Finished Lain. It offended me that they started talking more, but over-all it wasn't time wasted. There were a lot of cool visual elements, like the splotches in the shadows and constant humming of power-lines reminding you that TEH WEB is everywhere and always on, etc. The typography and graphic design is horrendously dated, sadly, but it's still serves it's purpose, although they should have gone with something a little less "nineties".
Mainly though, the talking. The motherfucking talking. And it was school girls doing it too. can't get worse than that, no wait, it can - and did - when they introduced this god fellow, who needed to rattle of speech after speech about this and that and obviously he needed to be killed. You can't have a god character in some animu without him being defied and subsequently killed, obviously. :|
I'm kinda making a mountain out of a mole hill, but if the dialog had been better this show would have been excellent. The story got kinda convoluted as a side-effect of all the nonsensical blabbering, but the core story and narrative - and all the themes that pertained to it, came across just fine and were interesting enough. Had this aired on Liquid Television back in the day I would probably have some serious nostalgia for it.
Looking into Kino's Journey, but I'm also wanting to get into House of Five Leaves and K-On (/suicides)