Roger Smith is Paradigm City’s top negotiator, a job involving a lot of talking to kidnappers, handling vast sums of money, and fighting random giant robot battles. For reasons unknown to Roger, he owns and can operate a megadeus(giant robot) called Big O. Every single villain in the entire city also pilots a megadeus and will whip it out at the slightest provocation, making Roger’s job a bit more exciting. The prolific megadeus pilot population is rather surprising since no one is supposed to remember how to operate them.

The citizenry of Paradigm City lost their memory forty years ago in an unknown incident. Since then, they have puzzled out how to re-harness the power of electricity, form a system of government, have a working economy, form large monopolies, and operate tanks. It’s not very clear how they managed to figure out all of this, but I’m guessing that a bunch of random guesswork was involved. Regained memories probably helped too.

The people of Paradigm City do occasionally recall things from their life beforehand, if they are old enough to remember such things. Except the times when younger people randomly remember things, except maybe they’re not remembering things, or maybe they’re remembering the future, or maybe they’re remembering someone else’s memory, or maybe they are actually just insane. The second season made things more confusing like that. Pretending the second season doesn’t exist, they basically just remember their pasts from time to time.

Anyway, when Paradigm City needs a negotiator it turns to Roger Smith, who is basically Bruce Wayne and Batman at the same time. He is rich and has a large mansion where he lives with his butler, Norman, and his robotic maid, R. Dorothy. If Bruce Wayne had a better sense of humor and created a giant robot instead of a pair of tights, he would be Roger Smith. Roger is a strict master, always enforcing his household rules, such as only letting women come inside unannounced and all residents must wear black at all times.

Some of the dialog in Big O is as bad as Frank Miller's work that isn't Dark Knight Returns or Year One.

Norman takes his job as butler/giant-robot-repairman seriously and constantly calls up Roger during robot battles to see if he should delay dinner or not. Dorothy, in addition to being a robot and maid, has a good repertoire with Roger that makes the series fun. She keeps Roger from getting a swelled head, and helps out in investigations. Although, every single fight ends in her stuck to a large magnet or used to activate an enemy’s megadeus.

The robot battles are fun, but quite often feel shoehorned into the episode. It never makes much sense that so many of these random people not only find these giant robots, but have memories telling them how to operate them. For the entire first season, the show follows a monster of the week format, which works really well for the series. The second season decides to have more plot though, more plot that makes no sense and is not all that interesting. The second season also contains the line: “I am one of the tomatoes.” It sounds just as stupid in context.

Fun Fact: There are no pictures of Big O on the internet.

It took me two weeks to get through the final four episodes of the series, and it did not feel worth it at the end. The story was boring and really quite idiotic. The final episode helped make up for some of that with some cool moments, but it didn’t make up for the rest of the season. Roger wasn’t as funny, Dorothy wasn’t around as much, and while other characters such as, Dastun, chief of police and good friend to Roger, and Angel, a spy working for the Paradigm Corporation and possible love interest for Roger, were expanded upon, they did not make up for the protagonists’ downfalls.

For the first thirteen episodes though, Big O was fun, had a good atmosphere, and was worth watching. I enjoyed watching Roger and Dorothy investigate stuff and have giant robot battles. The series worked when that was all it tried to do. The robot battles never did make sense, but I was okay with that. Go watch season one, it’s pretty cool and a lot of fun, but just try to pretend the second season didn’t happen and “forget” to watch that one. You’ll remember the series more fondly that way.