Aeon Flux

In a futuristic state, a woman slaughters soldiers with her automatic weapons.  Among the dead are those clearly suffering from some disease.  While the woman pauses to peruse a map and glance at a picture of her target, a scientist collects a strange bug that is presumed to be the source of the disease.  The soldiers having found her, the woman - now clearly an assassin on a mission - sprints through the building, leaving a stream of bodies in her wake.  She is unstoppable.  She arrives on a narrow ledge just outside the target's apartment.  However, when she glances within, she sees that the target is already dead though the scientist is present and undisturbed by the corpse.  What exactly the assassin planned next is unknown as she falls to her death.  While the scientist discovers a cure to the disease and receives great acclaim, the assassin appears in the afterlife to have her feet licked by some bizarre being; in her off time, she was a model for foot fetish magazines.

Thus ended the 12-minute pilot for Aeon Flux.  The entire story was told without dialogue, and the news reports were just gibberish that was self-explanatory based on the visuals.  The popularity of the show on MTV's Liquid Television led to a series.  Though creator Peter Chung had viewed the assassin's story as complete, the audience wanted more of her.  Though the name of the series was not meant to be her name, it became so.  Thus, Aeon Flux returned in 5 more adventures (5 minutes each), again without dialogue, where she died in every story.  Both the assassin - Aeon - and the scientist - Trevor - appear.  Sometimes they appear to be allies, but mostly they are rivals.  Still hugely popular, more and bigger episodes are ordered.

The third - and final - season had 10 episodes that were half an hour each.  Rather than a brief snippet of action concluding with Aeon's death, there are full stories where she mostly survives.  Aeon (voiced by Denise Poirier) and Trevor Goodchild (John Rafter Lee) switch between lovers and rivals.  He leads the totalitarian state of Bregna while she is a spy from the vaguely-defined state of Monica.  In one episode, we find that Trevor has mastered cloning and has a harem of Aeons; perhaps this explains her multiple deaths.  He is always tinkering with some new crazy technology or obsessed with some otherworldly being.  Regarding otherworldly, the setting does not appear to be Earth, even in some distant future.

Throughout the series, the setting is dystopian.  Mostly, Trevor seeks to build that which generally proves to be bad while Aeon strives to destroy it.  Overall, a terrific series.