Punches come from the heart.
So, we start off by resolving the conflict from last time. Natsuki comes in, tells robot hand to back off, and gets tased for his trouble. Torturing Natsuki finally provokes Atri to lash out, and she takes down both robot hand guy (despite his gloating that it proves how evil she is) and his hired goon. She askes Natsuki to retire her, but he refuses.
In the wake of this, we briefly learn that the baddies will be handed over to the police for the whole “threatening children” bit even if what they were trying to do and to an extent did to to Atri isn’t going to be worth anyone’s time, and with that out of the way delve into Atri’s backstory.
It seems that she was indeed the one who “went berserk” but we get an extended flashback as to the how and why. Atri was originally attached to Natsuki’s mother, when she was a child. They had good times together, and we see how this formed much of who Atri is as a person, but when mom went to middle school she became the victim of some pretty hideous bullying. This went on for months, to the point where, when Atri finally decides she needs to go to school to investigate the issue and solve something for her master, mom is on the brink of committing suicide.
Atri finds her atop the school building, clearly considering jumping. The ringleader of the bullies then, even with authorities there trying to talk her down, starts egging mom on to jump with her minions joining in on the chant. Since the adults in the room seem pathologically incapable of doing anything, this results in Atri, seeing a clear and present danger to the health and safety of someone she cares about, to punch out the bully ringleader. In the wake of this, mom calls her a monster and Atri is recalled, but escapes from being put down. We’re told that thereafter she watched over mom in secret (though grandma seemed to know about her), all the way until she met Natsuki
In fact, it’s even revealed that the day she saved Natsuki, she was considering suicide herself, guilty over having been unable to protect her charge in the end, so being able to give care saved her just as receiving it saved Natsuki. In the present, their roles are reversed, as Atri learns to cry a lot with her memories recovered.
And that’s all fine well and good, but before I play us out to next week, there are a couple things I wanted to talk about.
First is that the whole “Company brought to ruin by Atri’s malfunction” bit doesn’t add up. This is probably just a case of fridge logic, but Atri is supposed to have been the latest and greatest, to the point where less than fifty of her were sold. But it’s never implied that Atri herself was an inside-provided prototype or anything like that; grandma bought her normally. And then mom had her as an attendant for literal years. Even if humanoid robots are extreme luxury products, I think if your company’s only selling fifty of the top-shelf models over several years, you’ve got bigger issues than that handfull of bots getting recalled. I mean, there are companies IRL who have sold some truly defective cars for truly absurd prices and they’ve gotten away with it and moved units. You’re telling me that no more than fifty people over several years looked at an Atri-bot and said “yeah, I want that!”? Bull.
And as for the recall… okay, Atri punched a horrible bully girl. That’s probably not cool, and since it’s clear that ordinary humanoids are supposed to be incapable of violence against humans, that might be cause to have her hauled back to the shop so they can figure out what went wrong. But we see clearly from her flashback that her action was motivated by calculating that the person she was charged with taking care of would almost certainly die if this situation continued, and not just abstractly but in an acute and immediate sense. Given that she is a robot it should be possible to run some factory diagnostics on her and see where the behavioral weighting allowed for a punch as the lesser evil.
And maybe you have to correct that, and even recall the rest of her product line. It seems like the kind of bug you could probably patch, though. I think even Nintendo’s customer support could handle that kind of thing. Perhaps, though, you don’t even need to. With so few sold you could probably reclassify her as having bodyguard functionality. Do recall, when Atri early on declares herself to be a Warbot, the reaction was “no you’re not” not “there’s no such thing as warbots”. Hell, there’s even a moment where the human characters seem to lend a bit of credence to the idea. So clearly warbots, which must by their nature be capable of violence, are things that exist in the setting and it’s not unthinkable for a mechanical entity to do punchy things, even if it is beyond the pale for a domestic humanoid. The government might require a different license to own, but I think I (and a lot of people) would want a robot companion who could also physically defend me from an assailant.
This is leaving aside the fact that robot hand, who is still clearly of means despite the company going down and the nebulous professor somehow losing his life over the “scandal” chooses rooftop brawl over continuing on with just retrieving her from Natsuki. He approached at the right time; maybe if he had some carrot like an offer to refund her probably pretty absurd value instead of just the stick of “but she’s evil”, this all could have been solved in his way.
The whole lab/company/professor situation, though, is so nebulous that I think we’re not supposed to worry about it too much. It’s a vague motive for a bad guy who only shows up in any serious capacity in about two episodes, so it’s probably not a big enough deal for me to need to analyze it like this.
That leaves my other topic: where we go from here.
Because, in a sense, you could have cut at the end of this episode. We’ve confirmed triumphantly that Atri has a heart, that Natsuki is keeping her, and they’ve both reached some kind of emotional catharsis even if their future is less than certain. What more do you have to say, show?
Well, to take a shot in the dark, way back at the start Atri said that grandma had given her a mission. I somehow doubt that means the “take care of this kid” order that assigned Atri to Natsuki’s mom, since that doesn’t explain why Atri was ultimately preserved in a pod down in grandma’s lab. We know that Grandma was investigating the sea level rise, and seemed to be way ahead of the rest of the world on that topic. If she decided, after the accident that killed Natsuki’s parents and took his leg, that she needed to make use of Atri, Atri’s mission is probably somehow related to Grandma’s research. I think that’s what we’ve got two more episodes to resolve.
From here, I’ll get a little more speculative. I’m not a terrible guesser of plots, but I am still guessing since this is a blind watch for me. I feel like whatever Grandma’s bequest is, it’s something big. This is an odd call since Atri has so far been a small story about small people, but we are in this melancholy place without a real future, and powerfully established that Natsuki wanted to change that, so having Atri fulfill all her missions and promises by doing something really amazing would fit in.
In that, though, I predict better than even odds that we have to say goodbye to Atri, and that she won’t be able to stay. Either invoking whatever grandma wanted done will cost her some vital component (calling back to how she offered up her internal battery for the school power plan), or it will require her to be somewhere that’s not at Natsuki’s side. Even the subtitle, “My Dear Moments” seems to hint that to me, that Atri’s existence is not meant to be a lasting thing, but a precious moment.
For the latter, I’ll give my longest shot guess, but I think Atri may have to go to space, even specifically to the moon. My evidence for this is thus: Natsuki’s dream, that he can’t see through because of his busted leg, was to go to space in order to do something about the sea level rise. We briefly saw the rocket, and Natsuki even said he was sure it would fly eventually, so the launch base is local and primed to go. So Atri, to function as “Natsuki’s Leg”, may need or want to redeem how his natural leg failed him, by going up on that rocket in his stead. As for the moon, not only is the moon deeply related to the tides (and thus, conceptually, to sea levels), but all over the intro we see Atri playing with a ball version of the moon; imagery that seems important but that hasn’t otherwise come up in the story. Thus, everything would kind of tie together if Atri had to take Natsuki’s rocket to the moon and stay there doing grandma’s science stuff to halt or even reverse the relentless rising waters that have dead-ended the town and everyone in it.
But I have a feeling we’ll know for sure where the final arc is going in about a week.