The full six-episode season of Bass X Machina is now streaming on Netflix, and its opening chapter, “Until Then... I’m Bass Reeves,” drops viewers into a steampunk Western where robots and cyborgs are the norm. The series is the latest animated production from Studio Mir, the studio behind Devil May Cry, X-Men ’97 and My Adventures With Superman.

Spoilers ahead for the premiere, which wastes no time showing what kind of show this is. Brian Tyree Henry voices Bass Reeves, or this world’s version of him, and Henry is also an executive producer on the series. The real Reeves was a historic lawman, an ex-slave who became a Deputy U.S. Marshal. Here, he starts as a bounty hunter, and the episode proves it within minutes by shooting two opponents without thinking twice.

A bounty hunter with a stolen arm

Reeves is also part machine. A steam-powered arm has replaced his real appendage somewhere in his violent history. Quick flashbacks and dreams flash to a blood-red past event, which points to a story about how he lost the arm. The premiere holds that answer back for later.

The show’s emotional core shows up in one line from Reeves. Explaining the arm, he says it is not the only thing taken from him, and the episode makes clear that the loss still burns.

“It wasn’t lost. It was stolen.”

That single sentence reframes the entire premise. If the arm was stolen, someone took it, and Reeves is not done looking for them.

Alt-history with a historical backbone

The opening voice-over sets up the world. After the Civil War, the Union Army was “saddled with thousands of Black soldiers they didn’t know what to do with.” Some of those soldiers headed West as gunmen. Some became Buffalo Soldiers. And, in the narration’s words, “some legendary few… became lawmen.”

Reeves has already appeared in film and television many times, most notably in Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen, where his legend inspired that world’s first superhero, Hooded Justice. Bass X Machina takes the same legend and runs it through a steampunk filter, rebuilding the Western with retro-sci-fi tech and a sharp focus on Black history.

A train heist that does not hold back

The action opens with a train heist, and it is loud, bloody and fast. Reeves shoots up a gang of crooks while the train races along. Bullets enter and exit foreheads with style, and the pyrotechnics of a Gatling gun raise the stakes. The camera moves through a wide range of angles, which keeps the set pieces feeling kinetic.

Reeves also shows almost no mercy. After he dispatches one man’s two brothers, the survivor cries, “You took my brothers away!” Reeves answers coolly, “You’re back with ‘em now,” and finishes him with a single shot. The exchange sums up the character better than any exposition could.

The missing scientist and the magic metal

The main plot arrives after the opening credits, which hint further at Reeves’ origin and feature a propulsive theme song by Janelle Monáe. Dr. Eugene Starr has gone missing, apparently into the Badlands, a Native American territory. Starr, or someone close to him, has been experimenting on the “magic metal that’s going around” and using it on people.

It is not yet clear whether this magic metal is the same substance that makes “boilertech” common in this world. Still, human experimentation is plainly a concern for Reeves, and the premise gives the series a clear engine for the next five episodes.

Tati Gabrielle voices Dana Starr, the scientist’s niece and an engineering genius who ends up as Reeves’ sidekick. She builds handy gadgets and runs grim calculations, including how much time Dr. Starr has left after “predation, murder, dysentery, despair.” The answer is three days. That kind of dry, gallows humor gives the duo a sharper edge.

A family pulled in two directions

Monáe also voices Glory, Reeves’ wife, and the episode reveals the couple has two sons. Reeves cannot rest, and cannot fully be a father and husband, while he believes the key to his past could be out there with Dr. Starr. That tension gives the premiere its quiet emotional weight beneath the gunfire.

Created by LeSean Thomas, who has also worked on Yasuke, Cannon Busters and Black Dynamite, the series balances Western tropes, retro-sci-fi tech, bloody violence and an animated style that stays stylized throughout. By the end, Reeves and Dana ride off toward the Badlands, he on a horse and she on a makeshift boilertech scooter. The partnership is clearly forming, and so is the world.

What the six episodes need to answer

The premiere works as an origin story for this version of the lawman. We know how Reeves started and what he will become, but the open questions are how he got from one point to the other and how the mysterious evil in the Badlands connects to his past. Those are the questions the remaining five episodes will have to answer.

Based on this first installment, Thomas is delivering a stylized, violent and action-packed spin on the legend. Henry gives the title character a reserved demeanor with a subtly tortured edge, which keeps Reeves compelling even when he is doing terrible things. For viewers who want a steampunk Western with a sharp historical hook, the premiere offers plenty to chase.