We spend most of this episode with Spearhead, oddly enough including an extended flashback scene to when the formation was first formed, having a fun cookout together. One of the things the show does well is when it shows the 86 coping with their lives. Its very human; even in an objectively awful situation, people are going to seek happiness and ultimately cope with the horrors around them. It is, especially, thrown into stark relief when we see what the group started out as and then what they’re reduced to now, with two more deaths this episode.
The fact that the Legion is learning is subtly put on display with that. The machines have new strategies and are covering themselves against the plans that had previously dealt with them fairly well, and Daiya and Lecca pay with their lives, the latter managing to turn her sidearm on herself when staring down a Legion drone ready to take her head and the former mercy-killed by Shin, with Lena keeping her Para-raid connected as that’s all she can do to honor the lives lost.
On returning to base, we see the squad trying to go about their lives, even as its clear two more holes have been punched in the framework of their daily experiences. Anju in particularly is hit pretty hard, having lost her erstwhile love interest, but she puts on a brave face and… life goes on. It’s a very different approach, one that’s more down to earth than the melodramatic gritty and grim that some shows would go for in here, but it doesn’t fail to be effective.
Lena’s side of the world, shorter this week, has a lot of the same vibes of reminding us the kind of dystopia she’s living in, and that she’s walking on thin ice herself. She talks some hypotheticals with her scientist friend and learns in no uncertain terms that if she comes totally clean about the voices of the Legion she’s heard, she’ll almost certainly be transferred out with a psych evaluation and the processor in question would probably have their brain extracted for study (though apparently that had been planned for Undertaker and dismissed for reasons we aren’t let in on).
She’s also given a new mission for Spearhead, to take on a Legion forward base being constructed in the area. This is obviously an extremely dangerous assignment, and the orders are that it will be carried out before Spearhead can be given any reinforcements and without the aid of allied mortar fire. Yeah, if it wasn’t clear before it’s seeming more and more that Spearhead is a death squad, staffed by kids in their fourth year (of six) in service and expected to die fighting before they could possibly be released. The Legion may be a very real threat, but it’s seeming more and more that the use of the 86 on the battlefield isn’t a grim necessity with a side order of ethnic cleansing as much as it is a deliberate genocide that just happens to let discount Skynet do the dirty work. The deaths of the 86, particularly in the Spearhead, are not a side effect, they’re part of the point. At least, that’s how it’s really starting to seem.
Whether she realizes it or not, this makes Lena’s genuine empathy even more of a rebellion. On that subject, we have the bookends of the episode: The episode opens with a flashback (or dream-as-flashback) from Shin, showing him as a little kid, picking through a ruined city in winter, only to be confronted by the machine bearing his brother’s head, angrily insisting that this is somehow all Shin’s fault. We’re also, again, shown a situation where the same words are given while Shin is being choked, presumably by his brother – an episode that might or might not be related to the terrible scar on Shin’s neck and the death-experience that gave him the ability to hear the Legion’s echoes of stolen humans.
At the end, after Lena has explained the situation to the squad and they take it surprisingly well (aware it’s probably a trap but accepting that leaving it be could be worse yet), Shin stays on the line a little longer to talk to Lena, and they get talking about Shin’s brother. Particularly, they talk about Lena’s memories of him. Unlike Shin’s horrific memories, Lena paints the picture of an extremely kind young man, who helped her when she was in trouble and even indulged her. The topic of sweets comes up, and Lena points out how Shin’s brother talked about his enjoyment of chocolate. The chocolate bar she’s got with her unsubtly seems to ship her with Shin, causing her to get a little flustered, giving the overall scene a lighter tone, fitting with the show having people be people despite their problems. Of course, the last notes (this time before the end credits) have us once again looking forward and back alike, with more bitter reminiscence on the fallen and determination for the future, but by in large it’s a restorative moment.
Of course, between these two scenes, there’s a huge contrast: Shin’s memories of his brother are tainted by his Legion form and whatever vast trauma lead up to and followed from the choking scene. He never objects to what Lena is saying, and sometimes seems to even enjoy her perspective, but it’s not the one he has any more. Meanwhile, there is a degree to which Lena’s thoughts on the topic are clearly through rose-colored glasses, since she was so young and was saved from such a bad situation, so it’s hard to say that it’s Shin who’s got the distorted picture rather than Lena having seen a pleasant mask. Likely, both have elements of the truth, which makes the present all the more horrific.
One last thing I wanted to talk about, for the show in general but particularly in this episode, is the gore. Or, rather, the general lack of gore. For all the deaths and gruesome concepts in this show, there’s not a lot of blood and melodrama and really not any visual body horror. When Lecca blows her brains out, we see her put the gun to her chin, her teeth clenched, even some hint of her desperate and pained expression, but we don’t stick around to see the blood and brains spatter when she pulls the trigger. Similarly, when Shin gives his last mercy to someone, we hear the shot but we don’t get a close up of the wounds they receive, or even see the body. Daiya, in this episode, was caught in an explosion and no doubt horrifically maimed and burned, but we’re shown at most a hint of his hand as Shin approaches.
And yet, I wouldn’t say that 86 is ‘sanitized’ or anything like that. These deaths have as much power as a horrific gore scene, they’re given emotional weight. I feel like the choice is made to not show the full details because doing so would seem prurient. 86 doesn’t want to horrify viewers with gruesome visuals, it wants to evoke horror at esoteric concepts, both the mechanical ruthlessness of the Legion and the callous cruelty of the Alba. Blood, brains, burns, and wrecked human viscera wouldn’t add to that; they’d distract from it by creating a focal point for the horror somewhere that it’s not actually wanted or deserved. The horror is not that Lecca puts a bullet through her head or that Daiya is exploded and shot, it’s that either of them had to be in that position at all. Limiting the amount of gore we see leaves the impressions seared into the minds of the viewers as more what Lena experiences – their last human moments and the awfulness of their plight, not the spectacle of their corpse.
We’ll see how that continues next episode, with the presumable suicide mission that is taking on the Legion base-in-construction. I have little doubt that it’s going to be tense and harrowing, and I’m especially interested in seeing how Lena steps up for her own end of the situation.