Rejected by the quasi-governmental organisation known as the Oceanographic Agency, Maia Mizuki instead finds herself working for NEREIS, an all female organisation which will do anything from retrieving cats to stopping criminals. With no memory of her past, her only clue being her grandfathers dying word "Daphne", Maia works her way up from having to do menial tasks to becoming a full agent of NEREIS, while all the time her past remains a mystery...

Daphne in the Brilliant Blue: Volume Four contains another four episodes - thirteen to sixteen - of this twenty-four episode show.

On the first volume I had quite high hopes for the show. The central premise of a world mostly sunk beneath the waves seemed to offer many interesting concepts. Unfortunately, the show has quickly descended into its humorous madcap mission of the week format - which is okay if what you want is a bunch of scantily clad nubile woman running around saving the world one eccentric at a time. Personally I think that the loss of the central mystery about Maia's origins can only be seen as a missed opportunity.

This disc contains episodes thirteen to sixteen (Angers Away, Old Kook and the Sea, and the two-parter Die Hard, Play Hard at the Sea) all of which have the thinnest of scripts.

Angers away sees the Wong Chang Lee brothers busted out of jail by their sister in a handy dandy submarine she has acquired. Of course the NEREIS gets them back and bag themselves a sub in the process. The show is played strictly for laughs and is as shallow as the water on the beach.

Old Kook and the Sea sees Maia trying to help out an old man who feels he will never be revenged until he kills the sea monster which injured him. Solution: dress their new sub up as the monster and let the old man take pot shots at them.

The two-parter Die Hard, Play Hard, at the Sea sees the NEREIS sending Maia after a runaway kid, who seems to be heading to Siberia City. From this inauspicious premise the show takes in a Mafia plot and finds Maia having to save the lives of passengers on a doomed plane. From purely the point of the story the show picks up a little with this two-parter, but with so few episodes left to go, I wonder if anyone will care about Maia’s past.

The show's picture is clear and clean with audio options for English and Japanese stereo, plus subtitles. The disc contains no extras, not even the usual trailers.

If cute girls toting guns and running around in bikinis is your idea of a good time, then this is most probably a show for you. Just don’t expect any great depth from the story.

5

Charles Packer