Cyberpunk, Magic, and Critical Mistakes – Shangri-la Spoiler Review

Shangri-la is a very peculiar show for me. I wanted to like it. I tried to like it. I gave it chance after chance and said time and again things like “they could recover from this”, or “they could still bring it back” or “that’ll make sense if…” only to be, in some sense, disappointed every time. This isn’t a show where every thing is bad, but it is one where critical flaws ultimately produce something of a frustrating experience.

In some ways, I think Shangri-la is best studied in a master class on how to not write speculative fiction. It is so particularly, precisely bad that we really do have to sit down and dissect its failures in order to understand and learn from them. In others, I have to wonder: is there anything worth saving? Well, there’s not much point dawdling, so let’s take a look. Fair warning, this is going to be a long one.

As we go over the setup, I want you to follow along and ask yourself when the first problem becomes apparent to you.

We open on the world of the future, specifically a future that’s sort of like of Final Fantasy 7 stole extra parts from Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. Our main hero is a girl named Kuniko. She’s introduced being released from prison with a smug attitude as all the other prisoners cheer for her and she generally acts flippant. The authorities return her to her home, a town called Duomo. Duomo’s main problem is that it’s all set to be overrun by the toxic jungle that’s swallowing much of the surface world (hence those shades of Nausicaa). The hope of the people is that they may some day be imported to Upper Midgar, which in this world is called Atlas, a massive tower arcology that looms over the jungle that used to be Tokyo and is safe from the worst the world has to offer. However, the authorities seem keen to screw the people down below over time and time again, which means that Kuniko kind of works as the plucky rebel/revolutionary figure, determined to kick open the doors to Atlas and lead her people to safety. Helping her are her grandmother who never does anything, professional Barret Wallace impersonator Takehiko, and Momoko the badass Transsexual parental figure.

I guess I’d better get this out of the way here: two of the major characters in this show, Momoko and Miiko, are male to female trans. I am in pretty much no position to comment on whether this is good representation or not. They’re in a bad show, but they’re actually a couple of the better characters in that show with rounded and dimensional portrayals, so take from that what you will.

Meanwhile, we’re introduced to another major character, Karin. Karin is a whiz kid of a coder who appears to live in Atlas (we mostly see her eerie dark hacker cave), and she’s something of a white collar criminal. A fun and likable white collar criminal, but a white collar criminal all the same – the global markets of this future now run on cap-and-trade style emission restrictions and carbon credits, and Karin has her pet AI, MEDUSA, generate and crash market bubbles to buy and sell with frightening rapidity, allowing her and her fellow conspirators (who are largely only seen through their avatars) to make money hand over fist. MEDUSA, however, may have a few kinks, as it appears to be a true thinking AI, learning bit by bit as it works for Karin.

Karin and MEDUSA are the actual best characters in the show, by the way, but I’ll get to the full breakdown.

Also meanwhile we check in with another main character, Mikuni. Mikuni is a weird unexplained heterochromic albino girl with similarly unexplained psychic powers. She lives in a creepy temple bathed in perpetual night, and when someone lies to her she knows, and, declaring that she detests liars, kills them by horrifically mutilating their body with telekinesis.

Have you noticed it yet? These sound like the starting pitches for three entirely different stories. And that’s perhaps the most core fault of Shangri-la.

Far be it from me to say that you can’t mix a lot of these things. There are brilliant, or at least good stories that combine futuristic technology with classical magic, sort of “Robots and wizards” settings. I’ve reviewed some (Battle School shows like Anti-Magic Academy are especially prone to this), I’ve written some myself (Yet to publish! Foreshadowing!), and you can follow some in various other media as well. In the west, the most famous might be in the world of Role-playing games with the World of Darkness product line and, more directly, Shadowrun: the iconic cyberpunk RPG where you can have a troll hacker working with a corporate street samurai and an anarchist elf with an uzi.

But, when you blend two or more different settings, you need to have the understanding that you’re ultimately telling one story, and everything should be, in the end, germane to that story. You have to keep the narrative contained and the themes on point and have an idea of what matters and why you should show it from the very beginning, even if the intersection isn’t immediate. To start this digression, I’d like to reference the novel “A Deepness in the Sky”, by Vernor Vinge. In that novel, most of the story is spent with two entirely separate casts effectively living in different genres – the alien natives of a planet moving through something akin to the Cold War era and the dawn of the information age, and the humans waiting elsewhere in the star system, observing them until the time is right to make first contact (while dealing with their own internal problems). These two casts don’t meet face to face until pretty near the end, but at the same time they do “belong” in the same story – their themes synergize, and often what we experience with one side has bearing on us, the readers, as we interact with the other. This is a clever and well-handled execution in which a story has multiple very different plot lines going in parallel.

The problem is, in Shangri-la, I can’t even call the plots parallel. They’re skew lines, in terms of the themes and emotions that run through them. Between the three “worlds” of Shangri-la, there are two basic forms of dissonance. The first dissonance is between Kuniko’s Story and Karin’s Story, and the second dissonance is between both of those stories and Mikuni’s story. This is hardly the only problem with the show, but it is the most core so I need to address it now and it needs to be understood.

Karin and Kuniko’s stories have the problem that they exist in conceptual spaces that are similar, even overlapping, but ultimately incompatible. At their hearts, who are these characters? Kuniko is a plucky rebel. She’s a cheerful go-getter who’s going to fight the evil corporate overlords to make the world a better place. She is 100% a cyberpunk character (while watching I compared her, usually favorably, to Cloud Strife a lot) and the kind of cyberpunk she wants to be in is a brighter, black-and-white action sort of story, which you can do. Karin, on the other hand, is a rich corporate criminal. She’s a kind of likable white-collar criminal, but at the end of the day she’s a scheming technical genius who beggars nations for her own amusement and personal gain. She’s fairly consistently a protagonist, and absolutely a cyberpunk character, but the kind of cyberpunk story she wants to exist in is radically different than Kuniko’s. Karin’s core story is a dark, gray-on-gray cyberpunk story that explores the nature of life and AI and what it takes to get ahead while working more or less within a profoundly screwed-up system. Karin wants to win the game and she’s willing to cheat to do it, where as Kuniko wants to just flip the table.

So, who are these characters to each other, in their ‘native’ stories? In Kuniko’s story, Karin is a villain. She’s a wealthy magnate whose actions ultimately hurt everyone. If Karin’s abuse at the hands of the system is played up enough she could be a rogue agent, but she’s always going to be at least kind of a “bad guy” to the native story that Kuniko wants to tell. Kuniko, however, doesn’t even exist to Karin. Because Karin’s story, to have Karin as a protagonist, wants to be the kind of story where everyone is morally dubious at best, it can’t support a plucky rebel like Kuniko. At best you would get a harsh “realistic” rebel faction, the kind who have lots of guns and no qualms about being violent terrorists, real nasty pieces of work in the business of kidnapping, extortion, and murder. In short, not Kuniko. There’s just not enough hope for the future or trust in the basic goodness of humanity in Karin’s world for Kuniko to take root.

And at first, this is kind of how it plays out: Karin’s actions have repercussions for Kuniko and her group in Duomo because she and MEDUSA have the authorities running scared, but Karin is wholly unaware of Kuniko and anything that Kuniko wants or does. If it were better presented, you could possibly even run with this, letting Karin be both the hero of her own story and a villain for Kuniko. However, that’s not what they go with. Kuniko ends up doing some snooping into Karin’s/Atlas’s operations via a magic full-dive “visit the code world” sort of scenario that’s indicated to be kind of a unique power and encounters Karin(‘s avatar) there and then… nothing. The stories those two would naturally tell basically never interact again. Karin makes some more global problems, but little to none of that gets back to Kuniko’s native element, and while Karin stews over the ‘mystery girl’ she can’t really do anything on that score. Ultimately Karin is kind of outed from her place and takes on a new supporting character role in other stories before cap-stoning her own at random, and interacts with Kuniko in an entirely different way.

Oh, and Kuniko’s seemingly special ability to enter the code world with a fairly basic rig? That never really comes up again. It’s weird and special enough to use it once and for Karin to remember it, but apparently having the holy grail of cyber interfaces in a cyberpunk story just isn’t relevant enough to ever bust out. It’s like having an age of sail story, and one character can control the bloody wind itself and after doing it in one scene they never do it again nor are expected to. I have a theory as to why that is: diving into the world of code is part of Karin’s story, not Kuniko’s. The ability got stapled onto Kuniko when she needed to butt into Karin’s space, and never comes up again because it’s not part of the kind of cyberpunk that Kuniko herself naturally lives in. Kuniko has a magic dagger (I’ll get to it) and a super boomerang and a transsexual ninja warrior, she doesn’t need to send her mind into computers; that’s not the kind of thing she does. She blows up evil computers with her boomerang instead. But Karin’s entire life and plot exists in computers, it’s critical for who and what Karin is, and so this weird olive branch is extended to let Kuniko intrude on that. In my “age of sail” comparison, the story may be set in the age of sail, and Karin is doing all sorts of boat and pirate stuff… but Kuniko spends all but that one scene in which she controls the wind on dry land.

And that means it’s time to take those two and analyze the dissonance between them (together) and Mikuni.

Mikuni is a problem as a character. These problems run deep, and they run long, so now is not the time to get into all of them. But, let’s start out with the setting Mikuni inhabits and the themes she and other elements that seem to belong to the same setting indulge in. Mikuni is, for the majority of the show, only really seen in her weird palace/shrine. We’re told that it’s within Atlas, but it’s difficult to really understand what that means, because it’s continually presented in a very convincing way as being a separate realm. Mikuni is implied (and later shown) to be hurt in a horrific fashion by sunlight (even more than is explained by the fact she’s some kind of albino, but that’s neither here nor there) so of course her private realm is some kind of dark. The design, however, takes it over the top to make sure you would never think that her place is an arcology interior. All the sets she’s a part of suggest palatial old construction, not anything belonging to the cyberpunk future, and she even has an outdoors, complete with seemingly natural settings and an apparent “sky” that’s always set to moonlit night. There are no cracks in the facade for the audience, no real indication that this is Atlas, the towering Arcology that looms over the world.

Actually, one of the things the show does well is that in exterior shots, you get a good sense of the massive, overwhelming scale of Atlas. This is, after all, a single building that’s meant to contain an entire society; a sort of city or even country stuffed into one tower. It absolutely looms over every scene it’s part of, and we hardly ever get a “complete” shot of it, and never but that it has some intense scale and distance effects applied to it. It’s bigger than a mountain and the interior, at least above a certain height, is all for human habitation. It feels large and it is large and I’m not trying to take that away from the show. But there are a couple times, and Mikuni’s lair is really the big one that comes up early and often, where they probably go a bit too far, specifically with how they depict the interior environments of Atlas.

The use of “natural” settings is a big one; as something of a fan of cyberpunk, I don’t want to see a murky swamp or a field of flowers inside the tower but that there’s some reminder that this is still the tower. It should have a certain level of artificiality to it, both to act as a visual cue for ease of understanding and to immerse us more in the setting we signed up for rather than masking it. Karin’s hacker cave does a good job of this; it’s absolutely cavernous, for a room, which when you know the first thing there is about skyscrapers or arcologies says a lot, if there’s that much space going around, but it’s also a room. If you’re going to go to the trouble of recreating a natural non-urban environment inside an arcology for some reason (and by the way, there never is a reason) show us the smoke and mirrors that allow for the illusion of nature to exist in this fundamentally unnatural setting. Show us how the ceiling is actually low, or how much of the landscaping is metal or ceramic or otherwise astroturf underneath. Make it clear we’re in a technological parody of nature. There’s exactly one scene where Mikuni’s sanctuary has a “Masquerade break” and it’s a plot scene, not an ambient one. And, for the record, there are a ton of overall scenes in this setting.

But, anyway, digression within a digression over, what’s Mikuni like? In all honesty, and you might have guessed this with my complaints regarding the visual design of her sanctuary, she belongs to an entirely different genre. Mikuni is a creepy psychic child. She lives in a world that has a very ‘period’ look and feel and never really interacts with technology. People come to her, facing a deadly test, and she’s surrounded by mystical mumbo jumbo. Mikuni, naturally, belongs in a fantasy or horror story. In something like that, she’d be germane to the world and feel like an important part of it. Instead, she feels like an unsightly blemish on the show. When Ryouko, the administrator of Atlas and our main villain, sends someone to go do the dangerous thing and talk with her, bringing Mikuni’s world into intersection with something at least a little more germane, you question why she’s even there. She doesn’t add much of anything and doesn’t feel like she belongs in Atlas even when she’s part of it, so you really feel like she can or even should be somehow different.

Oddly, I think it actually would have been easier to meld Mikuni in with one of the two cyberpunk heroes than it is to reckon those two with each other, particularly if you’re talking about Mikuni + Kuniko. Because Mikuni is more different and doesn’t belong in the home story of Kuniko or Karin, rather than belonging but being wrong, there’s not technically an innate opposition to including her beyond the normal welding of arcs and themes. I said before and will say again: you can totally have a setting with both cyberpunk technology and magical powers. You just have to manage the interface between them so that you understand that the world is a composite. Again, this is easier for Kuniko because while Kuniko is a cyberpunk take on the “band of plucky rebels challenge the evil overlord for the good of the little people being oppressed and abused” that’s a plotline that’s native to Fantasy as well, so Kuniko’s story would fully support the presence of fantasy elements while Karin’s (which is all about market manipulation and AI) doesn’t so much. Or, on the other hand, if you want Mikuni to largely inhabit a separated world, rather than magic like hers being a broad thing, you could do that two, but great care would have to be taken to match the themes up so that when the gulf between them is ultimately breached, there’s already a sense of cross-pollination or influence that has existed over the gap. Something to show us that both sides are going to be germane to the final story, and that one couldn’t really exist without the other.

… and by Haruhi’s pretty ponytail we still haven’t really gotten through episode one! There is a lot of stuff that just needs to be dealt with at the start of this one, even if it does touch on later movements.

So, basic story, we get Kuniko’s triumphant return to Duomo and her friends in Metal Age (the rebel group that’s legally distinct from Avalanche), meeting with her friends. She gets a weird dagger, and then some Atlas goons show up to crack down on Duomo’s celebration of Kuniko’s return because they dared burn something, that releases carbon, and we’re in a sort of green lessons future so carbon bad. They make a royal mess of things, but we meet a young soldier named Kunihito who seems to be rather nice and not puppy-eating evil like you’d expect. So, obviously, this guy is going to ultimately turn to be a good guy and probably a major character, you can tell from literally the first scene he’s in that he doesn’t belong with the generic legions of doom, like a recruitable character in a Fire Emblem game.

Of course, his turn doesn’t happen immediately. He clashes with Kuniko while trying to deescalate the situation at Duomo, and in that clash his special weird dagger and Kuniko’s end up resonating, which also causes a resonance in Mikuni’s identical dagger over in Atlas. So, this is a nice mysterious plot hook that you’d think would tie the three together. Based on their age, their design, and how they interact, you’d also expect Kunihito to start to play a big role, interact with Kuniko several times, and ultimately come to understand each other and probably get together as the show’s main couple besides.

That… doesn’t exactly happen, especially in as much as Kunihito never really makes a good showing as a major character. He does have a few “exactly as expected” good scenes with Kuniko over the first half of the show, but there’s a reason I didn’t introduce him at the very start when I introduced Kuniko, Karin, and Mikuni: He doesn’t matter. Remember that, we’ll have more on it later.

So, that particular confrontation is broken up by a strange artillery attack that does a lot of damage to Duomo. Metal Age blames Atlas, but Atlas is running scared, uncertain what could have done it. Both Kuniko and Kunihito end up in the jungle investigating what seems like the source of the attack, and briefly encounter each other again.

Along the way we get Karin doing her financial machinations, and spend time with Ryoko, the apparent leader of Atlas. She’s a nasty piece of work. Technically she doesn’t seem to be the top of the totem pole as there’s a supercomputer, Zeus, that makes a lot of calls and a mysterious “Lord” of Atlas… a freaky little boy covered in ofuda-style seals while wading in what looks like a pool of blood who mostly just screams and raves. This is Hiruko. I largely consider him part of Mikuni’s world because he’s explicit magic and, like Mikuni, isn’t largely allowed to be seen in a condition that’s not fit for period horror. We do eventually learn he’s a bodysnatcher when a little girl is pushed into the pool only to have the now fluttering seals attack and attach to her, turning her into Hiruko, but we have no context for why this is part of Atlas. Hiruko is brought news of things happening, particularly with the daggers, which really causes him to do the one thing he does and freak out, but there is no reason why this “lord” even exists since he just screams about things that he’s told are happening being bad. And yeah, there’s not much reason for why Mikuni is being given a private world of darkness with hosts of retainers either, but she at least is a living person with deadly psychic powers. We tolerate Hiruko’s dissonant presence and void of purpose, because we have some trust that this will be explained or connect to something, but it only goes so far. Eventually, something like this has to pay off, and it has to do so pretty well if you want it to be accepted.

During this stretch, Miiko (Momoko’s also trans friend) wins the lottery to go to Atlas, hoping to re-found an old gay bar. That dream is crushed when all of Miiko’s possessions are burned on arrival and a role is assigned, making Miiko into Mikuni’s new servitor, presumably replacing the one who got killed horribly for lying. Miiko at least survives the first interactions with Mikuni and through, um, transition not found becomes Mikuni’s favorite and a motherly figure who has the killer psychic child’s ear. This doesn’t sit perfectly well with Sayako, a sadistic mad scientist type who’s Mikuni’s other mother figure and the side of the story’s only real tie to anything that looks or feels like it belongs in Atlas, but she lets it slide since Mikuni seems to be happy.

Meanwhile, Karin keeps doing market manipulation. However, someone else seems to be doing it even better, something (ultimately an AI) called Serpent pumping and dumping countries before Karin and her friends can. It’s also being even more obnoxiously obvious than Karin, so she works together with Ryoko and the government (at arm’s length) to trap and destroy Serpent, sacrificing the economy of Kuwait as bait, which with a little magic code dive help from Kuniko (the last time she does that) and her grandmother in Duomo gives the world the location of Serpent’s servers, allowing them to bomb it to hell and kill the beast. We learn that Serpent was, ultimately, kind of a copy of MEDUSA made by one of Karin’s “friends”. This never really amounts to anything.

Speaking of Kuniko, those snippets of Mikuni and Karin have gotten us far ahead of the last material I mentioned for Kuniko. One of the lesser, more forgivable problems with Shangri-la is that, for the most part, there are three, four, or even five plotlines going at once, and we check in with all of them every episode, meaning that each line only advances by a couple of minutes. A given episode might lean more to one character or another, but it still takes a long time (in terms of episodes) for any one story to get anywhere. So, rather than going strictly chronologically, I’m going to try to take a “bite” out of each plot in turn, catching them up. The destruction of Serpent happens in episode 6; we left Kuniko back with the Toxic Jungle expedition in episode 2. Let’s catch her up to the point where she sniffs out Serpent’s location.

After the Toxic Jungle trip and running into Kunihito there, Metal Age pulls a train job for supplies and Kuniko actually starts wondering things about Atlas, like if everyone can really go there and if they’d be happy. She arranges to pull an unauthorized visit, sneaking in disguised as a construction worker, but her trip goes south at… not the very first security checkpoint, but pretty much. Kuniko gets to see that there are empty lots in Atlas, which really stresses her out and reinforces her desire to get everybody up there, before she and her team manage to escape safely.

Kuniko then decides to take a trip to Akihabara, which in this ruined future is still a hive of electronics shops and otaku, with a thriving black market Kuniko intends to use to fund her rebellion. She takes Momoko there with her and runs into Kunihito again, who is on his own undercover mission, using a prototype of something called mimic armor (a sort of camouflage/invisibility system) as a bargaining chip for information, though he was not intended to actually lose it. After the two kids grump at each other, Momoko forces them to go on a date while cleaning up real business. They actually talk (albeit in a standoffish way) about their different lives and problems, which actually turns to surprising levels of understanding when they’re forced to take shelter from some nasty Atlas-caused hail called a Bomb Shower. They have a real heart to heart… and then Kuniko blows up arbitrarily because they’re too early in the story to get real chemistry, loses her boomerang attacking Kunihito, and runs off, ultimately with the mimic armor for her trouble. Kunihito is “pardoned” for losing the mimic armor after thinking he’d have to resign in disgrace, probably because as is revealed to the audience he’s some kind of classified special rank, but is made to have a random chat with Mikuni (where he “passes the test” and doesn’t get horribly murdered for lying). Hiruko freaks out some more that two blade-bearers were in close proximity, and with that we are caught up on every line to the point where Serpent is destroyed.

That brings us to the next big movement in the show: Ryoko attacks Duomo to capture Kuniko and sends her (along with one of her useless little friends from Duomo who gets involved) back to prison. Kuniko thinks it’s going to be a breeze, since the detention center wasn’t so bad last time, but with Ryoko taking some time off her rulership of Atlas to play prison warden, it’s turned into quite the hellhole. Kuniko has no more friends willing to stand for her, and is bullied by new alpha prisoner Rena, until Kuniko willingly takes a fall for Rena for… honestly, I’m not sure why, I guess it’s supposed to be expressing a naive optimism on Kuniko’s part but it comes off as exceptionally stupid of her. This gets her punished by Ryoko, who forces her stand outside with neither food nor shelter (remember, bomb showers are a thing that happens, which make the prospect even more dangerous), suffering miserably from exposure. Kuniko keeps on a brave face, and her refusal to break inspires the other prisoners, particularly Rena. On the third day, Ryoko declares that she’ll execute Kuniko for her trouble.

The execution, however, isn’t immediate. The news is made public and Momoko visits and gives Kuniko a dress and some lipstick to wear for, ahem, the big day, while the prisoners engage some sort of clandestine plan. Execution time comes with Ryoko seemingly planning to solve the whole destiny thing by just removing one piece, but while right in front of the firing squad Kuniko obliterates their weapons with invisible nanowires hidden in the lipstick and the prisoners inflate a hydrogen balloon hidden under the courtyard on which Kuniko and that mostly useless friend of hers who came to prison as well get to escape like they’re the wizards of Oz.

Ryoko, naturally, has all the other prisoners killed. Should have just shot Kuniko as unceremoniously at the start.

On the whole, the time we spend in the prison is probably the most effective arc for Kuniko. First of all, it actually has some emotion, both while Kuniko is suffering in the open and when we get a follow-up that promises and I guess delivers some growth for Kuniko. She ultimately comes out about the same character she entered, but she never does anything that flagrantly stupid again so I’ll take it. Though, perhaps it works so well because it’s told uninterrupted. For the majority of two episodes, everything we see is focused in and around the prison. There are still multiple lines, following Ryoko and the various prisoners, but there aren’t any lengthy cuts to entirely separate plots with Mikuni or Karin, letting you actually experience what’s going on and get invested for a change, while it’s still early enough in the game that you haven’t given up hope. However, the escape, particularly the balloon, is kind of silly. Ryoko, normally a very in-control and ruthless baddie, delays and appeases for either no reason or because her plans are so pointlessly byzantine that they don’t make sense any more, and while there are excuses made for how a makeshift hydrogen balloon able to carry two people is rigged up by prisoners using only what they have at hand that won’t be missed… no. Angus MacGyver would call bull on this one, not gonna happen.

Anyway, as Kuniko and her friend float bravely to safety, a solar eclipse happens, which, as Kuniko lands and meets up with Momoko, prompts Mikuni to come down out of Atlas to play in the street. Literally, she and her retainers just appear on a random highway that happens to be where Kuniko and pals are because I guess Mikuni wanted to see the outside world and for some reason the dead of night, which lasts a lot longer and would be much safer for her, isn’t mystical enough to let her leave. This ends up turning into a fight where Miiko defends Mikuni from “assailants” Kuniko and (indirectly) Momoko, who were provoked by Sayako shooting at them. Sayako manages to capture Momoko, and Kuniko and friend escape back to Duomo. There, they meet up with Takehiko, who was digging a tunnel to rescue Kuniko, which she has resumed to rescue the rest of the prisoners, leading to her having a total breakdown when she busts into the courtyard only to find the dead bodies of everyone who helped her just left to rot. After Kuniko comes to terms with this, she takes formal leadership of Metal Age (not that she wasn’t heeded by everyone before) and declares an attack on Atlas and its new Prime Minister, Ryoko (not that she didn’t control it before).

Meanwhile, Mikuni’s pretty scarce after the whole playing in the street thing, but don’t worry: We get plenty of scenes of Sayako torturing Momoko and accidentally giving up more info than she gets, and more scenes of Hiruko being a screaming loon, including the scene in which we see Hiruko reincarnated through body-snatching. Ultimately there is a fairly pointless scene with Mikuni where she plays hide and seek with Miiko, goes far, and gets a face full of sun that puts her unconscious (possibly thanks to Ryoko turning off the shades for a moment, and in any case the one scene in which we get a sense that her palace isn’t just a magic dark dimension.)

The Karin side picks up again as well – Karin and her friends are squabbling somewhat over control of their AI, MEDUSA, and getting very cloak and dagger about it. Which makes me realize, as we get into a big arc for it, that I haven’t actually talked about MEDUSA itself yet.

As a character, MEDUSA is a bit odd. Not because it’s an AI, though that does inform it’s weirdness, but because it only says a couple lines (most notably “save me” as its learning algorithms, based in fear of death, drive it to beg for its orders), and not even in different inflections or with different implications like, say, Groot (“I am Groot”) or Chewbacca (Unintelligible roaring)… yet it’s still able to be categorized as a character. MEDUSA is usually visualized in the code world as a little blue serpent in a cartoonish sea. Think something like the Pokemon Dratini. As the water levels rise (simulated) MEDUSA fears drowning, which motivates it to perform tasks that will “reduce the water level”, which is anything Karin tells it to do. Despite the fact that she’s driving the little thing through fear the whole time, Karin does actually kind of dote on it, almost like a pet, and seems to enjoy ‘rewarding’ it with ‘safety’. Tarsian, the friend of Karin’s who made Serpent, seems to have darker aims for MEDUSA as well. Serpent, and later a MEDUSA that’s either powered up, following its much more ruthless own will, or both, instead takes the digital form of a giant black snake monster that glides through the air or wherever it wants to go in the world of code.

In any case, MEDUSA’s market manipulation doesn’t go unnoticed, and even as the little (or not so little, as the moment calls for) thing switches numbers this way and that, Ryoko tracks down the location of MEDUSA’s server and deploys an aircraft carrier worth of troops, Kunihito included to take it out. This is foiled when Medusa takes control of a laser satellite and uses it to warm the water around its island and create an artificial stationary hurricane to protect itself, causing the mission to destroy it to end in a dismal failure – Ryoko even has every survivor other than Kunihito killed to cover it up.

Concurrent with this, we get basically an entire episode focused on Karin, the same way the prison time focused entirely on Kuniko. However, unlike the prison, this is… strange. Basically, Karin starts experiencing some weird spooky stuff. It starts with her finding herself singing a strange lullaby and continues with her interacting with a cat and a weird blond youth. The strange kid (though not really more of a kid than Karin) appears and disappears seemingly at will, including inside areas he shouldn’t be able to access, and he doesn’t register on the security cameras. This paranormal activity seems most interested in beckoning Karin to come outside, saying she’ll “find what she lost” or some nonsense like that. Eventually, the spectral manifestations do convince Karin to go outside for a moment (though it was never established before this episode that simply leaving her room was a big deal for her). We get a lot of random symbolism, like Karin’s house looking freakishly like a bird cage from the outside, and a young Kunihito releasing birds from a cage, but more than that we get a bizarre bit of setting and backstory. Karin seems a little happier and both the boy and the cat are never seen again. Poof.

As some grounding for this, throughout the show Kuniko, Kunihito, and Mikuni have a lot of names. They’re called “The Sun” (Kuniko), “The Moon” (Mikuni), and “The Land” (Kunihito) by the more mystical types, particularly Hiruko in his crazy rants, but the Atlas authorities know them as the “Digmas”. Digma 1 is Mikuni, Digma 2 is Kuniko, and Digma 3 is Kunihito. This gets… a little bit silly. For one, the order is reverse age, like they were counting down. You’d say that perhaps it was based on discovery and not birth (after all Mikuni is part of Atlas) but on its own that doesn’t explain Kunihito. Further, no reason is ever given for these “Digma” designations – the only thing that’s ultimately special about the three as a group is that they each own one of the special daggers. But Kuniko didn’t get hers until the start of the show, and we’ll learn well enough that the daggers can be stolen and transferred. What makes this even stranger, and why I’m mentioning it now, is that towards the end of this episode we get information that there was a Digma 0, a boy named Kanaria who died years ago, and happens to be the exact ghost who’s now insisting that Karin get some fresh air.

Now, there are a few things that don’t really line up here. First of all, random ghost. I know we established that there are supernatural elements in this setting, but a ghost like Kanaria appears to Karin as is not something that we’ve established, or that fits with the rest of the supernatural elements in the setting. Mikuni has mysterious psychic powers and Hiruko, while kind of an undead spirit, is regulated by ritual and needs a constant supply of human hosts to continue existing, since there was some degree of urgency in getting him another kid to become. The idea of a legitimate ghost who can just appear, vanish, turn into a cat that also has ghostly powers, and all that jazz is not supported by the bizarre, brutal, and ritualistic supernatural elements we already had.

Second, Kanaria chooses to appear to Karin. And, okay, Karin is a shut-in. Ignoring the fact that I think we would have accepted her going outside without this episode since her shut-in nature wasn’t established as important to her or fear-driven until it’s solved, there’s the problem that Karin is in no way related to Kanaria in any sort of thematic sense. Remember, Karin’s story is the one that least supports magic, and other than here when she’s not being used as a prop in some other story she never engages with it. Even then, when she does come into contact with the magical stuff, it’s treated as weird and not germane to her, and she mostly goes about her business as though it wasn’t magic. Her having a supernatural spirit guide epiphany isn’t what fits with who and what she is. If anything, she should consult MEDUSA (a being she interacts with, and which has an arc all about leaving containment) and receive the message from her AI that she should go out. She’d be angry, of course, and reject it of course, but as MEDUSA comes to understand the world better, it could without direct orders attempt to solve the problem Karin doesn’t even know she has, deepening the bond between them that’s ultimately important for major movements. True, in the story as-is MEDUSA isn’t answering Karin’s calls right now, but that could even be spun to make its contact, from a superior or equal position rather than an inferior one, more weird and impactful.

And Kanaria is related to other characters. In fact through the Digma designation, he has ties to both our other leads and more characters besides. If Kanaria is going to appear to anyone it should be Mikuni (who lives in the supernatural plot and is contained in her own sort of cage; it would be germane to have a ghost speak to her and important to tell her that she has to prepare to leave the nest for some important reason) or Kunihito (The Digma who doesn’t see the chains that bind him, and who is strongly implied to have gained Digma status because of Kanaria’s death, perhaps inheriting some supernatural something or other from Kanaria… though that still doesn’t explain why Kanaria is 0, an odd designation).

So, even though Karin’s big episode gave us some interesting insight into her life, like her relationship with her missing parents (that the astute viewer can probably tell are more missing than she believes), it really shouldn’t have been Karin’s episode at all based on the major themes. And the most insulting part of it is that Kanaria? Digma 0? Those things never come up again. He just haunts Karin for an episode and then is never expanded on, explained, or reused.

It’s arbitrary and frustrating and even though the episode was one I enjoyed as I was watching it, because it gave me development for Karin who I already thought was the best character, it was also kind of the point where I realized Shangri-la might not know what it’s doing enough to “come back from that”, seeing as it had this random ghost with no ties to Karin bother Karin who was otherwise at least giving us a nice straight cyberpunk story as a side dish to the kind of scattered Kuniko rebellion and Mikuni’s… whatever it is that Mikuni is doing.

Karin uses her newfound ability to leave the house to dress in an all-concealing bear suit (because that’s somehow less embarrassing than being seen… I’ll take it) and do some shopping in Akihabara, though the experience is frustrating enough to have her asking how to just buy the city, since that would be easier. She runs into Kuniko there, the latter trying to stock up on weapons and ammo for the war, but manages to flee any possible social encounter, so there’s none of that pesky risk of developing ties between two of our leads.

Meanwhile, for Mikuni, we focus on Sayako – apparently one thing that’s true about the Digmas is that they’re the potential successors to Atlas. Sayako demands to know why Mikuni hasn’t been acknowledged and from that learns that the others exist, but not who they might be. She tries to hack Zeus to find out, but Ryoko shuts her down and has her arrested for good measure. In the confusion around Sayako’s arrest, Miiko finds and releases Momoko, who wisely scoots rather than looking for the unseen rescuer.

With that and Momoko’s return to Duomo, the attack on Atlas begins. Karin profiteers off the blow-by blow, which sees Metal Age attacking by air and multiple forces including government, Atlas, and the unknown assailants getting involved, though you could be forgiven for getting confused as to who is shooting whom at any given time. Metal Age manages to get inside, though they get steadily slaughtered along the way, as Kuniko and Momoko make their way in, learning along the way. We get that Tarsian (Karin’s co-conspirator and Serpent’s creator) is the current CEO of the Atlas corp and would technically be Ryoko’s boss, though she seems to have the power between them. We bump into Kunihito, and after quickly ditching him learn that Kuniko’s grandmother was one of the original founders of Atlas, which is apparently a horrifying revelation for some reason. Eventually the fighting reaches a stalemate thanks to Ryoko threatening to simply torch the floor the surviving Metal Age soldiers are on, brokered into a peace by Tarsian who offers them safe passage out of Atlas if they surrender. Kuniko sees the writing on the wall and takes the deal, but doesn’t leave herself without a visit to the residential section that sees her hanging out with Kunihito’s mom, which is quite the surprise for Kunihito. Still, he doesn’t make a fuss and even gives her back her original boomerang so I guess that means they’re cool.

Takehiko (Remember him?) also has an extra experience in Atlas, finding a shrine in a weird field of flowers and pinwheels sort of place clearly intended to evoke images of the more pleasant side of the underworld, and his missing little sister’s shoes there as well as those of an unknown number of other sacrificed children. It’s weird and random and shows us another room in Atlas that might as well just be another plane, except this one rather than serving at least as somebody’s luxury suite seems to serve no purpose at all.

Meanwhile on Karin’s side, her friend Zhang tries to warn her about abusing MEDUSA but MEDUSA shuts him out, not that Karin really wanted to hear it anyway. Eventually Zhang, with the help of Kuniko’s grandma, bankrupts Karin behind her back, supposedly to teach her that money isn’t everything or some stupid thing, but all it does is put Karin’s back to the wall at which point she sends a full power Medusa after Zeus in order to rob Atlas. Tarsian wants Zeus reformatted to stop the hacking threat, but Ryoko coups him there. Her goons try to arrest Karin, but Karin has buggered off by the time they arrive.

Also starting in this arc, Sayako is freed from prison, and Ryoko has Miiko arrested and made into the next sacrifice for Hiruko, which seems highly irregular but does take. Mikuni takes action from this, but her retainers seem unable to fire on Ryoko and for some reason that’s not clear at the time she doesn’t just kill Ryoko with her psychic powers and in fact seems to be an entirely helpless little girl. Ryoko takes her to Hiruko/Miiko, the latter still putting up a fight to control the body. Security surrounds Mikuni as it seems Ryoko intends to dispose of her, but Sayako shows up and escapes Atlas with both Mikuni and Hiruko/Miiko.

Back in Duomo, Kuniko apparently has to sentence her grandmother to exile for… having been the CEO of Atlas at one point in the past. Now, this doesn’t take that long, but is actually a fascinatingly botched scene so I want to look at it in more detail. First of all, why we’re doing this: Kuniko’s grandmother (Nagiko) has been a source of wisdom and guidance for Metal Age since presumably their beginnings, leading the resistance against Atlas until she selected Kuniko as her successor. I’m not sure at all why her status as the former (repeating, former) CEO of the project had to be this big damning secret in the first place. When you say it’s been a secret and it comes out know I get that people are going to be pissed, but it would seem kind of normal to me for something like Metal Age to have someone with insider knowledge if not at the top than at least high up. Nagiko should have been a known factor since before Kuniko was a thing.

Second detail, the decision of what to do. Kuniko goes with exile from Duomo and it’s presented as a big deal, a harsh punishment, and a meaningful one. But really think about it: obviously Kuniko doesn’t think she’s soft-sentencing her granny to death, so they’ve got to assume she’ll set up somewhere pretty easily with all the resources she has and, frankly, Duomo isn’t so hot. It’s kind of a hellhole that everyone is trying to get out of. If it was clear from the framing that this was meant to be a non-punishment to get Nagiko safely away from angry Metal Age members who feel betrayed, that would be one thing, but it is given the weight of a serious punishment… at least from Kuniko’s side.

Because there’s the third detail: how the scene goes down. Kuniko actually takes a very leader-type stance, declaring that Nagiko is banished with a stern look… and Nagiko calmly packs her bags and talks about how to take care of the pickled vegetables. Now, this kind of scene, where the character in Nagiko’s position goes with a tangential concern to avoid revealing how hurt they are, would work… but the audience needs to understand that the character is hurting. In this scene, we don’t. We don’t know Nagiko very well, and she doesn’t emote one bit. It honestly comes off like she’s deaf or senile, grumbling about her pickles while Kuniko tries to have a serious conversation about how banished she is. Which is another thing – the moment goes on way too long. To do this kind of thing well the character being punished says something thoughtful with tears in their eyes and then gets on with being banished, but here we’re treated to Nagiko spending a frustrating lot of time responding with pickle recipes to everything that Kuniko has to say, and she does it totally deadpan. I don’t blame the voice actress for this, at least not in this scene, because that’s how she’s animated as well, but it wasn’t the right directorial choice. This is a scene that needed to have big emotion if it wanted to have any chance to work over the kind of nonsense setup, and while Kuniko plays big like she should, Nagiko underplays the whole thing, causing it to fall flat.

Anyway, she’s banished from Duomo and largely from the plot. Also in Duomo, we finally get an answer to those odd occasional “mysterious shots fired” things, the sort that happened back in the first couple episodes and in the battle for Atlas. As the mysteries in this show go (and it’s my opinion that they try to have too many going at once) it wasn’t exactly the most relevant or important: there was some other actor on stage, sure, but we have like a dozen bigger fish to fry.

Turns out it’s the plants, and they want to take over the entire plot for a while. Essentially, the “Artillery fire” that has caused the mysterious events is the result of genetically engineered plants called Dadelus that violently launches its seed pods at things that annoy it, apparently with some pretty insane amounts of force over long range as it mimics modern Artillery. I have no idea why anyone would design it like that. In any case, Dadelus takes root and grows quickly, so it’s been kind of taking over the toxic jungle, ever more when the Bomb Showers from Atlas clear other plants and Dadelus takes root first. Seeing as those shots can wreck buildings and will ultimately end up targeting actions inevitable in human life as well as attempts to prune it, this is pretty legitimately dangerous, proved strongly when it shoots people trying to burn it out. Not that Ryoko (who also has figured this out by now) cares since it’s not a big threat to Atlas.

While Kuniko tries to decide what to do, Takehiko decides it’s murdering time. He reveals he’s an Atlas agent sent to protect her (which makes little sense given everything but sure) but now wants to kill her to spite Atlas after learning that they sacrificed loads and loads of kids to build the city (for some bullshit reason), including his sister – hence the weird underworld shrine field with the shoes. Kunihito shows up, having abandoned Atlas to find his own way, and stops Takehiko, who decides to jump off a cliff rather than trying again.

Kunihito will now be set dressing for the rest of the show.

I wish I was joking. He is in the show from here on, possibly more in the show, but he’s just sort of… there. After this point he pretty much says nothing interesting and does nothing interesting, and considering that the only stuff he said or did interesting up to this point had been the scenes shipping him with Kuniko, you’d think that he’d now have a lot. But instead, the writers are just sort of done with the two of them as a couple. They were fun and interesting when they had similar morals but contrasting viewpoints, causing each other to possibly see complexity in the world, but now that they’re on the same page and we should be indulging in Kunihito growing as a person when freed from his obligations and ties to Atlas, seeing the world in a new light in which he doesn’t have to fight Kuniko and can instead really listen to her, we just decide that he’s done. He basically replaces Takehiko as the Metal Age also-ran, the assistant behind Kuniko who’s not Momoko.

Anyway, let’s check in with Karin: She’s fled to Akihabara which it turns out that after the last time she actually did buy in its entirety. I’ll grant the show that the way they reveal that is actually quite funny given how her interest in buying the city was treated when she mentioned it the last time. Apparently she no longer needs the bear suit and has set herself up as a sort of yakuza landlord. Mikuni’s team shows up and gets the premier treatment from Karin, if for no other reason than that Mikuni is one of the people who could inherit Atlas, meaning getting on her good side. Thus, Mikuni is set up in Akihabara with new servitors – maid cafe maids instead of priestesses. She still causes one who lies to her to die horribly, resulting in a “funny” bit of montage as Karin frantically changes the cattle call to request honest people.

In addition to the rather dark idea of humor, this is also a stretch in which we solidify something about Mikuni that seems very off. Until this point, the natural assumption was that her powers were mind-reading (or at least lie-detection) and telekinesis (at least of human bodies). More than once talking to Mikuni and being asked a hard question to which most people would lie is called Mikuni’s “test” and after at least one kill she said, in a very grumpy and ruthless-sounding way, that she detested liars.

Now, though, we’re told a different story: apparently, Mikuni’s power is entirely reflexive and beyond her control: if someone lies to her, unknown forces smite that person. I guess that explains why she didn’t just break Ryoko rather than yelling at her minions to shoot. She also, apparently, does not like having this power attached to her. Mikuni here experiences deep regret at the separation it forces between her and other normal people and basically does a good job angsting about it.

You may notice that these two portrayals don’t go together. Now, I am open to characters not being what they initially appear to be – and not even necessarily in terms of characters who grow, which is a different thing. In Madoka Magica Homura Akemi initially comes off as a cold and ruthless magical girl who Mami believes, with reason, is likely a rival for territory. By the end, she’s revealed to be a tortured soul who has watched everyone else die time and time again while trying to save Madoka from a cruel fate. In a less extreme example in Revisions, which was not a good show, there’s an old man character who initially comes off as a foul mouthed obstructionist, complaining about everything and suggesting that one of the girls would be better shutting her mouth and working as a hostess than being an outspoken mecha pilot. But when the chips are down, the grumpy old man actually turns out to be a reliable ally.

But in Madoka Magica there are clues to Homura’s true colors from the very beginning, so that even in your first viewing you get the idea that she’s not actually as cold as she seems to be, Mami didn’t have the full story, and there is probably something mysterious going on. In Revisions, the grumpy old man stays a grumpy old man, it’s just that with newer perspective you understand that when he talked about wanting to help Shibuya as a whole, which he did, it wasn’t the bunk you might have assumed it was if you lumped him in the same category as the mayor. He just had strong opinions on how that would or should be done. In both cases, the character remains consistent, but you get a new perspective on why they are they way they are.

In the case of Mikuni it is Mikuni’s own words and actions that lead us to believe she intentionally and deliberately killed liars, and that even if her power was not under her control she would probably be okay with anyone who lied to her being horribly killed. She was spoiled and entitled and both expressed displeasure directed at the people who were killed and did things that any reasonable person would realize would very likely lead to her conversation partner being killed like that. She only started to shape up into a more nice little girl under Miiko’s care, and that was very acceptable character growth. Now we are expected to believe that Mikuni always disliked killing people with her psychic powers. But if that’s the case, then we are left wondering why she would have tested people. I know she’s a young character, but even she should have realized that playing verbal hardball would have certain results, that’s fairly basic pattern recognition.

Anyway, Kuniko finds another Metal Age base (outside Duomo) wiped out utterly by the Dadelus plants and the poison they spread, and resolves to solve the problem. She goes to Akihabara to buy a bomber, but gets redirected to Karin who’s now king of the crosstrade. Through that encounter she ends up meeting Mikuni and learning that the two of them are sisters. Somehow. The supposed bond between the two as sisters is never actually used. The deal is made, with Karin getting Kuniko’s magic dagger in the process, but questions remain as to how incinerating the whole surface will be carried out.

Nagiko wanders back into the plot, making her exile pointless as well as stupid when you really stop to think about it. She takes Kuniko up to negotiate with Ryoko regarding the refugees and the destruction of the Dadelus, and when Ryoko tries to be stubborn about it pulls a stunt that causes the plants to attack Atlas, possibly even spreading their seeds inside. Gun metaphorically to her head with this now being everybody’s problem, Ryoko agrees to move all the surface refugees into Atlas at once while Kuniko’s team turns the toxic jungle into a sea of napalm.

So, a few things happen in this arc. First of all, Kuniko basically wins, in a sense embarrassingly easily, what she was fighting for to begin with. All her people are moved into Atlas and are implied to be likely to stay moved, which is exactly what she wanted in the first place. This is quite the anticlimax for the idea of kicking the doors open so the abused masses could gain their paradise.

Second, Kuniko, aboard one of the bombers, burns the evacuated Duomo to ash with her own hands (well, presses the button to do it, but close enough) in another scene that’s botched, but interestingly botched.

The thing is, the setup goes really operatic in here. An immense amount of weight and drama is placed, through the direction and the script alike, on how Kuniko must be suffering, destroying her old home in Duomo. It’s treated with the intensity of a major character death, being reminiscent of scenes in better works where you can get very sentimental over a place, which are sometimes extremely powerful scenes. The most obvious cognate (because of how much on the same wavelength the works can be) would likely be the squashing of Sector 7 in Final Fantasy VII, though of course the motivations are pretty opposite.

The problem is, nothing in the show supports that being a powerful scene when it’s Kuniko and Duomo. Because, really, what do we know about Duomo? It’s kind of a hellhole. And that’s not even the “But it’s our hellhole” sort of hellhole where we fight to defend it; the people there want to get out. They want to abandon that place and go to Atlas, it’s just what they’ve got for the time being. And by the time it burns, the people are, in fact, in Atlas. So in a sense this should be a cause for celebration: goodbye stupid surface city.

We could move away from that though, if we had a sense of Kuniko’s personal bond with Duomo. Even if it was somewhere she’d hoped to leave behind, it still is her childhood home, and you can kind of understand and accept her feeling something about that. But, in order to have that be the investment to justify this really overwrought scene, we would need to understand that bond, and empathize with Kuniko’s feelings. In order to achieve that, you would need to have had scenes in the past that show Kuniko experiencing a connection not just to Metal Age and her people but to Duomo as a concept. There are approximately zero scenes where the show does that. Kuniko arrives back in Duomo at the start of the show after time in prison, and while she’s quite happy to see her friends again, we don’t really spare much of a thought for the environs of Duomo. We don’t see how she knows the town, and we aren’t allowed to get a strong feeling of her being ‘at home’ there because we’ve got 99 plots to get through and sitting around in Duomo isn’t one. Over the course of the show, she’s there only for pretty brief periods before setting out to do things again, usually with the goal of getting her people (herself included) out of Duomo.

So when we get the lingering moment, the swelling music, the full melodrama for incinerating Duomo, I ask you: why should anybody care? Unlike Sector 7, where a bunch of friendly NPCs are presumed flattened, nobody is in Duomo to die in a fire. Everyone’s goal was to be out of Duomo, and they’re out of Duomo. And, on the sentimental side, there was never any point where we really built sentiment towards Duomo. Kuniko’s family house there was a backdrop, it never felt like a home the way even Tifa’s bar in Sector 7 did, so losing it doesn’t really feel like a big loss. Without that warmth or connection, we’re more inclined to say “good riddance” than “how sad”.

Anyway, the Dadelus are incinerated (though some remain in a lower floor of Atlas), Japan is beggared by the eco-damage, the Akihabara crowd survived in bunkers, and the people of Metal Age are now safely in Atlas. So why is the show still going?

We do have a bridging plot hook. Karin, of course, was busily using her insider knowledge of the inferno and MEDUSA in order to profit on the market disruption but as she gathers up the last profits, MEDUSA takes charge of its own destiny and escapes. This doesn’t connect with anything in the show outside Karin’s material, but I guess it’s a bridging plot hook.

We take a time skip after that. UN forces have tried to off MEDUSA at its core, but the ability to conjure hurricanes has stymied any attempt to actually take it down, so it’s still out there.

Karin, in this time, makes a play: she gets Kunihito’s dagger stolen, and presents both it and Kuniko’s to Mikuni. With all three daggers, Mikuni would presumably be the true successor to Atlas, which is exactly the kind of person Karin wants to be on the good side of

Karin’s friends tell her that MEDUSA probably wants to crash the world economy and cause a great depression. Of course, while she is trying to use what influence she has left to contain MEDUSA that might be the least of her problems as Ryoko tips off the UN, who send a bomber to go kill Karin. It fails, but blows up even more of Akihabara, and Miiko/Hiruko uses never-before-seen magic to protect Sayako and Mikuni and ends up disintegrating in the process.

Karin ultimately has to abandon her bunker and the last vestige of control she has over MEDUSA. Kuniko meets up with her in the rubble of Akihabara and talks some sense into her and they use the computers in the otaku bunker to hack a satellite and deorbit it at MEDUSA. When that doesn’t kill it off, MEDUSA responds by moving to seize control of the world’s nuclear weapons, revealing its endgame to be the intent to create a nuclear winter. The ground team “realizes” they’ll need Zeus to have a chance against MEDUSA, and wouldn’t you know it, Zeus will only listen to the proper master of Atlas. Which right now is set to be the grieving Mikuni as she presents herself and the three daggers to Ryoko, intending to be named successor.

There’s a fight at some stairs when Mikuni meets up with Ryoko that ends up with Team Hero held off, at which point Ryoko declares that Mikuni will only be made successor if she burns Sayako. Sparing Mikuni the choice, Sayako jumps off the balcony to her death. Kuniko follows and pleads to just be allowed to talk to Zeus, but it turns out that Ryoko is Zeus.

Now, at first, I was tempted to call bull on this reveal – Ryoko had enough past and a position that would be in the public light enough that it seemed like having her be the avatar of the supercomputer’s AI was probably something that shouldn’t have been able to be kept secret. But, on the other hand, there were hints (like Ryoko’s presence in and defense of Zeus), and it’s consistent both with the setting and Ryoko’s portrayal as a freakishly single-minded person dedicated to Atlas and Atlas alone. So in the end, the show gets a cookie for this one, it was a good reveal.

Sadly, they do nothing with it and have a lot more BS to get out.

In the immediate the reveal means… nothing. Mikuni is bitter and wants to avenge Miiko so she’s okay letting MEDUSA burn the world. Kunihito stops Kuniko from making a fight of it right there, and Momoko arrives to explain his actions. Sayako also shows up, having been saved from her previous fall to her death by Momoko. She charges after Ryoko and attacks; the two of them do battle on the descending elevator into the bowels of Atlas. The elevator isn’t OHSA compliant, though, and Ryoko knocks her off the platform like we’re playing smash brothers so that Sayako once again falls to her death.

In the meantime, we get some more (vague) explanation of matters that were raised (vaguely) starting in episode 20: Apparently, Atlas was built on some sort of mystical locus that was revealed by an earthquake, but is rendered unstable by “vibrations” – the tower can’t actually stand, at least not there, without the help of magic, specifically the blood sacrifice of little girls (hence Hiruko and the field of shoes).

This would be a little hard to swallow to begin with. While the modern world doesn’t have any examples of modern megastructures, we have a decent theoretical grounding behind arcologies (like Atlas) and other things like Space Elevators, so it’s pretty natural to accept, in fiction, that these things can be built with just a little future tech. In setting, too, they treat Atlas as something special, but not something insane. There was no priming of the audience for the idea that Atlas shouldn’t stand. If the writing had been smart, even just a little bit smarter about this mystical nonsense like it was about Ryoko, we could have had talks earlier where people, particularly non-natives like Karin’s online friends, would mention off hand that Atlas is “impossible” or “shouldn’t have worked”. And we’d write it off at the time as the place being an engineering marvel but when the reveal comes that it really was impossible, we’d accept it better.

Beyond that, though, the delivery of this stuff is the absolute worst in the show. While meaningful characters do meaningful things we get the two old farts (Nagiko and Tarsian) together again and they talk about it – their troubles building Atlas and the decisions they made that lead us to this point. And… that’s it. They talk. Well, they also “play chess” but it’s clear that they have no idea what chess actually is since they just make pretty and “symbolic” patterns out of the pieces on the board. They deliver their statements, which is supposed to be two old friends who split on possibly bad terms and haven’t seen each other in ages reconnecting, in the most dry and dispassionate ways possible, just recounting what supposedly happened in weak voices and with no good details, following the fairly insane path of the creation of Atlas like every step is the most natural thing. “We couldn’t stop the vibrations so we turned to magic and sacrificing kids.” Excuse me, what?

I said earlier, when speaking about her exile, that I couldn’t blame Nagiko’s voice actress for how senile the character came off. Here, though? It might still be more bad direction than an actual fault with the voice talent, but both Nagiko and Tarsian seem like they’re reading their lines from a teleprompter, at gunpoint. There is no emotion and no investment at any point in this, and it totally kills the scene – or should I say scenes? We keep coming back to old exposition morons delivering their lifeless exposition, and it never works. A lot of the time they’re just on repeat, most of the rest of the time they don’t have interesting stuff to say, and when the material should be interesting it’s dead on arrival thanks to being delivered like they don’t even know what they’re saying. In fact, I suspect something like that might be the truth – the voice actors couldn’t make heads or tails of the plot to decipher what sort of weight or impact the material was supposed to have, the animation did nothing for them, and the director was out to lunch. That’s how bad these scenes are.

And there’s a bigger problem with the mystical foundations of Atlas as well. I mentioned it in passing, so you might have picked up on it: all of this only starts appearing in episode 20 out of 24. I’m sorry to keep comparing this show unfavorably to Final Fantasy VII – I’m not even that huge a fan of FFVII – but it really is the most comparable piece of media and once again Cloud Strife and Friends have done better than Kuniko and Company. So, we have this setup where the decadent cyberpunk city is built up on the back of something that is both magical and bad. In Shangri-la that’s the foundation of Atlas, Hiruko, Vibrations, et cetera. In FFVII, it’s Mako Reactors powering Midgar and funding Shinra. In Final Fantasy, this is pretty much the first thing you learn: Mako Reactors are bad, they’re sucking at the sacred mystical life stream of the planet like power plant vampires, and the heroes are trying to shut them down. They don’t make you wait until Disc 3 to say “Wait, there’s this magical thing that’s really the base of the conflict”. It’s there from the beginning.

Further, FFVII does the work to make you understand Mako Reactors. You understand how they would have been invented since magic and science aren’t separated in that universe and they do provide vast amounts of clean energy, so it’s not really surprising that Shinra would start dominating the electric power market by building the damn things. We don’t need their engineering manual, but we do need – and get – a basic understanding of how they’d come into being and be adopted within the context of the world they exist in.

Atlas does none of that. Like I said, it’s just sort of dropped matter of fact, like its natural, that when there’s an engineering problem with your giant arcology, you turn to human sacrifice and conjuring spirits from the netherworld to somehow, through their mystical prophetic raving, stop the place from shaking apart. Call me crazy but I think I’d try “more struts” before “offer thousands of children to dead gods” and would never see the latter as natural. There’s no sense of how we go from a technological problem in a technologically grounded world, one that’s supposed to be our future at that, to this freaky high magic solution. Who gets that idea? Most Yu-gi-oh villains I’ve heard of have plans, motivations, and backstories that make more sense than this, and they’re typically trying to conquer and/or destroy the world via children’s card games. That’s the level the backstory of Atlas is on, people: I honestly believe world domination via trading card more than I believe anything going on in Atlas.

And you know what’s even crazier? Despite having apparently jumped headfirst into human sacrifice and ancient magic, Nagiko and Tarsian are still portrayed, essentially, as reasonable, well-meaning, sympathetic people. They’re just old granny and old grumpy man, talking about old times when they dreamed big but couldn’t quite pull it off. No. You get that kind of treatment when you’re a washed-up adventurer who failed a quest for reason of arrow to the knee, not when you’re a global-scale plutocrat who murdered countless innocents for a construction project! These two make Rufus Shinra, his dad, and maybe even Professor Hojo look like saints, but we never follow up on Nagiko and Tarsian, nor hold them accountable for their deeds in any sense, it’s just allowed to be washed out in the dead emotional void of their scenes. They are so uninvested that you could outright miss just how monstrous their background is.

Anyway, Kuniko of course goes down the hole to challenge Ryoko and Mikuni, but before we go down that rabbit hole ourselves, let’s finish Karin’s material.

Karin is doing her best to rein in MEDUSA, but MEDUSA is having none of it, and she’s not on her best state since she also finds out in a dramatic yet unsurprising moment that her parents “away on business” are actually dead and their messages were manufactured by Ryoko to keep Karin working (initially for Atlas). The fight brings in every cyber ally, even old man Tarsian saying he has a plan, but in the end we’re given a fakeout where we’re told that MEDUSA successfully launched the nukes. We’re then treated to a scene from MEDUSA’s point of view: it returns to its little state, and considers the implications of what it’s done. All over the world, dust clouds fill the atmosphere. The global temperature drops. The water levels of the world lower. MEDUSA looks on its work with pride, having saved itself and fulfilled its purpose. It decides, free and happy, that since the sea levels have gone down, it might as well open the flood barriers around its mainframe to have a look around the world that’s now “saved” from rising waters and open to it.

That’s when the water floods in. MEDUSA had been tricked at the last minute into believing false data about the missiles and their effects. No bombs actually fell, and of course the sea levels didn’t drop in a matter of minutes… or at all. The water pours into MEDUSA’s silo and Karin is forced to watch, crying, as her holographic manifestation of MEDUSA begins to sink, crying out its piteous old litany of “save me”, except now there’s nothing that can, and MEDUSA finally drowns. In the epilogue of the show (Spoiler: the world will not be destroyed) Zhang and Klaris, Karin’s friends, come to see her in person, and reveal a backup of MEDUSA’s initial state, which recognizes Karin as its mother, and they promise to raise it right this time around.

This sequence is the most emotionally effective part of the show. Plenty of characters die in Shangri-la but the only one I really felt sad for was the soulless AI that just wanted to cause a nuclear winter. The reason for that is that Karin cared, and Karin was a good consistent character who I empathized with, and who really emoted, so when you’re with her having to sit by and watch as an intelligence that was basically her child slowly and painfully dies, it hurts, and when there’s a (logical, not pulled out of nowhere) second chance given, you really feel the catharsis. This is the absolute high point of the show, and the culmination of the only plot-line that really made sense beginning to end.

So, that’s the best – I honestly can’t complain about it. Now let’s take a look at the worst with Kuniko, Ryoko, and Mikuni.

In the bowels of Atlas, Ryoko brings Mikuni to a cavern containing a coffin with a mummy and a jeweled spear. The spear is an artifact from Japanese mythology, and the Mummy is said to belong to another slice of ancient mystical past called Himiko.

Yeah, that’s right – Himiko, not Hiruko is the heart of Atlas and the core of all the mystical bull going on. And at this point you may be asking yourself “Who or what is Himiko?”. And the proper answer is that, having watched the show to the end, I don’t even really know. Gozer the Gozerian would have made about as much sense as a payoff.

And I know what someone reading this is thinking: “Himiko is part of Japanese Mythology, you’re just saying that because you don’t have the cultural context to understand this!” And I’ll confess to being an American, not someone who was steeped in Japanese culture from an early age. But I still think that there are multiple levels on which the reveal and use of Himiko in Shangri-la doesn’t work.

First, I’ve looked up Himiko. As a mythological figure she’s one of sparse attestations, but my best understanding is that she was supposed to have been a queen of ancient Japan who was skilled in magic. Whether she was good or bad and what she used that magic for is up to some debate. She can be a wise ruler, a young sorceress, or even an evil enchantress. Because she’s being portrayed in a somewhat corner case way here (as a dead deity), because there are so many options for what she is, and because she’s far outside her native context, you need to explain what she is and what she means here and now a fair bit better than they do here in Shangri-la. As it stands, you could replace her with just about anything and it would be about as logically and emotionally satisfying as the invocation of Himiko. I mentioned Gozer before, and frankly I’m not sure I was exaggerating.

Second, we circle back to the issue of how you meld a cyberpunk futuristic setting with mystical magical elements. Himiko’s use here really doesn’t work in those terms, and I’ll explain why. And to dispel the idea that I’m just getting Himiko herself wrong, I’ll do it by crafting an analogy in terms more familiar to my “home culture”.

So, let’s imagine for a moment that we have a cyberpunk+magic story in a western setting. Something like Shadowrun, as I mentioned before. There’s of course a big bad corporate villain (just like Atlas is), and over the course of the story we get a number of introductions to supernatural stuff going on.

In the “doing it well” scenario, our villain is Cain Addams, CEO of Eden Ltd. Throughout the story, the magic we see is founded in Abrahamic mysticism, and from a point that’s fairly early in the story we take opportunities to tell a couple of Genesis tales that might be relevant. The idea of Cain – the first murderer, cursed to forever wander the Earth – is brought up, probably in passing, priming us for the reveal that Cain Addams is none other than the Biblical Cain! By the time we meet him, we know, even if you happen to not know the story of Cain, more or less what he’s about: He’s a bad dude, a punished dude, and he’s immortal. Even an ignorant viewer is given the tools to understand what he might want (Maybe a way to die, maybe a way to reach paradise, maybe just power and control since he’s still jealous and wrathful – take your pick) and why he’s the way he is. This is especially important because Cain Addams isn’t just Cain-from-the-Bible. As far as I know there isn’t any Apocrypha where Cain becomes a Cyberpunk CEO, so since we’re moving the character around we need to re-establish some of the facts about him and develop him as both a character and a magical whatever-he-is, almost as though he were a pure invention. The cultural touchstone is there for those who have it, but the work should be broadly accessible.

Something like this really could work, pillaging and repurposing old lore to produce new drama, grounding your fantasy in something of which a lot of people are aware. But much like every bit of fantasy media that uses Dragons or Vampires has to re-define for the audience what their dragons or vampires are like, you have to define this mythological element in terms of how you’re going to use it.

… don’t be surprised if I go there some day.

Anyway, how about the cognate of the way Shangri-la did it? Through the story we see all sorts of magic, it doesn’t really have a consistent and clear theme. Nobody sees Mr. Drake, the supposed CEO of Drake Heavy Industries, which will be our evil company. We close in on his lair, but we don’t really learn anything about him. We face wizards and prophets and way too many corporate goons, and eventually reach, in the depths of a corporate facility, a truly massive set of doors. We open them, and by this point the audience don’t know what to expect. They haven’t really been primed for anything in particular. Some audience members have probably formed theories. Maybe Mr. Drake is a dragon, hence the name and the fact that nobody ever sees him in the flesh. Not many people, though, would be surprised if it were something else. What will stand as a surprise, though is when it’s Cain, the first Vampire. Drake meant “Dracula”. We never saw any vampires before, Cain was never mentioned until the last act, but he’s there: Cain the First Vampire. And the work expects you to know that you’ve strayed into Vampire: the Masquerade without announcement (this was never billed as being a V:tM tie-in), what his implications are, and probably what the rules for fighting Cain the First Vampire are. The work talks about “Antediluvians” in this last act after the reveal, but it never says what they are. We can kind of guess they’re vampires, but there are so many different kinds of vampire in fiction that we can barely put together what these vampires are, much less some special kind of vampire.

In this case, it doesn’t matter that the same cultural touchstone (Cain) is used, it helps no one because the presentation is a mess that doesn’t understand you need to put in effort in order to leverage that touchstone. That’s the pitfall Shangri-la hits. The problem I don’t believe is solely that as a Westerner I don’t have an understanding of Himiko, it’s that the show makes no effort of any kind in order to let us know what this Himiko before us is supposed to be like.

Anyway, Kuniko shows up, learns Ryoko’s big plan was to body-snatch the successor of Atlas because her current body is failing (though, as the incarnation of a computer, couldn’t she just transfer into another?), and that Kuniko herself is a clone of Himiko – meaning, I guess, that she and Mikuni weren’t sisters after all, making that attempt to tie everything together completely pointless. Kuniko ends up pulling the spear herself, which will release Himiko’s spirit. Ryoko expects Himiko to possess Kuniko’s body but… Himiko doesn’t do that for some reason that’s never explained, Kuniko smugs about it, and offs Ryoko. At this point Zeus (which isn’t exactly Ryoko even though Ryoko was the avatar of Zeus…) starts trying to resurrect Himiko. Sayako shows up, this time with absolutely no explanation of how she survived her fall to her death, and takes care of Mikuni while Kuniko is summoned to the final battle.

Here it is, what the whole show was building up to: In the heart of Atlas, Himiko’s spirit, taking control of Zeus, plans to invoke a magical ritual to sacrifice every living person in Japan in order to resurrect herself and Kuniko, the clone of that ghost person, has to do blow up the evil ghost-possessed supercomputer with her boomerang in order to save the world.

Oh, and while all this was going on, it seems that Takehiko also failed at dying via long fall, has invaded Atlas, has planted lots of bombs, and sets them off because screw Atlas for being built on human sacrifices. He presumably dies again in the explosions. I know I’m saying this like it’s an afterthought, but it’s kind of an afterthought to the show too.

Anyway, Miiko (ghost) shows up with the ghosts of Hiruko who I guess wasn’t supposed to be actually a bad guy and all the sacrificed kids, miracle-cures Mikuni’s “Dies to sunlight” illness that Sayako was so worried about, and also takes away those psychic powers that the writers spontaneously decided two thirds or so of the way in were not under her control and something she hated. Then all the ghosts vanish for real this time and we can be happy. Or something. The show ends with Kuniko and Kunihito looking over the presumably unlivable and collapsed or collapsing Atlas and Kuniko declaring that someday and somewhere they’ll find their Shangri-la, just to shoehorn in some relevance to the title at the end.

So, in imitation of our lead and supposedly-but-not-really-lead, let’s take a long look back over the devastation ourselves. And for this, I’d like to introduce an idea: Signal-to-Noise Ratio.

Basically, in anything there’s “Signal” (Material you want) and “Noise” (things that are undesirable or useless). The better the ratio is, the more Signal you get for less Noise. You won’t typically hear these terms used when discussing media, but the idea is still there. If you say a show is “Tight” (referring to its writing), you mean it has a good Signal-to-Noise Ratio. If you say it’s “Bloated” that means it has a bad one, more balanced to the noise.

Shangri-la is interesting in that, while not being conventionally bloated, it has possibly the worst Signal-to-Noise Ratio of any show I’ve seen. The reason for this is that, even when scenes do things in the moment, most of the myriad plot threads that are part of this show start and stop arbitrarily, without mattering to each other or the conclusion. It’s similar to the problem the reset ending created for RahXephon, but here it’s throughout the whole thing and not just a matter of retrospect and a botched ending (though the way Shangri-la botches its ending doesn’t help).

Here’s a quick list of the characters who were utterly worthless: Kunihito (a theoretically main character), Yuri, Souichirou, Nagiko, Leon, Shion, Kanaria, Shougo, Takehiko, Tarsian, and Tomoko. More characters like Karin (along with her supporting cast of Klaris, Zhang, and MEDUSA.) and Mikuni (along with her supporting cast of Sayoko and Miiko) failed to amount to much in the grand scheme of things, but don’t really count as completely wasted because at least they provided some material of intrinsic value in the middle.

You may note that some of those characters were so useless that I didn’t even mention them by name in my plot summary. Leon, Shion, and Shougo for instance were a trio of brothers acting as Ryoko’s butlers/henchmen until the very end of the show of which the youngest, Shion (who was presented very much as a minor), was constantly abused physically and emotionally by Ryoko… but he was a terrible masochist and loved her for her abuse. These three eat up a lot of scenes and screen time, but they literally never do anything that wouldn’t have been done just as well by a faceless goon. Yuri and Tomoko were Kuniko’s friends from Duomo. Tomoko was briefly of interest during the prison arc (which I count as something that mattered since it left a mark on Kuniko), but these two should have been a real link between Kuniko and the common people or shouldn’t have wasted our time, handing off their role elements to Momoko. Tomoko basically vanishes after escaping the prison with Kuniko, banished to the realm of a background extra, which makes the development she got as her own person just noise, because her story is simply abandoned.

And let’s look at the major plots. The starting plots of the show are Kuniko’s rebellion and Karin robbing the world blind. Mikuni gets scenes but they don’t have any real direction until much later. So, what happens with those? Kuniko’s rebellion is ultimately shoved aside and “won” as an afterthought to the Dadelus. No one comments on the fact that with Atlas doomed at the end of the show it’s presumably back to being lost, only worse with Atlas refugees, so it’s just like the show forgot that “find a safe place to live” was a problem.

Karin’s economic manipulation is the best handled plot in the show. It has a decent start, a dramatic climax, and evolves organically over the course of the show as we start to worry less about Karin and international politics and more about what MEDUSA is capable of. But here’s the thing… it’s not actually germane to anything. There is no element of Kuniko’s story that couldn’t have been done without Karin. The rebellion against Atlas doesn’t involve Karin. The Dadelus plot doesn’t involve Karin. The whole thing about becoming successor to Atlas technically involves Karin in that Kuniko’s motivation for stopping Mikuni at first is to get Zeus to counter MEDUSA, but that wasn’t really necessary: Kuniko had more than enough reasons to run to the final confrontation without the impending nuclear apocalypse: She doesn’t trust Ryoko, and a grieving Mikuni (grieving for reasons very tangentially related to Karin, but really Ryoko could have gotten an air strike one way or another) at least briefly has interest in destroying the world to punish it. So the most emotionally effective and best executed plot in the entire show could be cut and, with a couple judicious patches at the intersections, we would really lose nothing. Which, when Shangri-la is such a tangle of overlapping plots that at times makes it hard to follow a single episode, maybe should have been done if it couldn’t be better integrated.

Then there’s the Dadelus arc: it appears very suddenly, emerging from just yet another cloak-and-dagger loose end to demand full attention… for a couple of episodes. After the Dadelus are first mentioned by name, they totally take over the show, but it’s not long until Kuniko gets the bombers to reduce all that nonsense to ash, disposing of them as quickly as they came.

On the topic of major arcs, Mikuni eventually sprouts one when Miiko is taken, causing the rift between her and Atlas… only for her to ultimately come right back to Atlas and play the role of Ryoko’s pawn in the endgame. I’d be more forgiving of this, since in theory it’s extremely necessary for Mikuni’s development as a person, having first experienced the warmth of Miiko’s care redeeming her as a person and then the harshness of the outside world teaching her how to stand on her own… but Mikuni’s character development is utterly botched. As I may have gone on of a rant about before, Mikuni, rather than being treated as someone who learned, grew, and developed from her interactions with others, is a square peg retconned into a round hole once she leaves Atlas and we get the new perspective she supposedly always had on powers that it was never directly stated didn’t work that way. Despite this, she never really takes agency while she’s out in the real world. She does it once, trying to storm the heart of Atlas and facing down Ryoko before Sayako gets her and Miiko/Hiruko out of there, but once she’s in Akihabara she just goes back to her old behavior with a new aesthetic. All the important legwork about making Mikuni the heir to Atlas is done by Karin (Who could have been anyone since she’s randomly wandered out of her own plot for this), pretty much without Mikuni’s prior knowledge. So in what should have been a powerful learning experience, she learns nothing.

And of course, when we get to the ending, and all the stuff with Himiko, the show pretty much discards everything that came before as worthless. When you get down to it, we spent the first twenty or so episodes just getting three daggers into the same place at the same time. Nothing about how the story ends is predicated on what the characters went through to get there, their struggles or their growth. Nagiko, in episode one, probably could have made a phone call that would have shortcut us directly to the end by summoning the three Digmas (who again, had nothing consistently important about them other than their possession of the daggers and who have no explained relation to Digma Zero Kanaria who was never expanded on) to an audience. They’re not all the same people they were at the start of the show, but they’re close enough that all their actions in the endgame would still have made sense.

It’s really frustrating when a show does this, and makes the journey utterly irrelevant. You can have happy endings or tragic endings or open endings or very absolutely final endings, but don’t have a non-sequitur ending that could have fired at any time.

In the end, Shangri-la is uniquely frustrating because there’s actually a lot of it that’s good. I’ve mentioned Karin’s plot in positive ways a good deal, but even aside from that there are a bunch of scenes or even movements that work – or should work – in isolation from the whole. I’d say that at least two thirds of the show’s running time, what’s actually put on screen, would be entertaining to watch and even good in the right context. The art’s pretty to look at. The action’s not great but at least a couple fights do well enough. There’s intrigue. The minor characters, though useless, can be compelling – Tomoko in particular really tried with her backstory. Ryoko is an effective villain, even if not one of the best, and her reveal is actually good enough that I wish it had fired when she had more agency left. Even the magical nonsense has bits and pieces that could have been saved, even been worth saving, if it was better blended and managed… though those were reliably some of the worst parts of the show.

But here’s the thing: if you have a car, and two thirds of the parts are absolute top end bits, but the other one third are a mix of rusty junk, broken, or just plain missing, does the car run? It doesn’t. This story is the same way. It has some quality components, but they’re not put together in a way that leverages their strength, so much of that doesn’t show in the final product as well as it should. Shangri-la is an example of something that is by far worth less than the sum of its parts.

With that in mind, I’m going to rate Shangri-la a D-. It doesn’t deserve a fail, but all the same I would strongly recommend anyone reading this to NOT watch it. It’s an object lesson in what not to do when you’re crafting speculative fiction, and unless you want to use it to compile a list of things to avoid doing in your own work, there’s no reason to give it any of the time it demands. Anything Shangri-la stole from, like Final Fantasy VII or especially Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, would reward you far better.