One Season Wonders: MTV’s Aeon Flux Was a Dream to Awaken Our World

In the years before streaming, extremely niche TV shows faced uphill battles against cancellation. As a result, TV history is littered with the corpses of shows struck down before their time. In One Season Wonders, Ken Lowe revisits one of the unique, promising scripted shows struck down before they had a chance to shine. 

There is an episode of Aeon Flux, the trippy sci-fi action cartoon that aired on MTV’s Liquid Television, that begins with a group of kids play-acting a fight. They throw fake punches at one another while one boy laughs and claps his hands to supply the sound effects. Mere feet away is a national border so militarized that even throwing something toward the other side causes automated guns to riddle the object with bullets. The two countries are so close that you can have an apartment on one side of the border and gaze through the window at your neighbor on the other side of it.

In this episode, a pair of lovers try to escape, but the woman fails and is injured critically. The cruel regime heals her, but sentences her to work in a factory on some mechanical component. When she tries to run the border again, the defenses have been made even more complex and cruel—she is ensnared in a web, her legs anesthetized and amputated right on the spot, and we see that she herself made one of the mechanical components that is part of the horrible machine that has done this to her. The last image of the episode is of the same boys who were playing in the first scene, but they are not pulling their punches now. They are hitting each other, as, sitting miserably nearby, their friend can no longer clap to provide the sound. He, too, is a double amputee.

Aeon Flux is a show with a simple premise and deep, twisting (and twisted) ideas. Its protagonist, the limber and lithe, sexually unstoppable, and effortlessly cool title character, isn’t just a secret agent who inexplicably keeps coming back from the dead from episode to episode. She also represents freedom, individuality, and even, despite her steely dedication to her covert missions, compassion for the innocent. Trevor, the hyper-intellectual dictator of the nation-state she opposes, represents dominance, order at the expense of the self, a single-minded lust for human transcendence no matter the cost to our actual humanity. Their spy vs. spy antics would be brilliant on their own without the delicious detail that they are irresistibly, jealously, disastrously attracted to each other—always to their own doom.

The fact that this is a sizzling setup for a show is one reason why it remains a touchstone among viewers of a certain age who remember when MTV was an actual thing. It doesn’t hurt that plots like the one I described above are so eerily universal, so keenly attuned to humanity’s monstrous failings in microcosm and in macrocosm, that the show seems to have aged so little. There was nothing like it before it aired, and there’s been nothing quite like it since.

The Show

Some people will take issue with this qualifying as a one-season phenomenon, but hear me out: the show had two “seasons” of shorts that aired in 1991 and 1992. The first was a continuous series of 2-minute episodes and has been collected as the show’s “pilot” in official video releases, while the second was a series of 5-minute shorts. Those shorts had no discernible dialogue and both are essentially shorter than an episode of television. Aeon Flux didn’t really have full-length episodes, Aeon and Trevor didn’t even talk, until the show returned in 1995 with a half-hour time slot. In a short 10 episodes, just a touch longer than 3 hours of continuous viewing, Aeon Flux became one of the coolest things on TV, and a vanguard for other sci-fi of the era. It demands to be watched alongside movies like The Matrix and Dark City or books like Snow Crash—the fiercely individualistic, cyberpunk sci-fi that wallows in the squandered promises of the end of the 20th century.

In some distant, desolate future there are two nation-states at perpetual war for ideological reasons. The nation of Bregna is a conformist police state ruled by Trevor Goodchild (John Rafter Lee), whose megalomaniacal designs for humanity are strenuously opposed by the nation of Monica and their supremely skilled secret agent, Aeon Flux (Denise Poirier). In episode after episode, Aeon infiltrates Bregna to foil some plot of Trevor’s. I am a sucker for shows that open with a litany, and Aeon Flux’s is one for the ages

It’s worth mentioning that creator Peter Chung never actually intended for Aeon to be the show’s protagonist—hence her death at the end of the first series of shorts and her constant deaths in the second collection of shorts. But MTV wanted her, and eventually Chung and his co-creators were able to give her a voice, more explicit motivations, and a more fleshed out character. She’s the contradiction at the heart of the show: visual design and characterization that explicitly make her a dominatrix, yet with a rebel ideology that resists the very concept of domination; a hyper-competent secret agent who is nearly always undone by her own mistakes or connections, Trevor’s biggest hater and most passionate lover. Their deadly rivalry and slapstick inability to ever just kill each other are the core of the show.

The show’s visual style, also, marks it as something distinct in American TV, with some pretty clear cues from European comics. There’s a lot of Hergé and Moebius in the designs of the Breen soldiers and the dystopia they patrol, and in the stark eyes of the characters. It was the kind of show you caught while watching TV over at a friend’s house or at a hotel with cable and weren’t sure you hadn’t dreamed it.

So why did it get canceled?

Animation is expensive, time-consuming, and doesn’t always do great numbers with advertisers—consider the three-year gap between the shorts and the full-length episodes, all of which feature the kind of design that might drive the best animators to madness.

But beyond that, there just isn’t as big an audience for a show like this as there is for, say, Beavis and Butthead. Aeon Flux is perplexing, disturbing, and not always fully explained. It is a show that utterly defeats the “asker,” the type of viewer who will turn to you in the middle of a show or movie with a question that, if they would just wait, is usually explained by the text itself. The thing about Aeon Flux is that these answers are not always forthcoming, and it is up to your interpretation of things a lot of the time. In one episode, Trevor muses that humanity has evolved so quickly that our motivations must seem utterly alien to humans of a thousand years ago. Well, from the perspective of the show, we are the humans of a thousand years ago. So there.

There have been numerous attempts at reviving the property, including a somewhat poorly-received 2006 film starring Charlize Theron (which Chung reportedly hated) which flopped but had the great side effect of getting the original series and some other ancillary materials reissued for the first time. A live-action adaptation is supposedly in the works at Paramount, but I’m not too sunny on the likelihood it’ll ever get made. Some things are too beautiful, too raw, and too weird for the current crop of studio execs to ever allow to be made. In that way, Aeon Flux truly did skate the edge.

Best episodes

In the show’s extremely short run, it’s hard to pick out any duds, but some of the more indelible images from the show come from “Thanatophobia,” “A Last Time For Everything,” and “The Demiurge.”

Shows to soothe the pain

If you want more noir action from a heroine in a future dystopia, the anime Ergo Proxy might help you stretch your calves.

For some more unforgettable designs from Aeon Flux creator Peter Chung (though he didn’t write or direct), the 13-episode anime Reign: The Conqueror, a kind of retelling of the life of Alexander the Great, is a fun oddity.

If you need the sound of John Rafter Lee’s voice scheming for world domination to lull you to sleep at night, check out the Spawn animated series from HBO.

Tune in next month as we revisit the show that was too honest about high school in the 1980s for its own good, Freaks and Geeks.

Kenneth Lowe can’t give it, can’t even buy it, and just doesn’t get it. You can follow him on Twitter @IllusiveKen until it collapses, on Bluesky @illusiveken.bsky.social, and read more at his blog.

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