Category: 86

If you haven’t watched 86 yet, do yourself a favor and give it a look. The first cour of the show was a well-paced, emotional, dramatic dive into the seemingly no-win scenario of a group of undesirables intended to die in battle against an army of rogue AIs and their commander, a principled young woman battling to hold on to her own humanity and help them against the wishes of the system she’s a part of. It was A+ work that balanced human kindness and cruelty, as well as light and darkness in general, to form an effective experience.

The one odd bit is that, despite the fact that we knew another cour was coming, it seemed to end on a definite final note. So, how does the show continue?

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The final episode of the cour (special pending) and if you told me this was the absolute final episode of the show and anything related to 86, I would believe you. In fact, if I wasn’t damn certain that the story goes on from here, what with a second cour announced and a whole bunch of novels past anything we could have possibly gotten to, I would question the sanity of someone who told me that this wasn’t just the bitter end.

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No Lena this week. For much of the episode, not really much talking either. This one is very much on the artistic end, trying to convey an experience and bridge us to the next matter of action.

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The time for the great battle against Shin’s brother’s Shepherd form has come. The episode “feels” short, consisting essentially of two extremely powerful scenes rather than a lot of little ones, albeit with a little support. Let’s take a look.

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So, this episode is all pretty much ‘gearing up’ for what would seem to be a final confrontation. The Spearhead is down to five, and they’re being sent on one last suicide mission, while Lena is having to face being trapped, alone and powerless.

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The pace of 86, at times, makes it difficult to talk about, or at least to start with. At the bare minimum for the week’s episode we saw some downtime and then got told what perceptive viewers already fully expected: the Spearhead is meant to kill those sent to it, a surprise to Lena but not really to us. And? And lots of development of the characters and time spent building the important emotions.

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We spend most of this episode with Spearhead, oddly enough including an extended flashback scene to when the formation was first formed, having a fun cookout together. One of the things the show does well is when it shows the 86 coping with their lives. Its very human; even in an objectively awful situation, people are going to seek happiness and ultimately cope with the horrors around them. It is, especially, thrown into stark relief when we see what the group started out as and then what they’re reduced to now, with two more deaths this episode.

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So, to an extent, I was wrong. Shin’s brother got a more detailed address than I was expecting, even if, no, it wasn’t the crux of another transformation. On the other hand, we did in fact get a new movement in the major plot, and it is a hell of a big one.

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86 continues to impress with its humanity, but to an extent much of what was had and needed this episode was highly predictable from the last. That’s not a bad thing; there are an infinite number of ways to tell a story, and only a finite subset of them actually work. Because of this, it’s not a necessary bad thing when elements of a story are predictable, especially from what immediately precedes them.

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