Æon Flux

Featurette: The History of Aeon Flux. Production art: sketches, storyboards, model sheets, color stills, and pencil tests Other works by Peter Chung.

Production art: sketches, storyboards, model sheets, color stills, and pencil tests Other works by Peter Chung.

The episode starts with Æon catching a fly with her eyelashes. We then cut to an apparent battle between Monican agents and Breen forces, with Æon liberally mowing down dozens of soldiers on her quest to apparently assassinate a Breen Official, though most of them are already sick and dying from a strange disease carried by an azure beetle. As hundreds of soldiers die in the sewers, Trevor Goodchild finds and takes in one of the beetles, hiding it in his finger and carrying it with his lover to the top of the building where Æon's target is sleeping. While Æon has traveled up onto the roof she unwittingly picked up a tack from a loose cable fastening on the sole of her boot.

As the episode opens, Æon and Trevor are kissing through the windows of their transports, with the former being in a plane and the latter being in a train. As they do, Trevor uses his tongue to open up Æon's fake tooth and place a rolled up picture inside. After the two of them part, Æon spies an industrial vehicle driving past. Æon then retrieves the picture from her tooth to find it is a photo of a fellow passenger, and a suitcase. She climbs out and moves along the side of the plane to spy on the man, who is reading documents from the same suitcase. Æon must jump mid-air to the back of the plane to get inside, but she misses and falls ...

In this episode, Æon is on an assassination mission. She infiltrates her target's home via a maintenance ladder. On her entry she falls from the ladder, and notices she is spied on by a security camera. While walking down a hallway she notices a room where the security camera recorder is being kept, and enters. She goes to destroy the tape but at the last minute decides to review the footage. The picture is faulty because of a loose video jack shorting against an air vent. Æon goes to fix the connection but spills coffee on her gloved arm. Unnoticed by the departing Æon, footage of another intruder previously entering the building plays on the monitor. While washing her arm, Æon accidentally sprays water on herself in the bathroom's shower and spoils her signature hairstyle ...

Æon enters her living quarters to find a container of eggs she was keeping in her refrigerator but she finds that Trevor, who is in a cupboard, has had them all. Angry, Æon leaves her apartment but before venturing outside the Monican base she witnesses another agent fail to successfully complete jumping through a complex climbing frame. Æon steps up to practice jumping through, just as the other female agent walks away, and flawlessly executes the complex routine. Later, she enters a strange base and collects some of the same eggs seen earlier in her apartment. Resisting the urge to leave, Æon breaks one of the eggs and analyses the broken contents under a portable microscope ...

In the episode, Æon has infiltrated Bregna at a time when Trevor Goodchild has accepted power 'temporarily' from the kidnapped chairman Clavius. Trevor quickly enacts a policy of 'complete openness', installing cameras all across Bregna which gives him ultimate control over the people. Gildemere, a Breen soldier loyal to Clavius, is plotting against the new Chairman guessing rightly that Trevor was the mastermind behind the kidnapping. Trevor's reasons for the coup are two-fold; he gains ultimate power in Bregna, and uses Clavius' body to create an isolated place locked with a strange ornate key ...

Trevor has a pair of humanoid birds called Seraph-Trevs held captive, a Male and Female. Trevor is attempting to seduce the Female. Meanwhile, another scientist named Ilbren is planning to have his way with the Female even going as far as trying to employ Æon to capture the Female offering the Male in return. Their meeting is interrupted by a mechanical tentacle which Ilbren fends off with a swarm of robot wasps. The Male Seraph-Trev is securely held in a separate cell and reduced to a state of abject misery by the separation from his mate. Æon plans to free them from Ilbren and Trevor's designs and to do so she employs an old friend of hers, Una, to translate directions to the Birds' chambers. Una is a social misfit like Æon and has apparently fallen in love with the Male Bird ...

The episode starts with a pair of boys play-fighting while another claps to mimic the sound of heavy punches. That boy later flicks a pebble into the path of one of the border turrets activating it and watching the resulting spectacle. Trevor Goodchild is being pressured by the government into making the border more intimidating, despite his desire to make people stay in Bregna through the 'power of ideas'. To this end, he secretly allows Æon to come in and bomb the factory where the parts for the wall are being made. In a parallel and intertwined storyline, two Breen lovers, Onan and Sybil, seek to escape from Bregna into Monica through a gap in the frontier ...