Pet is an unusual story, part crime drama and part psychological thriller, about a group of psychics in service to “The Company”, and how they do the dirty work of their corporate overlords.
It’s also a few more things, in terms of its theme, but you wouldn’t know even the previous paragraph just from episode one, so let’s just start the deep dive.
The first episode (after a pre-intro scene that establishes much of the rules but that won’t make all the sense until later) is from the point of view of a man who has done tangential work for the Company without realizing its significance or the reality of his employers. After a slight mess-up at a handoff, he witnesses Company men hypnotize an old friend of his, who he thought had run off to Bali, causing the man to drive off a cliff.
He confronts his contact, Katsuragi, and is of course rebuffed, only to be told the Crushers have been set upon him. He goes home, tries to leave his bar to some kids who had been renting a spare room and doing odd jobs for him, only to have his perspective warp with unreal or impossible sequences, finally deducing at the end just who those two kids really are.
Hiroki (Left) Tsukasa (Back turned, Right)
The second episode has most of those same events, as seen from the point of view of the pair who didn’t much like being called Crushers. They’re underlings to Katsuragi and, essentially, our most central characters – Practical, calm, and somewhat gloomy Tsukasa and human Golden Retriever Hiroki.
Having watched the whole show, I don’t think the psychics in this are really capable of what normal humans think of as “love”, but there are a lot of overtones to the relationships they have with their own.
In any case, Tsukasa and Hiroki are instructed to “Crush” the guy from episode 1, but offer that they could instead rewrite his memories to let him live. We know from the end of Episode 1 that they’re ultimately successful, so we can breeze through Katsuragi’s objections and interference (He’s psychic too, albeit of a lesser type) and get into the mechanics of psychic powers in this setting.
There are at least two, and possibly as many as four different methods of psychic ability in this show, depending on how you count, but they’re paths to the same underlying rules. The basis of those rules is that the human memory is arranged into “Loci”, and two of these Loci are particularly important – a person’s Peak (their pure happy place) and their Valley (their darkest moment). If anything happens to these to cause them to break apart, the entire framework of the person’s consciousness will collapse and they’ll be “Crushed”, essentially rendered brain-dead.
The subgroup of psychics we’re most concerned with in this show are “Image Users”. They do psychic manipulation by having an image for themselves that they can use to transport in and out of memory spaces. They also a share a background where they started life unable to make their own memories, due to their minds being too open and absorbing from everyone else. This is fixed when a senior psychic allows the kid to view their Peak, sharing it as the foundation of the kid’s own mental sanctuary, around which they can form valleys and a “Lock” to keep apart Peak, Valley, and the Outside.
Naturally, an Image User’s “Peak Giver” is a very important person to that Image User. Tsukasa, notably, is Hiroki’s Peak Giver
In any case, Hiroki wants out of Company jobs. Tsukasa agrees to open a fish store with him, but keeps doing work for the Company who provided the starting capital. In the process, we also get to know another Image User, Satoru, who seems one of the more conventionally sane of the lot.
Much of the meat of the show is this, having Tsukasa go on jobs while Company cloak and dagger stuff is going on, and learning in the process that he may not be such a great person, especially with how he regards Hiroki.
Yeah, that “pet” title refers to, we find out about halfway through, Image Users who are molded into obedient servants by their Peak Giver, particularly in relation to how Tsukasa sees – and treats – Hiroki. When I called Hiroki a “human golden retriever” that was in reference to his generally affable and energetic behavior combined with his blonde look, but the fact that Tsukasa sees him as someone (or something) that ought to have about as much independence as a well-trained dog also factors into it.
Eventually, the story moves forward with the introduction of the elder Image User Hayashi. Hayashi is Satoru’s Peak Giver, and Satoru believes he’s been away on business for the last two years when actually he ran away from the control of the Company. Now that he’s back on their radar, the Company wants him destroyed, and Tsukasa leads the charge of actually doing it. This is revealed to be because Tsukasa was also Hayashi’s ward and Hayashi his Peak Giver, a relationship that the company forced to an end of association when Hayashi decided to save Satoru from the fate of being basically a mindless vegetable.
Tsukasa’s feelings towards the older man are clearly complicated, with intense notes of both affection and resentment, even hate. He ends up engaging Hayashi in an extended psychic conflict, and using a dangerous trick to access Hayashi’s peak and crush him.
Or rather, crush them both. But Tsukasa is returned to Hiroki in a state that is crumbling but not quite totally crushed, and Hiroki is able to put humpty-dumpty back together again. Albeit, Tsukasa comes back with a few errors to his health and sanity, leaving him kind of openly (to the audience) deranged in the endgame.
Said Endgame is a competition for power within the company. I’ll start with history: the Company seemingly first gained the power of mind control by recruting some old Chinese masters. The Old Masters taught the first generation of Company Crushers, but then one of the masters turned against the head family and the CEO had them all killed. Hayashi, at that time, emerged as the first apparent Image User and was able to help out, earning the company’s trust. But because the company is kind of flagrantly awful, their leadership abused Hayashi repeatedly to gain control of the Image Users in a direct and emphatic sense, resulting in things like Tsukasa being taken in (and abused by) the CEO’s family.
The company’s final step to try to secure the power of mind control is the creation of Babies. They forced Hayashi to do one, and that seemed to be his last straw. What is a Baby? Essentially an Image User who, lacking a lock, will inevitably degrade and who is incapable of becoming anything resembling a full person, but who is therefore a disposable tool that can be used by ordinarily trained Crushers (like the head family) to enter minds with the finesse of image users (riding the baby’s coattails)… and at significant range, rather than merely through touch.
Thus we have Jin, a daughter of the head family, trying to manipulate Satoru into her clutches while conspiring with her relation, Long, who acts as a handler for the one Baby they have. Because Tsukasa wants power and control above all, he becomes obsessed with Crushing Satoru by any means and on any excuse (or even without one) because that will mean he’s the only one in the company’s pocket capable of making more babies.
Hiroki finds out about this when he’s forced to take a job, collapses on it, and is taken to the hospital where a not-quite-gone Hayashi is leaking psychic all over the place. Hiroki senses this and tries to fix Hayashi up. He fails, but learns in the process that Tsukasa crushed his own Peak Giver and thus might not be an awesome person to always listen to no matter what. He decides to run after getting a scary red flag answer about this mess from Tsukasa.
Hunting down Hiroki ends up being the crux of the final conflict. Tsukasa still wants to destroy Satoru at any cost and needs to invade his peak to do it, and thus (non-psychically) manipulates the others into accepting a plan where he and Satoru will rewrite Hiroki’s mind, during which he means to backstab Satoru. Satoru is induced to accept this by being told that it was Hiroki who crushed Hayashi. However, he starts to find the fraying edges of the web of lies, and in the process discovers a message that Hayashi left with Katsuragi (hypnotized) telling him flee the company and that, while he shouldn’t trust that Tsukasa hasn’t been brainwashed to company values, that he should get Tsukasa out of there too if it’s at all reasonably possible.
Eventually, the lot catch Hiroki, but Hiroki fends off the first attack which also cuts short Tsukasa’s backstab plan. Satoru finds all the evidence, but trusts Tsukasa mostly because Tsukasa has reached the point of freaking out regarding Hayashi, the weight of his deeds starting to crush (or even Crush) him.
In a final confrontation with Jin, Long, and Katsuragi, Long gets dead, and Jin shoots Katsuragi dead just before learning that Katsuragi was, unknown to either of them, her real father. Tsukasa, at the end of his rope, asks Hiroki to fix his memories by finding and replacing Hayashi with himself, but this doesn’t work and Tsukasa gets crushed. Thus, Satoru saves Hiroki by… pretty much doing the same thing to him with better technique, making Hiroki see Satoru as Tsukasa.
This lasts for about five minutes of screentime (albeit significant in-character time) tops as at the end of the last episode they wander the earth. Satoru decides to undo that mental whammy when he thinks Hiroki can take it, and the sun comes up to reveal that they are in the real, physical place that forms the basis of Hayashi’s Peak (and thus theirs and Tsukasa’s as well).
The tone of the ending promises continuation, something about recovering the crushed people and tearing down the Company, but Pet is over. That’s not its theme and that’s not its story.
So, this one can be a bit hard. It’s kind of an “awful people do awful things” show, and while Hiroshi and Satoru help make it a little less hard to watch thanks to at least having decent facsimiles of souls, it does kind of ask you to take for granted that this darkness is somehow justified to someone somewhere along the line.
I do think a weakness of the show is in how much it treats “The Company” as a postulate. They seem to have nearly infinite reach and power, but their whole psychic corps is approximately a half dozen people. We’re never told what their history or industry is outside of being psychic hitmen. The organ trade is mentioned once, like evidently Tsukasa was earmarked for that while he was still a catatonic pre-image-user, and there are some implications that they have their fingers in illegal drugs, but it’s hard to feel much about their aims when we’re just to assume that they’re called “The Company”, their upper echelons are Chinese, and therefore they’re the guys that demons call when they’re not feeling demonic enough to hack it today.
And I get it, how much do we really need the nitty-gritty details of what kind of work The Company does? We know it’s mostly illegal, presumably profitable, and absolutely unethical… even though Hayashi could spend decades attached to them and still be a decent dude. And Satoru and Hiroki have only limited cognitive dissonance about the jobs they run despite their moral backbones.
I think we needed to see some nuance to the company in order to really get the feeling of what it’s like on the inside. Are they as big as they seem? As small as they seem? Do they ever wear a fig leaf over their naked evilness? If not, how did they get the loyalty of Hayashi, or the old masters in the first place?
With the Towa Organization we don’t know a lot, but we know something of their internal structure and that they’re deeply concerned with “human evolution”. We’re not shown their core business or how they made their money or got their power, but we at least know the goals of their operations that happen to intersect with the other stories going on. Most other big evil companies, we know more about. Even the Barbem Foundation at least had a clear theme.
And a big difference is that none of those carried the show or were in the sphere of the protagonists. We’re seeing The Company up close, and yet it’s blurry and indistinct compared to all sorts of equivalents that we see from greater distance and with what should be less clarity.
But, when you get down to it, that’s a minor thing. It is important, don’t get me wrong, but what it’s important as is a component of the real question of the show’s quality: how the emotional arcs of the characters move you through the episodes.
And while it is dragged down in places by senseless compound conspiracies and Tsukasa (up until encountering and crushing Hayashi, a seemingly connectable focal character) taking a trip on the crazy train, that is… mostly good. Through the first two episodes, you are confused, wondering if this is going to be something like Boogiepop. Through the Hayashi arc, there are intriguing things going on, and the final arc runs steadily forward, propped up by Satoru (since Hiroki isn’t there much).
There is some awkwardness with these characters and their relations that don’t have cognates to us non-psychics, but on the whole you can follow it pretty well. And it’s engaging, and the mindspace manipulation translates to screen in a wonderful manner
With all its flaws, I have a hard time imagining Pet going home with better than a B, but that is what I’m going to give it. It’s a little bit of madness and chaos, a little bit of unexplained darkness, and a lot of cloak and dagger goodness to check out.