I love how weird and inexplicable hell's gate and its effects are. Making the stars disappear, and the new stars represent people with powers, and and now we can't go to the moon? we don't even know if space is still THERE? It's such a cool weird mystery that I never really felt needed to be solved it just makes the setting really neat.

I think the pacing of the show is pretty excellent. 2-4 episode arcs where they do a job that introduces us to more characters, more plot development, more character development, etc. I feel like it was really cleanly and precisely planned out and had a lot of moving parts that worked well together.

I really like Hei/Lee. I like that you can't really tell which version of him is the real him; is he a sweet, awkward boy cosplaying as a cold-blooded killer, or the other way around? Despite him being more or less the main character(though you could argue that the police lady is the real main character), we don't get a look inside his head, and I think that works well.

Also, despite the setting being pretty dark, and there being RATHER a lot of gruesome murders, the show manages to hang on to to a drop of levity that keeps it from getting dull. All the scenes with Hei acting the part of a regular dude were fun, and I really liked the detective guy and his ""partner,"" the sarcastic sailor moon-looking girl. And the british agents were fun as hell! And a lot of the single-episode characters were good too. Just a lot of enjoyable and surprisingly memorable characters, here.

Overall I think this show really holds up! I hear season 2 is... not as good, but I'm still tempted to watch it after I give it a little breathing room. I did watch the little 4-episode in-between thing, which was..... egh, I dunno. It was very grim, lost any sense of fun. I think the regular ending of season 1 would have been a better place to leave it; I didn't really mind the ambiguity.