Kami wa Saikoro o Furanai (God Doesn't Roll Dice)

[Daily Yomiuri, January 26, 2006, Wm. Penn]: What kind of person were you 10 years ago? Say your boyfriend and your best friend were on an airplane that dropped off the radar into a black hole/time slip 10 years ago and only reappeared last week. Would they recognize the person you have become? Would you still have anything in common with them?

That is the premise of Kami wa Saikoro o Furanai (God Doesn't Roll Dice, Wednesdays, NTV network, 10 p.m.), a refreshingly different sci-fi series. Oh, I know, these time-slip tales are getting pretty common and the story sounds a bit like a 21st century version of the Japanese folk tale "Urashima Taro."

But nowadays, any TV series that actually encourages us to think seriously stands out. The program's Web site (www.ntv.co.jp/saikoro) is even sponsoring a series of short-story contests for viewers who want to reflect on their lives and the last decade in hopes of winning a bag of network goodies. Satomi Kobayashi stars as Yasuko, 38, an airport hostess whose main concern is whether she can hold on to her job until retirement.

When Flight 402 went missing in August 1996 she was assigned to help the bereaved families. Now she has been sent to Nagasaki to deal with any trouble caused by an eccentric physics professor who predicts the plane will be returning. He isn't a crank.

The plane appears as predicted and everyone on board is just as they were 10 years before. Yasuko is ecstatic at first, but then the awkwardness of it all overwhelms her. Her friend Aki (Rie Tomosaka) seems immature now and she feels old. As Yasuko puts it, the difference between 28 and 38 is much greater than the difference between 18 and 28.

Curious about how the passengers, crew and scriptwriter would deal with the new Japan, I was actually growing fond of this drama until the final scene revealed the physics prof typing "9 days left" into his computer. Instead of a discourse on how people adapt and times change, are they going to ask viewers to watch a black hole swallow them up again, leaving angst-ridden families behind?

That's not my idea of entertainment, but I'll give it a second chance. Any local TV series that actually asks us to think about our lives--past and future--deserves that much. If they do all have to fly off into that black hole again, I hope they take most of the Thursday night TV line-up with them--especially the platypus.

STARRING: Kobayashi Satomi, Tomosaka Rie
NETWORK: NTV
Theme Song:  
DURATION: January through March 2006