I hope you enjoy slow burn drama over any general expectation of action. Frankly, I kind of appreciate the approach… at least when there’s been a second cour announced. If we were only getting a single ordinary-sized season I would be a little bit concerned about the pacing. That said, I do think it serves a solid purpose for what I believe the show is trying to accomplish.
Now, I’ll say right here as I’ve said in several previous reviews (if not in these exact words): I have a fairly poor relationship with ‘message’ fiction. At best, I tend to observe a sort of armed neutrality with the concept, acknowledging that while it is perfectly fair and reasonable to say something meaningful in the context of fiction, I feel it is both not necessary to do so and often a bad idea if conveying the message comes at the expense of the fiction. I much prefer a show like Kill la Kill, that’s entertaining but ‘about’ nothing, to one that becomes so mired in its politics and allegory that it ceases to serve its primary purpose as entertainment.
86 stands oddly on the border of what I could consider message fiction. It clearly has a take on issues, namely war and discrimination, and wants to say something about them, but the treatment is grounded fairly entirely within the story itself. The reason I wanted to bring that up comes at the end, but it shouldn’t be long to get there.
Most of the episode is dedicated to telling two sides of the same story. First we see the side with Undertaker and the 86, as they go about their lives up until one asks the Major a critical question during one of her nightly calls. They really don’t do anything particularly ‘important’, they just do what they can do, working out their web of crushes, talking about their cat, and so on. It’s not heavy stuff.
We then, of course, cut back to the Major, getting her version of the story and how she’s trying to help them adapt and survive. We hear her answer to the question (wanting to know why she’s nice to them) and learn she was once saved by a fairly patriotic Processor in her former visit to a battlefield. The squad advises her to get out of the Handler position, as she’s too soft for it.
The next day, we see the squad heading into battle again, but we do it entirely from the Major’s perspective. Recall, she doesn’t have a visual link to the squad; it’s audio only. We watch the battle with her entirely following along on a screen that looks like an Atari rendering all positions. During the fight she uses an advanced map she found to help with positioning. She notices one unit veering around an area another is heading towards and cross-references it, noticing that there’s going to be soft wetland ground there. She shouts a warning, but it’s too late. The soldier on the other side becomes mired, trapped alone as an enemy bears down on and, with no support in the area, kills her.
This is done entirely watching on the computer screen that, again, is very crude blinking symbols for everyone and everything involved. It outright defies the idea of having an action scene: one is offered up on a silver platter and the show says, “no thanks, I don’t want it.” We spend this character’s final moments watching one geometric symbol approach another as she’s forced to accept her oncoming death.
I think what this does is that it enforces the horror of the scenario. By refusing an action scene, the show directly and emphatically avoids glorifying the fight. It could be more visceral if we were in the cockpit with the poor girl, yeah, but we’d also have the excitement of the fight. Here, nothing but cold dread. Going for, in essence, minimalism denies some elements, but in this case it makes the others more powerful.
The episode ends (after the credits, of course) with a last scene from the Major’s point of view, oddly one that we saw a hint of at the very beginning of the episode. After the battle, the Major, distraught and torn up, tries to apologize for not being a better handler… and she’s aggressively rebuffed, with one of the surviving squad members calling her out for, essentially, paying only lip service to their plight with her niceties. It’s a savage, furious dressing down about how little her kindness actually matters to kids who are drafted and forced to fight and die while the major herself remains safe in the core of the nation that was denied them. The speech pretty well breaks the Major, and we’re treated to her anguish and distress at hearing both how bad things are and how little she’s done, faced even with the idea that her kindness may be essentially self-indulgent. The anger is, from the all-seeing point of view of the audience, extremely well-founded but essentially misdirected – not that there’s anywhere else it could be directed.
For the purposes of having a story with these characters you know that we’re going to see some reconciliation between the Major and the squad, but the pain expressed is something that feels very real, and makes the idea of bridging the gap between their experiences seem lie one of extreme (perhaps impossible) difficulty, establishing very strongly just how deep the resentment for cruel mistreatment can run and how hellish even this defensive war really is.
And what works is that even with message in there, what you really care about is how these particular characters are going to handle the situation going forward.