Can you believe we’ve got more coming after this? Once again, the show has done a pretty good job of convincing you that everyone is dead and all is if not lost than at least at a brutal end. Alongside that, we get a pretty incredible action climax with the right amount of back-and-forth for a desperate final battle against the odds.
The episode starts the sequence by bleeding off the cast. Anjou, Theo, Kurena, and finally Raiden are left behind in tough situations, presumably to die, peeling off from Shin as he makes his way towards the Morpho, where Pale Rider/Kiri wants a one-on-one battle with the lost scion of the Nouzen clan. Last to peel off is Fido, holding Frederica, and the battle between Shin and the Morpho is joined.
This time we see that the Morpho is quite capable of point defense, with rotary guns that can’t manage to land a hit, but that do keep Shin at bay. Kiri’s rage initially seems to get the better of him as his guns overheat, but he’s got more tricks up his mechanical sleeve, including the fact that he was potentially as skilled as Shin in life, and has retained a good portion of his close-combat prowess despite his titanic Morpho body.
The fight goes through enough movements to be a truly worthy grand battle. Raiden busts in with his half-disabled mech and provides critical cover fire for Shin before the main gun gets trained on him, mysterious crackles in the Para-raid precede the Morpho being pelted by ranged artillery and even napalm-style incendiaries (more on that in a bit) only to start really utilizing bizarre energy threads to strike the battlefield and fend off the attacks, and finally Frederica, let go by Fido, arrives on the field herself just as all seems lost to expose Kiri’s biggest weakness.
Naturally, he starts to lose it on seeing her alive. Whatever brainwashing the Legion does is good, since most of what he feels gets channeled into rage, but it’s not enough to force him to act rationally when confronted by the one person who meant the most to him. Frederica even takes herself hostage, putting the gun Shin gave her to her own head, in order to distract Kiri and finally give Shin enough of an opening to take a point-blank shot at the Morpho’s core, Frederica’s precious knight finally being laid to rest and the threat of the titanic war machine ended.
The Legion turns out to not be stupid in defeat, however – with its central processor eliminated, the Morpho self-destructs in a fairly impressive explosion, with Shin still having been atop the hulk. Thus ends the episode, seemingly with everybody except Frederica dead. So doesn’t end the series, so we know at least some of the people we’ve been spending time with must make it out of this, but it is really easy to suspend disbelief the way the episode is handled.
Briefly, the emotions in this are very good. I’ve mentioned how the action successfully does good choreography, being both visually engaging and technically dynamic. But it does dynamite emotions as well. The moments where each of the others bleed off from the offensive are strong, and showcase their characters, since they all do make a choice to stay behind. In the final battle, there are great notes out of Shin, Kiri, and Frederica. Even Fido has a strongly implied character, despite the fact that the robot doesn’t use words to communicate. Action can be good or at least decent based on its flow and choreography, but only becomes great when it also has stakes and emotion to generate investment, and 86 here passes with flying colors. We’ve spent several weeks building up to this conflict, and it’s worth all the leadup in the end.
So, about the conditions the episode leaves us with. Raiden and Anjou probably have the worst cases for their survival, as they aren’t Shin and were both last seen near the epicenters of explosions. Maybe Anjou was able to take the fight she was staring down and didn’t blow with her missile packs, but she’s given less hope than some of the others, and Raiden still being around would be a minor miracle, which is something of a shame as I really liked the interplay he had with Shin. In general, I suppose the strength of the writing behind the present group dynamic is the best argument for the continued survival of everyone who made it to the Federacy – along with the awkward place we’d be in if they made it back to Ernst mostly alive but down number, but that’s once more from a meta point of view.
Kurena and Theo are a little better off. Both of them exited the approach at positions they took to be good for their fighting style, Theo choosing a cluttered urban environment and Kurena a prime position to lob long-range shots from. They’re alone in Legion-infested territory, but if Raiden could drag himself from where he got the side of his mech blown out to the immediate battlefield, the environs around the Morpho clearly aren’t swarming with too many guns, so I find it fairly credible that those two are still with us.
Which brings us to the most interesting part, the fact that this episode is the first on-screen hope we’ve gotten for Lena’s continued survival. When speaking solely of the ‘text’ of the show, not the context, we have had every reason to believe that Lena is dead and the Republic of San Magnolia exterminated to the last. It’s clearly not in a good way, what with ruins of their style of architecture being all around the Morpho battle area, but even if we’re supposed to believe that the shells that started raining on the Morpho just after the weirdness with Shin’s para-raid were being provided by the otherwise unaccounted-for Kurena, if you pull back and look at it there were too many being lobbed per volley to really excuse that. Last we saw the allied military was trying to dive in deeper, but didn’t really have any hope of bringing the critical battlefield within artillery range. That leaves whatever San Magnolian survivors there are as the source of the support, and when it comes to utilizing the heavy guns to cover Juggernauts, even those in close combat and with the added use of some atypical fire, Lena is our known expert. The support fire wave is largely inexplicable otherwise even if it’s not lingered on as such, and the entire thing is very much her style. I think that even without any sort of meta-text promising her continued existence, it wouldn’t be that hard to guess from the episode that she’s probably still fighting (and likely not responding to radio hails from the allied nations due to using Para-raid rather than radio tech to organize).
In any case we have (if release notes are to be believed) two more episodes of the current season of 86. According to the end of this one, the next up is to be titled “Shin”, so I have a feeling our not-quite-dead lead is going to have some soul searching to do, likely about the notes regarding him being at home on the battlefield or not really alive, so that he comes out of the battle with the Morpho in a different place than how he entered it. But, we’ll see when the time comes what really follows from here.
UPDATE: It seems that, due to the earlier skips and issues with time slots, the last two episodes of 86 won’t be airing until March. This is somewhat tragic, but of all the cliffhangers we could be left on, this is probably the best we could have hoped for, with the main objective one way but the characters the other. I will cover them when they come up. Seasonal Selections will return with new shows in the second week of January.