Yeah I love Space Dandy too! I think Carole & Tuesday is the most unimaginative and unbelievable sci-fi setting Watanabe and co. have come up with (like deadass it's like 80 years in the future on Mars yet motherfuckers are using 2019-ass smartphones with 2019-ass Instagram and 2019-ass Pitchfork are rating music), and I think the progression of the story is very uneven in terms of pacing but also is really fairly predictable. Carole & Tuesday almost *never* argue, and when you think about what has been the core thrust of each and every one of Watanabe's shows, its the inexorable differences which separate his main character casts yet strangely draw them to each other. There's no friction. And like, they seriously go from playing their first show at a bar to, and I'm not making this up, playing the headlining set at a futuristic Coachella stand-in. It has this really boring B-character plot that feels like it's never going anywhere until it finally does featuring this really ill-defined concept about AI-generated music that just feels so thrown together and inessential. Idk it just feels really sloppy in a way I wasn't expecting from Watanabe, I'm surprised it came out like this.
I think the show doesn't want you to think too much about its world because, hey! The characters are fun and the music's catchy. But then it throws in a really heavy-handed metaphor about Trump's America and wants to be about Big Themes without doing any of the work to be that show. I also wasn't big on Watanabe's Blade Runner short and didn't like Terror in Resonance at all, so I'm kind of worried the guy's lost his touch. It's a bummer.