Last week, the show was (apparently) preempted by a holiday broadcast, so after a break once again, we’re back with Shin and company talking about their feelings as the showdown with Pale Rider and his Morpho draws ever closer.
There’s a degree to which this episode probably does more for Shin in particular than any one episode up until now. It starts with him having an argument with Raiden, who rightly brings up that Shin has been remarkably unwell as of late. It doesn’t go so well, but leads to the group all moving forward once again (and, on the sidelines, Kurena getting called on her crush by the others). The army advances in the north while Shin’s team follows the Morpho’s trail into southern Legion territory. Unless I’m mistaken, this would be near or in whatever’s left of the Republic, which leads to some extra melancholy as they regard the apocalypse pastoral scenery they’ve seen before and think about their past and future.
One of the things this does is try to hammer home the idea that the Republic is gone and Lena is dead, casting something of a shadow over the group that, even if they cared about no one else, wanted her to live and possibly to see her again. I have to say, if Lena wasn’t on so much more promotional material, I might actually believe by this point that she had bit the dust or worse.
We get another lighter bit where, after a heavy conversation, the melancholy is broken by the talk of everyone going to see the ocean when the war is ended… but Shin doesn’t really take to it. Frederica chats with him after that, late at night, and Shin finally opens up regarding how he sees himself.
In Shin’s eyes, he’s essentially a ghost – he has no wishes or desires of his own (that he recognizes and admits) and thus finds that he can’t really live. It’s a fact that he says doesn’t bother him, but that Frederica intuits (and the audience can tell) is starting to chew him up in its own way. They share their feelings about being lost in the world, and while Shin can’t quite take to the idea of moving forward, there’s the sense that a seed has been planted.
While this is going on, we also check in with the Federacy army now and again – Grethe as she collects the rest of Nordlicht and finds them ready to fight on for the others who are beyond their reach (and possibly reinforce at a critical moment), and several of the commanders as they discuss their opinions on the current desperate offensive and how much must be committed to it. No Ernst Zimmerman today, but he said his piece last time.
These are all pretty dynamite scenes. I know it probably sounds like not a lot gets done in this episode, but learning and experiencing more about the people involved is important, and the deliberate pace is critical for building the kind of melancholy atmosphere that 86 is going for. In essence, it makes very smart use of its time even if it’s doing so in a completely different way than other shows that go for constant motion and turns.
The cinematography is also worth noting – 86 is very smart which what it decides to put or not put on camera. Most of the conversations here alter between long shots, extreme close-ups, and carefully chosen scenery. The argument between Raiden and Shin in particular makes a lot of use of focus – not something you usually see in animation, since there’s not the same camera that normally has a foreground and background in or out of focus. Here, the direction takes pains to create the sense of this being something actually filmed by bringing the characters and the chain-link fence in and out of focus variously. Scenes in this episode are also, for a time, puncuated by cutting back to a dead dragonfly as it’s slowly picked apart by ants… a grisly image in some senses, but perhaps a good omen given the resemblance of the Morpho’s pre-firing routine to the spread of diaphanous wings and the Juggernauts, compared to it, to little ants.