Spoilers follow for Bass X Machina Episode 1, “Until Then… I’m Bass Reeves.” The full six-episode season is available now on Netflix.
The latest animated production from Studio Mir (Devil May Cry, X-Men ’97, My Adventures With Superman, etc.) to make its way to our airwaves… or streaming waves – whatever we’re calling them these days – Bass X Machina is, based on this first episode, a fun and violent excursion into the world of the steampunk Western, but with an eye to Black history. Or rather, alt-history, since this series gives us a Wild West where robots and cyborgs are the norm, even while the face-in-the-dirt killin’ remains as ruthless as ever.
Brian Tyree Henry, who also is an executive producer on the series, voices Bass Reeves, or this world’s version of Bass Reeves, who of course in reality was a historic lawman; an ex-slave who went on to become a Deputy U.S. Marshal, Reeves has been portrayed in movies, TV and elsewhere many times over the years, perhaps most notably in recent years in Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen (where his legend inspired that world’s first superhero, Hooded Justice).
As the first episode starts, Reeves explains in VO how, after the Civil War, the Union Army was “saddled with thousands of Black soldiers they didn’t know what to do with. And after having known the horrors of war, some of these soldiers didn’t know what to do with themselves.” Some chose the life of the gun in the West, some became Buffalo Soldiers, and “some legendary few… became lawmen.”
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