Trigun is probably the most popular show that I knew nothing about. I knew about Vash his looks his weapons but beyond that I knew nothing. Normally with a show that is twenty years old some spoilers would have sunk into the zeitgeist and made it back to me see Cowboy Bebop but here I was truly surprised with how little I knew going in. It is also worth noting that I watched Trigun almost as a challenge to myself. On one hand I had been rooted heavily in the modern and I wanted to look a little further back into history. I could have done something tired like rewatch Ghost in the Shell and I will someday but something I had not seen seemed more critically interesting. On the other after Island after venting my displeasure with science fiction shows there was a fair critique: try watching good ones. Knowing nothing about Trigun other than what Ive said so far I figured it was a good piece to give me a chance to reconsider my position. I was wrong. Trigun is a good show let me get that out from the jump and it avoids a lot of the foibles of bad science fiction. For one it is science fiction compared to the audience not compared to the characters. The world the characters exist in is futuristic and they understand the rules even if we dont. While this maybe and is at times in Trigun frustrating for the watcher everything feels grounded. We just dont know the ground. An apt analogy may be visiting a foreign country. I may not understand all the customs and quirks but the locals do and that is reassuring and comforting. So unlike Island or Kiznaiver or Dimension W Trigun holds together as a scifi show narratively. The characters are real and likeable or hateable when appropriate. Without reservation getting 80 of the way through I will say that Trigun was vying for a top spot and then things got a little off. Skirting spoilers Ill rattle them off at the end as best I can Trigun has a pacing problem. It is good enough to keep you from noticing until the end but it is definitely there. Things go along in a fairly SoL fashion before ramping up with very few episodes left to plumb the depth of the implications set up. I want to spend more time with endhalf Vash. By the time he appears fully formed we have already seen firsthalf Vash go through a lot of the same plot threads two or three times. Vash goes into a town stuff gets a little sideways Vash resolves the issue. It takes a while for these to mean anything. These twentysix episodes feel like they could fit in thirteen. I cant blame the show too much though because I feel like it is a product of its time. The art is nice and at times breathtaking but mostly it is though I have no frame of reference what I would think of as 90s cheap. Nothing against it it was the style of the era across the board but looking at it now it looks old always and cheap often. It is also weird that there is a recap episode. I dont feel like I see that much anymore in a twocour show. Maybe I am an idiot though I know there are recap movies but they are separate products. I think Monogatari has had some in its run though. That is always an option. Again though I cant hold it against the show. This is before Netflix Crunchyroll and DVRs. You could set a VCR to record I suppose but it stands that recaps make sense to fill in stuff for viewers who missed a few episodes. Now that I mention that maybe the pacing makes a touch of sense now too. Repeat the same beats a few times so people can definitely see it and understand the story. The pacing may also be chalked up to filler to keep pace with a manga. I dont know. I know DBZ fell prey to that as it went. They had to spend some time doing nonmanga stuff to let the manga catch up. That may make the most sense given how outofleft field some of the later plot points come. If there was a 2019 redux of Trigun I feel like it would nicely fit into onecour and tell a tight story about a man grappling with his present and former demons and trying to move past them. That all being said though I believe anything of this vintage deserves to be taken in part as a product of its time. So taken as an anime divorced from time Trigun is okay. Taken as a relic of an older age it is very good and worth a watch. Should my sister watch this anime? For the first time yes. Spoilery gripes: