The son, Kenichi, blamed Taro for failing to save his father. Taking the failure to heart, Kotaro decided it was time to grow up and take responsibility for Kenichi, returning Taro’s Ultra Badge to Mother of Ultra before defeating Alien Valky and leaving ZAT to figure out his life now. Gen comes to a similar decision, realizing that Tooru has become too accustomed to Leo showing up and miraculously saving him, while also coping with the fear that the only reason the Black Star keep attacking is because they want to destroy Ultraman Leo, not necessarily humanity. He tries to make those preparations for Tooru, but Commander Black attacks them first, forcing Gen to reveal his identity to Tooru and fight. And when he succeeds, he decides to leave for a while, much like the Ultras before him, but his aim is much more defined: to see the blue skies and seas of his new home, which he’d said were already very similar to those of his old home.
To some degree, Leo kind of closes the door on the format of the 1970s seasons. Beginning with Return of Ultraman in 1971, Tsuburaya Productions created a formula that pretty much every season stuck to: hero becomes Ultraman, is recruited by the defense organization, has a pretty girl would-be love interest and a young boy to act as the audience surrogate, hero ends the series leaving the defense organization. Literally every single season in this decade follows that formula, which is strange because that was very much not the formula for Ultraman or Ultra Seven: Shin Hayata had been an established member of the SSSP and in some episodes acted as vice-captain, Dan Moroboshi was an alien posing as a human and trying to cope with all of that; Hayata didn’t have a love interest but did have a preteen teammate that wasn’t necessarily “his” kid friend, and Dan...well, I’ll get to that in a bit. And it wasn’t just Ultra; Mirrorman in the same year as RoU had the same formula, and it’s kind of disappointing how it shifted its approach to become more like Ultraman when it was really setting up something new and different. And in the ‘70s, Ultraman had opinions on the changing nature of Japanese families, like how moms were nagging their children too much about their studies, what role a woman should have in her family, and what the modern Japanese man should be, and how a boy should aspire to be that. I’m not sure if these were widespread thoughts throughout the decade—quite honestly, I’d need to watch the original Kamen Rider and maybe even Goranger to get a better impression—but there is definitely some values dissonance between eras here.
And yet, I still feel like Leo “closes the door” because it starts to dismantle this formula. At some point, I’ll probably do a retrospective on Return of Ultraman, but suffice to say, it didn’t click with me much. I had a hard time connecting to Hideki Go as a character, quite honestly because I never really felt like I got as much of a feel for his personality as much as I had Hayata, or Dan, and certainly not Gen. And it also didn’t sit well with me what they did about his support staff. To spoil Return of Ultraman, a major two-part storyline (and a Christmas one at that, Kamen Rider fans!) begins with Go’s girlfriend and best friend being murdered by Alien Nackle, who is trying to kidnap and assassinate him. Go then takes custody of their younger brother and tries to raise him. It’s very much the same as what happens with Momoko, Takeshi, Kaoru, and the surviving Tooru—Gen and Momoko definitely seem to have feelings for one another, Takeshi is their friend and coworker at the gym and has been by Gen’s side from the start, and Kaoru is the very first supporting castmate we meet for Gen. But I don’t feel as much of an emotional impact with Go’s loss of his supporting cast; for one, I actually went through several episodes not realizing that Go and Aki Sakata were dating, or that Aki and Ken were siblings—I actually thought that Aki and Ken were married, that Jiro was their son, and that Aki was flirting with Go behind her husband’s back. So…yeah, probably not the best romance writing for Go and Aki there. And then when they die, there’s only a few episodes here and there that discuss Jiro’s loss, but not as much with Go’s loss—and again, Go was dating Aki. In fact, just before the murder, Go’s teammates were telling him that she would make a good wife to him, and he agreed, indicating he was putting some thought into marriage. And then at the end of the Christmas episode, after Go’s been saved, we see Jiro hanging out with Go’s attractive neighbor, Rumiko, who feels shoehorned in as a new love interest.
Say what you will about the minor timeskip from Gen and Tooru learning about the others’ deaths to their moving in with the Miyama family, but you constantly see how the consequences of losing everyone has fucked them up, especially Tooru. Sachiko’s older daughter, Izumi, tries to flirt with Gen, but he seems to ignore her advances; and it doesn’t help that she criticizes Leo and he takes it all to heart. The younger daughter, Ayumi, kind of fills in the same push-and-pull relationship with Tooru that Kaoru had—in fact, the fan wiki says that Kaoru’s actress only left the show at her parents’ request due to school (although, keep in mind, fan wikis cite their sources about as frequently as MAC officers survive, so take it with a grain of salt). But Tooru very clearly does not regard Ayumi as a substitute sister, and episode 45 deals with him meeting a little girl who he admits to Gen is the same age as Kaoru, making him want to protect her when she’s caught up in the Black Star’s deeds. Episode 49 sees Gen trying to step in for Tooru’s parents at a special event at school—in fact, Gen’s attempts and failure to be Tooru’s substitute parent are a recurring theme in the series—but Tooru’s grief over losing his whole family draw the saucer creature Nova to him. And the finale kicks off with Tooru wanting to go to the beach when the Miyamas have gone to visit their father’s grave, and he tries to explain to Gen that Momoko used to tell him and Kaoru that she could see her destroyed home island from the beach near their old home, so Tooru wants to go there to remember both her and Kaoru.
Ultraman Leo is a story about grief and trauma, and I truly believe that this is its greatest strength. Gen has lost his home and his family, and throughout the first third of the series, he is impulsive and angry in response, constantly messing up because he can’t keep his temper. But at the same time, he never loses his empathy. He puts up with Dan’s training methods out of the respect he has for the older Ultra, he constantly feels for Tooru and Kaoru, and occasionally enemies take advantage of his kind heart and especially his hope to not be the last survivor of his planet. When Ron attacks out of the pain of what he’s gone through in the months since L77’s destruction, Leo can’t destroy him and instead gives him a second chance as Kaoru’s pet. His love for his brother leads Alien Babalu to impersonate Astra in order to steal a powerful artifact that threatens the safety of the entire Star of Ultra (because apparently, the Ultras can’t be bothered to put anything as basic as a child-safety lock on any of their important shit [see: Ultraman Zero’s backstory, Ultraman Belial’s backstory, literally every week at Ultraman Hikari’s lab…]). The Ultra Brothers refuse to let Leo take a minute to try to sort anything out and continue attacking “Astra,” forcing Leo to take their beams in order to protect him.
But the stories of grief and trauma aren’t just Gen’s. If you’ve read my Kamen Rider OOO reviews, you may know that I make the argument that Ankh has posttraumatic stress disorder. While it’s difficult to say whether or not Kaoru and Tooru have it, due to an overall lack of good research on children and mental health, there’s a good breakdown by Stanford Children’s Health that does seem to match with what happens to them throughout the story. And in all honesty, they act a lot like how I’ve witnessed children exposed to constant traumatic stress in their homes—they can act completely happy and normal, but sometimes they’ll just be mean. And this is because of the trauma, their coping mechanisms, a lack of supportive love, and not really being able to control the outcome. Hell, Astra, for being an Ultraman of very few words and appearances, is murderously protective of his older brother in a way I definitely would say is a reaction to his trauma; when the saucer creature Hangler injures Leo, Astra does not fuck around: he shrinks down, flies into the monster’s mouth, and then returns to giant size, blowing up the monster from the inside. It is such a shocking moment that the goddamn music cuts out completely, as if it doesn’t know what to do! This is a young Ultraman who was buried alive under the burning wreckage of his home in the wake of Magma’s attack, with his brother trying desperately to dig him out and failing, who has a chain on his leg that nobody can seem to remove, whose face looks oddly off compared to his twin—and all of this is apparently due to torture at the hands of Magma, and King’s best attempts to heal him. At the time of this writing, Ultra Galaxy Fight: The Destined Crossroad has not yet premiered, and it appears to be featuring Astra much more prominently than just about anything in the past has, so it remains to be seen what they’ll incorporate into his backstory. But regardless, Leo’s little brother has been through some shit.
But if there is a poster boy for PTSD out of Leo, it would have to be Dan, based on both the ICD 11 and the DSM-V (broken down by the National Institutes of Mental Health). The symptoms can be broken down into four categories: re-experiencing, avoidance, arousal and reactivity, and cognition and mood, and all four are required for a diagnosis—at least one symptom of the first two types, and at least two of the latter.
Re-experiencing, or experiencing intrusive memories, is the symptom most people think about when it comes to PTSD. This can include flashbacks—whether memories or experiencing a sensation like you’re reliving the moment, frightening thoughts, nightmares, and emotional or physical sensations of distress or illness in response to a reminder of the trauma. Dan has these very obviously with his injury—when he is reminded that he can no longer fight as Ultra Seven, he has a flashback to his leg being broken while he writhed in agony in the water. And this happens when he reminds Gen that he’s sidelined too. But honestly, this is probably the least pronounced of Dan’s symptoms, which makes sense considering the next category is avoidance.
Avoidance behaviors can be physical or emotional. A survivor of trauma may try to avoid being in the same place where the traumatic event occurred, or try to safety plan ways to avoid being in the same situation in the future. An argument can be made that Dan is intentionally avoiding the Land of Light and the other Ultra Brothers, given that in episode 34, Go arrives from the Land of Light to deliver Sevenger and leaves with the Ultra Eye, intending to repair it; and yet after that episode, nothing is seen of either Sevenger or a restored Ultra Eye. Contrast this with, say, Zero at the end of Geed—he spends all series with a broken Ultimate Bracelet, but in the final scenes, he says he got it fixed now that everything has calmed down.
At the same time, though, I feel a little shaky on using this as evidence, if only because it’s very evident in Ultraman Orb with Gai and his Origin powers, and I think the emotional aspect is far stronger. Dan most certainly tries to be emotionally numb, or at the least, he’s hardened himself against the world. Consider his own series, where he was a thoughtful, optimistic, and deeply naïve young man. His personality was not all that dissimilar from Gen’s—he was wide-eyed and idealistic, always believing in the best of both humanity and his fellow aliens. But over time, he was proven wrong again and again. Aliens who tried to persuade him to show solidarity with them would commit atrocious acts, and even his own friends in the Ultra Guard had a strong tendency to shoot first, ask questions never.
Dan’s personality changes drastically in Leo. He is now sharp and impatient, angry with Gen, with the evil in the universe, and with himself for not being strong enough to stop it. He is avoiding the person he used to be, and this emotional avoidance is intrinsically tied to the hyperarousal and cognition/mood symptoms. Even his personal pronouns change—in Ultra Seven, Dan used “boku,” whether he was speaking to his human friends, to other aliens, or thinking to himself. At one point, he used “watashi” as Seven, but considering how rarely he used it, it felt like an act—something to keep the rest of the Ultra Guard from suspecting that their Dan was the mysterious alien ally who bailed them out time and time again. But Captain Moroboshi uses “watashi” all the time, and it feels just as much like a mask, like this is the person he thinks he should be in MAC, impersonal and professional at all times. When he speaks with Gen in private, however, he uses “ore,” which now appears to be his preferred pronoun post-Mebius. The Dan Moroboshi of the Ultra Guard no longer exists.
He rarely even discusses his history in the Ultra Guard, and in episode 29, when he meets a woman who appears to be his old flame Anne Yuri, Gen doesn’t seem to understand the significance of Dan thinking he’s found her again, after everyone seemed to have lost track of her when he returned to Earth. And in that moment, for a very short time, he seemed close to being happy. Considering how rare his moments of happiness are, it’s heartbreaking to see him get his hopes up—seeing this woman who he truly believes is the human he fell in love with, now taking care of an alien child with powerful psychokinesis…it’s hard not to read that as Dan wondering if that’s his child.
Continuing on into hyperarousal, I’ve already mentioned how Dan’s personality has changed to make him more irritable and impatient. I used to compare Leo to Batman Beyond, and I still stand by the analogy—Dan is very similar to the bitter old Bruce Wayne, with Gen acting like Terry McGinnis, a young successor who gives him a chance for redemption through training him, continuing his legacy. The difference is that Bruce gets a happy ending. Dan still has to wait.
But hyperarousal also includes recklessness and self-destructive behavior. Dan is constantly using his Ultra Psychokinesis in human form, even though we see it physically weakening him and making him ill, and the narrator explains that every time he uses it, he’s shortening his own lifespan. Dan knows this, and he still does this. Likewise, he does nothing to try to save himself in episode 40, instead just telling Gen to live. I’ve seen discussion by other fans writing this behavior off as “Dan has a death wish,” but I don’t feel like that’s the whole story. To borrow Christopher Khayman Lee’s analysis of his iconic Power Rangers in Space character, Andros, Dan too is “a broken man,” who no longer has his teammates because new defense organizations keep succeeding their predecessors. He no longer has his innocence, because he’s seen what darkness exists in the universe, having been victim to horrific violence committed by his fellow aliens, having been party to his human friends committing acts of terror and genocide against other species, and having been told to just give up the fight and go home by his own superior from the Land of Light when the Earth was facing the most dangerous invasion to date, and so soon after he was almost killed in an elaborate assassination plot designed to destroy the humans’ will with a very public execution. Keep in mind, Seven wasn’t a warrior at the beginning of his series; the series booklet describes him as an astronomer who was mapping this region of the galaxy. He was just a guy. With a boomerang. Who didn’t ask for all of this fighting and monsters.
And now he is the captain of Earth’s first line of defense against alien invasions and monster incursions. Normally, this would be considered a massive culmination of a character arc, a triumphant moment of overcoming the odds. But it’s not, and that brings me to the final category: cognition and mood. In addition to a loss of his close relationships—the Ultra Guard, Anne, even the Ultra Brothers and his own capsule monsters—Dan just doesn’t seem to have any hope left in him, and he’s completely detached. He has no hobbies anymore, where we used to see him paint maps for the Ultra Guard or go to amusement parks or get weirdly obsessed with car rallies for some reason. He’s always in uniform, except for the one episode where he went to meet the maybe-Anne, where he wore a grey suit that it looked like he had no idea how to wear. Unless he’s going to yell at Gen and throw things at him, he almost never goes down to Earth. In earlier episodes, he seemed to expect Gen to have no social life, just like him, calling him away from obligations with his friends. While it’s not unexpected that there would be no indication of him having a family waiting for him in the Land of Light, not when Zero wasn’t created until 2009, to me, it feels telling that when he thinks about his “brothers and parents,” when his superiors at the TDF and apparently the UN have approved a massive bomb to blow up the Star of Ultra before it can collide with the Earth, Dan’s thinking about the Ultra Brothers and Father and Mother of Ultra.
Gen is also the only one of his team who he shows any actual relationship with whatsoever, to the point that the rest of MAC protests his obvious favoritism. Dan is not a good captain, and he’s struggling in that role. He keeps telling Gen how as aliens, they are the only ones who can keep the planet safe, despite the entire point of his original series finale was the Ultra Guard having to prove to him that humans could be trusted to take care of ourselves, and it was okay for him to go home and take care of himself. Which is another thing he has in common with Andros from PRiS, which is a reason why I love him in this even though I find him incredibly frustrating from a narrative standpoint. Quite honestly, for someone who keeps talking about how he’s different from everyone else, how he’s an alien and how no one else will ever understand, Dan is incredibly human. The universe has broken him, and he’s trying to put the pieces back together any way he can.
So while Leo does take the cautious optimism of Ultra Seven and tears it down, it does become a keystone to Seven’s legacy. Leo takes the lessons Seven taught him and then trains Seven’s son, Zero, instead teaching him that true strength isn’t physical, but emotional. Zero, in turn, inspires the New Generation Heroes, training Ginga and Victory, teaming up with Seven to train Orb, befriending Geed, recognizing Grigio’s full potential as a rookie heroine, and ultimately, being a reluctant mentor to Zett. Leo’s own legacy appears to continue in The Destined Crossroad with the introduction of Ultraman Regulos, a mysterious warrior with a martial arts background, whose name curiously evokes the same constellation Leo and Astra came from. And Leo was the favorite series of director Koichi Sakamoto, which is why he tries to include it in as many of his Ultra projects as possible, such as Zero’s movies, Ultra Fight Victory, and the Ultra Galaxy Fights.
Leo is decidedly not for everyone, and I haven’t even discussed its sometimes bizarre direction choices, which I can only describe as an attitude of “I went to film school!~” wherein it feels like they know how it should look, but they somehow miss in execution. The budget hurts it, and I honestly wonder how it might have succeeded if they hadn’t premiered in the midst of the Oil Crisis of 1973. And for some reason, despite apparently rushing the most perfect theme song ever, performed by Gen/Leo’s actor, Ryu Manatsu, the series replaces it after about 12 or 13 episodes with a song that…well, it’s not bad, but it doesn’t fit thematically and feels much more like it would fit better for Taro or something earlier.
But if you do like exploration of grief, loss, and trauma, and you don’t mind being in for a wild ride, definitely give it a shot.
Additional PTSD resources
Avoidance at ptsd.va.gov
Mayo Clinic
Mind.org.uk
NHS.uk
Anxiety and Depression Association of America
To summarize the story, it begins with Ultra Seven facing twin monsters, Black and Red Giras, who are controlled by Alien Magma. The monsters are calling forth a storm that threatens to flood Tokyo, and during the battle, they horrifically break Seven’s leg, twisting it until it snaps. Though Seven tries to continue the fight, he’s completely defeated, to the point that he can no longer transform—when he tries to use the Ultra Eye again, it melts. However, he is saved by the brash young Ultraman Leo, the lone survivor of Planet L77 in the Leo constellation, which had been destroyed one month prior by Magma. Since taking refuge on Earth, Leo assumed the identity of Gen Ootori and took up a job coaching an afterschool athletics program at the Jounan Sports Center (because Kamen Rider’s Jounan University is everywhere). Dan Moroboshi, now captain of the new defense team MAC, recruits Gen as a fellow alien and Ultra who can do far more than he can to keep the Earth safe from aliens and monsters. But Gen is temperamental and untrained, and Dan is impatient, using brutal training tactics to teach Leo how to survive aliens who are far crueler than he is.
Leo eventually settles into a rhythm as he begins to succeed against the various monsters, even though his personal life as Gen continues to have its difficulties. Various aliens continue to target his friends from the gym, particularly two children, Tooru and Kaoru Umeda, who were orphaned in an early episode when an alien serial killer tried to frame Leo for killing their father. But he has victories as well, such as reuniting with his beloved pet Ron, and discovering that his twin brother, Astra, had also survived Magma’s attack and would occasionally come to his rescue in particularly deadly fights. He also gains the respect of the legendary Ultraman King, who declares the twins the newest two Ultra Brothers after they succeed in saving the Land of Light.
And then episode 40 happens.
After spending several episodes lightening up and settling into a typical 1970s Ultra series format, Leo remembers its darker days and decides to end its run with the “Terror of the Flying Saucer” arc, which kicks off with the Black Star flying saucer monsters launching a surprise attack on MAC’s base during a quiet moment of celebration, overwhelming them immediately and killing the entire team—including Captain Dan Moroboshi. Instead of saving himself, Dan tells Gen to live and continue fighting, and Leo only barely escapes in time. To make matters worse, the same monster lands on a department store building, and Gen learns to his horror that his friends Takashi and Momoko were inside, along with little Kaoru, all of whom were killed in the attack. Gen takes charge of Tooru and moves in with an ER nurse, Sachiko Miyama and her daughters, while doing the legwork of trying to track down the Black Star’s movements and defeat them alone. Eventually, Black Star’s Commander hires an assassin, Alien Bunyo, who puts together Leo’s human identity and targets his new adoptive family in order to kill him. It’s only thanks to King that Leo survives, but Commander Black goes at it again by holding Tooru hostage while Leo fights the final saucer creature, ordering him to lose if he wants Tooru to live. In the end, Tooru is rescued by the neighborhood kids, who proceed to beat Commander Black to death in an incredibly cathartic display, before retrieving the crystal ball he uses to control the saucer creatures and communicate with Black Star, throwing it to Leo so he can finish them for good. Gen then decides to leave the Miyamas and Tooru to explore the Earth as a human for a little while, admitting he finally feels like the planet is his home.
To say that Leo is controversial is probably pretty accurate. It is a series I don’t necessarily recommend for everybody—it’s probably a no for little kids, and it can probably best be described as the Ryuki or the Faiz of the franchise: it goes in dark places. MAC officers die with alarming regularity, and there’s a lot of episodes for which the “bitter” part of “bittersweet ending” is probably a little too pronounced. Gen especially goes through the wringer, which literally nobody in MAC liking him, considering Dan’s treatment of him to be favoritism—which does have a point, although this doesn’t make it Gen’s fault. And the writers didn’t seem inclined to give him much of a break either. Torture, both physical and psychological, wasn’t exactly unknown in earlierUltra series, including in Seven. However, the episode with Alien Bunyo is a pretty good example of what can happen here: Gen surrenders to Bunyo in order to save Sachiko’s life, and even though he manages to transform and shatter Commander Black’s sword, his restraints keep him from reaching giant size and limit his power, resulting in a crack in his crest from the sword. Commander Black then orders Bunyo to take Leo to the “body processing plant,” which is a freezing cellar, where Bunyo beats the crap out of Leo before he freezes over completely. Then, while Leo is still alive and conscious, Bunyo and Commander Black take a saw and begin dismembering him.
Now, this isn’t to say that it’s a completely grimdark take on Ultraman—consider, for instance, that Ryuki had some utterly hilarious episodes and moments, including the first fight, when Shinji broke his sword. And in the time between maybe episodes 20 through 40, we get some lighter-hearted fare, such as the story of an alien who controls a monster that eats rainbows, or the time Leo got shrunk down by a creepy wizard and had to paddle across a river and was represented by what was very obviously a toy (and probably inspired the entirety of Ginga for that matter), or a battle that I swear was originally scripted for Taro, given it’s a boxing match (boxing being the specialty of Kotaro Higashi, Taro’s host) and absolutely bonkers.
And in a lot of ways, I feel like Leo is the opposite side of the same coin as Taro: remembered for being darker while it still had plenty of silliness; Taro, in turn, may be remembered for being light-hearted and silly, but it also had some deeply fucked up stories that Leo wouldn’t even touch. About 10 monsters return from Taro in later media, whether it’s the Ultraman manga, Mebius, Ginga, the Galaxy Rescue Force voice drama, etc., not counting ones that only appear as Spark Dolls or cards. Likewise, about 7 monsters from Leo in later series, with the janky robot Sevenger becoming a one-hit wonder resurrected for Ultraman Z and its spinoff, Sevenger Fight. Even their finales are similar, almost as if Leo’s was a direct response to Taro’s. In the finale of Taro, Kotaro learns that a ship captain he’d befriended in the first episode, whose adult daughter and preteen son he’d been staying with, was killed by the monster Samekujira. The son, Kenichi, blamed Taro for failing to save his father. Taking the failure to heart, Kotaro decided it was time to grow up and take responsibility for Kenichi, returning Taro’s Ultra Badge to Mother of Ultra before defeating Alien Valky and leaving ZAT to figure out his life now. Gen comes to a similar decision, realizing that Tooru has become too accustomed to Leo showing up and miraculously saving him, while also coping with the fear that the only reason the Black Star keep attacking is because they want to destroy Ultraman Leo, not necessarily humanity. He tries to make those preparations for Tooru, but Commander Black attacks them first, forcing Gen to reveal his identity to Tooru and fight. And when he succeeds, he decides to leave for a while, much like the Ultras before him, but his aim is much more defined: to see the blue skies and seas of his new home, which he’d said were already very similar to those of his old home.
To some degree, Leo kind of closes the door on the format of the 1970s seasons. Beginning with Return of Ultraman in 1971, Tsuburaya Productions created a formula that pretty much every season stuck to: hero becomes Ultraman, is recruited by the defense organization, has a pretty girl would-be love interest and a young boy to act as the audience surrogate, hero ends the series leaving the defense organization. Literally every single season in this decade follows that formula, which is strange because that was very much not the formula for Ultraman or Ultra Seven: Shin Hayata had been an established member of the SSSP and in some episodes acted as vice-captain, Dan Moroboshi was an alien posing as a human and trying to cope with all of that; Hayata didn’t have a love interest but did have a preteen teammate that wasn’t necessarily “his” kid friend, and Dan...well, I’ll get to that in a bit. And it wasn’t just Ultra; Mirrorman in the same year as RoU had the same formula, and it’s kind of disappointing how it shifted its approach to become more like Ultraman when it was really setting up something new and different. And in the ‘70s, Ultraman had opinions on the changing nature of Japanese families, like how moms were nagging their children too much about their studies, what role a woman should have in her family, and what the modern Japanese man should be, and how a boy should aspire to be that. I’m not sure if these were widespread thoughts throughout the decade—quite honestly, I’d need to watch the original Kamen Rider and maybe even Goranger to get a better impression—but there is definitely some values dissonance between eras here.
And yet, I still feel like Leo “closes the door” because it starts to dismantle this formula. At some point, I’ll probably do a retrospective on Return of Ultraman, but suffice to say, it didn’t click with me much. I had a hard time connecting to Hideki Go as a character, quite honestly because I never really felt like I got as much of a feel for his personality as much as I had Hayata, or Dan, and certainly not Gen. And it also didn’t sit well with me what they did about his support staff. To spoil Return of Ultraman, a major two-part storyline (and a Christmas one at that, Kamen Rider fans!) begins with Go’s girlfriend and best friend being murdered by Alien Nackle, who is trying to kidnap and assassinate him. Go then takes custody of their younger brother and tries to raise him. It’s very much the same as what happens with Momoko, Takeshi, Kaoru, and the surviving Tooru—Gen and Momoko definitely seem to have feelings for one another, Takeshi is their friend and coworker at the gym and has been by Gen’s side from the start, and Kaoru is the very first supporting castmate we meet for Gen. But I don’t feel as much of an emotional impact with Go’s loss of his supporting cast; for one, I actually went through several episodes not realizing that Go and Aki Sakata were dating, or that Aki and Ken were siblings—I actually thought that Aki and Ken were married, that Jiro was their son, and that Aki was flirting with Go behind her husband’s back. So…yeah, probably not the best romance writing for Go and Aki there. And then when they die, there’s only a few episodes here and there that discuss Jiro’s loss, but not as much with Go’s loss—and again, Go was dating Aki. In fact, just before the murder, Go’s teammates were telling him that she would make a good wife to him, and he agreed, indicating he was putting some thought into marriage. And then at the end of the Christmas episode, after Go’s been saved, we see Jiro hanging out with Go’s attractive neighbor, Rumiko, who feels shoehorned in as a new love interest.
Say what you will about the minor timeskip from Gen and Tooru learning about the others’ deaths to their moving in with the Miyama family, but you constantly see how the consequences of losing everyone has fucked them up, especially Tooru. Sachiko’s older daughter, Izumi, tries to flirt with Gen, but he seems to ignore her advances; and it doesn’t help that she criticizes Leo and he takes it all to heart. The younger daughter, Ayumi, kind of fills in the same push-and-pull relationship with Tooru that Kaoru had—in fact, the fan wiki says that Kaoru’s actress only left the show at her parents’ request due to school (although, keep in mind, fan wikis cite their sources about as frequently as MAC officers survive, so take it with a grain of salt). But Tooru very clearly does not regard Ayumi as a substitute sister, and episode 45 deals with him meeting a little girl who he admits to Gen is the same age as Kaoru, making him want to protect her when she’s caught up in the Black Star’s deeds. Episode 49 sees Gen trying to step in for Tooru’s parents at a special event at school—in fact, Gen’s attempts and failure to be Tooru’s substitute parent are a recurring theme in the series—but Tooru’s grief over losing his whole family draw the saucer creature Nova to him. And the finale kicks off with Tooru wanting to go to the beach when the Miyamas have gone to visit their father’s grave, and he tries to explain to Gen that Momoko used to tell him and Kaoru that she could see her destroyed home island from the beach near their old home, so Tooru wants to go there to remember both her and Kaoru.
Ultraman Leo is a story about grief and trauma, and I truly believe that this is its greatest strength. Gen has lost his home and his family, and throughout the first third of the series, he is impulsive and angry in response, constantly messing up because he can’t keep his temper. But at the same time, he never loses his empathy. He puts up with Dan’s training methods out of the respect he has for the older Ultra, he constantly feels for Tooru and Kaoru, and occasionally enemies take advantage of his kind heart and especially his hope to not be the last survivor of his planet. When Ron attacks out of the pain of what he’s gone through in the months since L77’s destruction, Leo can’t destroy him and instead gives him a second chance as Kaoru’s pet. His love for his brother leads Alien Babalu to impersonate Astra in order to steal a powerful artifact that threatens the safety of the entire Star of Ultra (because apparently, the Ultras can’t be bothered to put anything as basic as a child-safety lock on any of their important shit [see: Ultraman Zero’s backstory, Ultraman Belial’s backstory, literally every week at Ultraman Hikari’s lab…]). The Ultra Brothers refuse to let Leo take a minute to try to sort anything out and continue attacking “Astra,” forcing Leo to take their beams in order to protect him.
But the stories of grief and trauma aren’t just Gen’s. If you’ve read my Kamen Rider OOO reviews, you may know that I make the argument that Ankh has posttraumatic stress disorder. While it’s difficult to say whether or not Kaoru and Tooru have it, due to an overall lack of good research on children and mental health, there’s a good breakdown by Stanford Children’s Health that does seem to match with what happens to them throughout the story. And in all honesty, they act a lot like how I’ve witnessed children exposed to constant traumatic stress in their homes—they can act completely happy and normal, but sometimes they’ll just be mean. And this is because of the trauma, their coping mechanisms, a lack of supportive love, and not really being able to control the outcome. Hell, Astra, for being an Ultraman of very few words and appearances, is murderously protective of his older brother in a way I definitely would say is a reaction to his trauma; when the saucer creature Hangler injures Leo, Astra does not fuck around: he shrinks down, flies into the monster’s mouth, and then returns to giant size, blowing up the monster from the inside. It is such a shocking moment that the goddamn music cuts out completely, as if it doesn’t know what to do! This is a young Ultraman who was buried alive under the burning wreckage of his home in the wake of Magma’s attack, with his brother trying desperately to dig him out and failing, who has a chain on his leg that nobody can seem to remove, whose face looks oddly off compared to his twin—and all of this is apparently due to torture at the hands of Magma, and King’s best attempts to heal him. At the time of this writing, Ultra Galaxy Fight: The Destined Crossroad has not yet premiered, and it appears to be featuring Astra much more prominently than just about anything in the past has, so it remains to be seen what they’ll incorporate into his backstory. But regardless, Leo’s little brother has been through some shit.
But if there is a poster boy for PTSD out of Leo, it would have to be Dan, based on both the ICD 11 and the DSM-V (broken down by the National Institutes of Mental Health). The symptoms can be broken down into four categories: re-experiencing, avoidance, arousal and reactivity, and cognition and mood, and all four are required for a diagnosis—at least one symptom of the first two types, and at least two of the latter.
Re-experiencing, or experiencing intrusive memories, is the symptom most people think about when it comes to PTSD. This can include flashbacks—whether memories or experiencing a sensation like you’re reliving the moment, frightening thoughts, nightmares, and emotional or physical sensations of distress or illness in response to a reminder of the trauma. Dan has these very obviously with his injury—when he is reminded that he can no longer fight as Ultra Seven, he has a flashback to his leg being broken while he writhed in agony in the water. And this happens when he reminds Gen that he’s sidelined too. But honestly, this is probably the least pronounced of Dan’s symptoms, which makes sense considering the next category is avoidance.
Avoidance behaviors can be physical or emotional. A survivor of trauma may try to avoid being in the same place where the traumatic event occurred, or try to safety plan ways to avoid being in the same situation in the future. An argument can be made that Dan is intentionally avoiding the Land of Light and the other Ultra Brothers, given that in episode 34, Go arrives from the Land of Light to deliver Sevenger and leaves with the Ultra Eye, intending to repair it; and yet after that episode, nothing is seen of either Sevenger or a restored Ultra Eye. Contrast this with, say, Zero at the end of Geed—he spends all series with a broken Ultimate Bracelet, but in the final scenes, he says he got it fixed now that everything has calmed down.
At the same time, though, I feel a little shaky on using this as evidence, if only because it’s very evident in Ultraman Orb with Gai and his Origin powers, and I think the emotional aspect is far stronger. Dan most certainly tries to be emotionally numb, or at the least, he’s hardened himself against the world. Consider his own series, where he was a thoughtful, optimistic, and deeply naïve young man. His personality was not all that dissimilar from Gen’s—he was wide-eyed and idealistic, always believing in the best of both humanity and his fellow aliens. But over time, he was proven wrong again and again. Aliens who tried to persuade him to show solidarity with them would commit atrocious acts, and even his own friends in the Ultra Guard had a strong tendency to shoot first, ask questions never.
Dan’s personality changes drastically in Leo. He is now sharp and impatient, angry with Gen, with the evil in the universe, and with himself for not being strong enough to stop it. He is avoiding the person he used to be, and this emotional avoidance is intrinsically tied to the hyperarousal and cognition/mood symptoms. Even his personal pronouns change—in Ultra Seven, Dan used “boku,” whether he was speaking to his human friends, to other aliens, or thinking to himself. At one point, he used “watashi” as Seven, but considering how rarely he used it, it felt like an act—something to keep the rest of the Ultra Guard from suspecting that their Dan was the mysterious alien ally who bailed them out time and time again. But Captain Moroboshi uses “watashi” all the time, and it feels just as much like a mask, like this is the person he thinks he should be in MAC, impersonal and professional at all times. When he speaks with Gen in private, however, he uses “ore,” which now appears to be his preferred pronoun post-Mebius. The Dan Moroboshi of the Ultra Guard no longer exists.
He rarely even discusses his history in the Ultra Guard, and in episode 29, when he meets a woman who appears to be his old flame Anne Yuri, Gen doesn’t seem to understand the significance of Dan thinking he’s found her again, after everyone seemed to have lost track of her when he returned to Earth. And in that moment, for a very short time, he seemed close to being happy. Considering how rare his moments of happiness are, it’s heartbreaking to see him get his hopes up—seeing this woman who he truly believes is the human he fell in love with, now taking care of an alien child with powerful psychokinesis…it’s hard not to read that as Dan wondering if that’s his child.
Continuing on into hyperarousal, I’ve already mentioned how Dan’s personality has changed to make him more irritable and impatient. I used to compare Leo to Batman Beyond, and I still stand by the analogy—Dan is very similar to the bitter old Bruce Wayne, with Gen acting like Terry McGinnis, a young successor who gives him a chance for redemption through training him, continuing his legacy. The difference is that Bruce gets a happy ending. Dan still has to wait.
But hyperarousal also includes recklessness and self-destructive behavior. Dan is constantly using his Ultra Psychokinesis in human form, even though we see it physically weakening him and making him ill, and the narrator explains that every time he uses it, he’s shortening his own lifespan. Dan knows this, and he still does this. Likewise, he does nothing to try to save himself in episode 40, instead just telling Gen to live. I’ve seen discussion by other fans writing this behavior off as “Dan has a death wish,” but I don’t feel like that’s the whole story. To borrow Christopher Khayman Lee’s analysis of his iconic Power Rangers in Space character, Andros, Dan too is “a broken man,” who no longer has his teammates because new defense organizations keep succeeding their predecessors. He no longer has his innocence, because he’s seen what darkness exists in the universe, having been victim to horrific violence committed by his fellow aliens, having been party to his human friends committing acts of terror and genocide against other species, and having been told to just give up the fight and go home by his own superior from the Land of Light when the Earth was facing the most dangerous invasion to date, and so soon after he was almost killed in an elaborate assassination plot designed to destroy the humans’ will with a very public execution. Keep in mind, Seven wasn’t a warrior at the beginning of his series; the series booklet describes him as an astronomer who was mapping this region of the galaxy. He was just a guy. With a boomerang. Who didn’t ask for all of this fighting and monsters.
And now he is the captain of Earth’s first line of defense against alien invasions and monster incursions. Normally, this would be considered a massive culmination of a character arc, a triumphant moment of overcoming the odds. But it’s not, and that brings me to the final category: cognition and mood. In addition to a loss of his close relationships—the Ultra Guard, Anne, even the Ultra Brothers and his own capsule monsters—Dan just doesn’t seem to have any hope left in him, and he’s completely detached. He has no hobbies anymore, where we used to see him paint maps for the Ultra Guard or go to amusement parks or get weirdly obsessed with car rallies for some reason. He’s always in uniform, except for the one episode where he went to meet the maybe-Anne, where he wore a grey suit that it looked like he had no idea how to wear. Unless he’s going to yell at Gen and throw things at him, he almost never goes down to Earth. In earlier episodes, he seemed to expect Gen to have no social life, just like him, calling him away from obligations with his friends. While it’s not unexpected that there would be no indication of him having a family waiting for him in the Land of Light, not when Zero wasn’t created until 2009, to me, it feels telling that when he thinks about his “brothers and parents,” when his superiors at the TDF and apparently the UN have approved a massive bomb to blow up the Star of Ultra before it can collide with the Earth, Dan’s thinking about the Ultra Brothers and Father and Mother of Ultra.
Gen is also the only one of his team who he shows any actual relationship with whatsoever, to the point that the rest of MAC protests his obvious favoritism. Dan is not a good captain, and he’s struggling in that role. He keeps telling Gen how as aliens, they are the only ones who can keep the planet safe, despite the entire point of his original series finale was the Ultra Guard having to prove to him that humans could be trusted to take care of ourselves, and it was okay for him to go home and take care of himself. Which is another thing he has in common with Andros from PRiS, which is a reason why I love him in this even though I find him incredibly frustrating from a narrative standpoint. Quite honestly, for someone who keeps talking about how he’s different from everyone else, how he’s an alien and how no one else will ever understand, Dan is incredibly human. The universe has broken him, and he’s trying to put the pieces back together any way he can.
So while Leo does take the cautious optimism of Ultra Seven and tears it down, it does become a keystone to Seven’s legacy. Leo takes the lessons Seven taught him and then trains Seven’s son, Zero, instead teaching him that true strength isn’t physical, but emotional. Zero, in turn, inspires the New Generation Heroes, training Ginga and Victory, teaming up with Seven to train Orb, befriending Geed, recognizing Grigio’s full potential as a rookie heroine, and ultimately, being a reluctant mentor to Zett. Leo’s own legacy appears to continue in The Destined Crossroad with the introduction of Ultraman Regulos, a mysterious warrior with a martial arts background, whose name curiously evokes the same constellation Leo and Astra came from. And Leo was the favorite series of director Koichi Sakamoto, which is why he tries to include it in as many of his Ultra projects as possible, such as Zero’s movies, Ultra Fight Victory, and the Ultra Galaxy Fights.
Leo is decidedly not for everyone, and I haven’t even discussed its sometimes bizarre direction choices, which I can only describe as an attitude of “I went to film school!~” wherein it feels like they know how it should look, but they somehow miss in execution. The budget hurts it, and I honestly wonder how it might have succeeded if they hadn’t premiered in the midst of the Oil Crisis of 1973. And for some reason, despite apparently rushing the most perfect theme song ever, performed by Gen/Leo’s actor, Ryu Manatsu, the series replaces it after about 12 or 13 episodes with a song that…well, it’s not bad, but it doesn’t fit thematically and feels much more like it would fit better for Taro or something earlier.
But if you do like exploration of grief, loss, and trauma, and you don’t mind being in for a wild ride, definitely give it a shot.
Additional PTSD resources
Avoidance at ptsd.va.gov
Mayo Clinic
Mind.org.uk
NHS.uk
Anxiety and Depression Association of America