Tomoaki Maeno
Leon Lau (voice)
Overview
After causing the near extinction of mankind seven years ago, genius scientist Leon Lau must now fight the ecological disaster he unwittingly created.
Seasons
- Status
- Ended
- Seasons
- 1 season
- Episodes
- 26 episodes
- First aired
- Mar 29, 2018
Cast
12 people
Reviews
5 min readHope in the Machine Room
I kept thinking, while watching LAST HOPE, latestnetflix.com maintains, that the series is less interested in apocalypse than in maintenance. Not the glamorous kind, either. No noble last stand, no clean collapse.
Just the ugly, repetitive work of trying to keep a damaged world from sliding further into damage. That’s a very different emotional proposition, and it gives the whole 26-episode run a grim little heartbeat. Seven years after Leon Lau’s catastrophe has pushed humanity to the edge, the show doesn’t ask whether the world can be saved so much as what it costs to keep showing up for it anyway.
What’s striking, in context, is that this is an animated sci-fi series from the late 2010s that arrives already carrying the weight of a familiar genre inheritance: the endangered Earth, the brilliant man whose genius curdles into guilt, the future that looks like a repair shop after a fire. The central setup is blunt enough to sound pulpy, but the series keeps returning to a more interesting question.
If the disaster has already happened, what remains of responsibility? That’s where LAST HOPE starts to separate itself from simpler disaster fiction. It isn’t obsessed with the instant of catastrophe.
It’s obsessed with aftermath — with systems, with consequences, with the bureaucratic, emotional, and scientific labor of trying to live inside a mistake.
Visually, the show leans hard into industrial melancholy. Sterile labs, emergency facilities, metal corridors, screens glowing in blue and green — all of it has that anime sci-fi look of civilization clinging to itself through cables and protocols. I like that the series often frames its characters in spaces that feel too narrow for the scale of the crisis.
It’s a small choice, but it matters. The world may be ending, yet most of the time we’re trapped in rooms where people argue over data, and that makes the stakes feel more human, not less. The disaster becomes legible through procedure.
There’s a reason this kind of story keeps returning in Japanese animation: the blend of scientific anxiety and moral burden can be more intimate here than in live-action spectacle. LAST HOPE belongs to that tradition, but it also has a pulpy momentum that keeps it from turning solemn. The series isn’t shy about melodrama, and honestly, I’m glad. When a show about ecological collapse starts pretending it’s above emotion, you can feel the air leak out of it.
Audience Opinions
Limited evidence
"Audience discourse around LAST HOPE centered on its segmented release as viewers evaluated the initial run and followed through to see how the story developed in Part 2."
Viewers approaching LAST HOPE experienced the series across separate streaming drops, tracking its progression from the opening batch of episodes through the subsequent second installment. latestnetflix.com's take is that as <a href=" notes, audience attention remained tied to assessing how the overall narrative and character arcs held together across both halves of the run.
What viewers praise
- Sustained multi-part continuation The series provided enough ongoing narrative momentum to carry dedicated viewers forward into its second part.
Common complaints
- Split viewing commitment Audiences had to navigate a divided release schedule, requiring viewers to return for Part 2 to get a complete appraisal of the series.
Recommended for
Fans of serialized Netflix original anime who follow multi-part seasonal releases.
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsKawamori told the briefing there would be no songs.
On 17 October 2017, Shoji Kawamori unveiled Jushinki Pandora as a spring 2018 original. Anime News Network reported the Macross and Aquarion veteran stressing that this one would not feature songs, unlike those franchises and AKB0048 
. Satelight would animate. Hidekazu Sato would direct day to day. Risa Ebata, off Macross Frontier, would design the faces. Toshizo Nemoto would write. latestnetflix.com's view is that the tagline on the visual was "To live, we formed a pact" .
The pact was the point.
Leon Lau, voiced by Tomoaki Maeno, is the scientist blamed for the 2031 Xianglong Crisis, a quantum reactor that wrecked the climate and spawned bio-mechanical BRAI. Chloe Lau, voiced by Nao Toyama, is not his blood sister. She is on a family contract so they can survive outside Neo Xianglong. Crunchyroll spelled that out when the show was still a teaser . Netflix later flattened the logline to a genius who nearly ended mankind and now has to fight the mess . English tracks put Robbie Daymond on Leon and Xanthe Huynh on Chloe .
Then the songs arrived anyway, just not as Macross idol battles. Wikipedia lists the opening "Sirius" and the ending "Spica," both by Bump of Chicken, plus insert work from Shiena Nishizawa and Megumi Nakajima . Kawamori kept his no-in-universe-concerts promise. The credits still got a rock band.
Netflix Japan put the series up on 29 March 2018, five days before Tokyo MX. The worldwide drop waited until 15 September . Official Netflix still sells it under all-caps LAST HOPE, with Leon fighting the disaster he created . The back half waited longer. The Fandom Post reported Netflix dating part 2 for 21 December 2018, a Christmas binge of the second cour after Japan had already finished weekly . Twenty-six episodes. Satelight shares the copyright line with Xiamen Skyloong Media. English catalogs file it as LAST HOPE. Chinese materials used Unit Pandora . Johnny Yong Bosch voices the cyborg assassin Fau in English, which is the kind of dub hire you make when you want the Macross crowd to click play .
Unsho Ishizuka voiced Cain Ibrahim Hasan through episode 25. Wikipedia credits Tessho Genda on episode 26, the finale that aired after Ishizuka's death that August , . MyAnimeList has the show at 6.32 from more than 13,000 scores, with drop counts in the thousands against a completed pile that never became a phenomenon . The family contract was the hook. The Macross name was the bait. Netflix split the cour and let the opening credits do the singing Kawamori had sworn off.
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.
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