Batteries are serious business.
So, I’m just going to start with this: this is another episode, perhaps even harsher than the one earlier in the show, where you really need to suspend disbelief about something that you might actually have an inkling is wrong. In this case, it’s once again about batteries. I’m going to rant about it because that’s kind of my job here, but in the end we just accept that this makes no sense and accept it for the narrative and emotional beats that it represents.
Because, as we start out with, Atri seems to be in a bad way, randomly losing attention and starting to shut down. We saw the first hint of these symptoms at the end of last episode, but they are boldly in full force here today. At first I thought that she might have suffered some sort of critical damage from the thrashing she took, but instead it seems that her battery is bottoming out.
So, battery rant. We’re told and expected to accept that Atri’s battery has lasted from her awakening to now, but now it’s out of juice. According to her owner’s manual, battery charging should not be tried at home and your Atri-model humanoid should be taken in for maintenance every once in a while.
First, years watching over Natsuki’s mom while on the run. But, okay, mad scientist grandma may have been taking care of things.
Second, batteries do not last that long. Atri is extremely animated. The amount of electricity she must have to burn through to move like she moves is non-trivial. Until this point, I’d been assuming that her quirk of eating like a human was a way to supplement or remove her need for grid electricity, like she can do it because she has some sort of chemical furnace that can convert calories to electricity. But no, that’s just how long her battery holds despite needing to power her body and brain in that little frame.
Even really fancy electric cars need to be plugged in to the grid pretty regularly to keep going, and one of the problems they experience is massive, heavy batteries. But okay, scifi show, presumably humanoids are based around some battery ultratech that can hold the obscene amounts of charge needed to operate for long stretches without being hilariously unsafe. That’s still not really an excuse for lacking a charging cord. Atri sleeps; in the world she was built for, which has functional infrastructure, would be a perfect chance to run your household meter up getting a little juice from a dedicated charging port.
And lastly, we’re sort of meant to take as a given that only a real technician could charge her up, and any one who actually saw her would probably go ahead with her recall. Now I know Atri herself is a super-rare model, but usually there’s some sort of standardization about technical aspects, and in a sane universe Natsuki could be taught how to charge a similar humanoid, likely one built with the same model of battery pack, and apply that knowledge to Atri. For actual sales, it has to go back to grid electricity at some point.
Oddly, the fix I credit better: we retrieve the pod she was sleeping in at the start of the show, realizing that she came out fully charged it must have been keeping her in that condition. The pod doesn’t have to be plugged in to anything but again, Mad Scientist Grandma. She’s explicitly called out on this one, saying she’d never make anything that wasn’t self-reliant. So, okay, the pod probably has a huge capacitor like unto Atri’s internal batteries and a nuclear battery to recharge it over time. I can buy that. And while the route to this point is tortured, I must stress again: you just go along with the emotions and accept it. This is a fictional setting, it can ultimately make up any silly rules it wants. It’s just a wee bit jarring when Atri’s world normally seems… extremely grounded, and very much like our own world in many critical ways.
In any case, they lay Atri in her pod, it does the charging job wirelessly in a couple of minutes because Grandma was a genius (by all description this would NOT have been the factory-approved method), and Atri wakes up back to pep. Except, and this is the stinger for this episode, she’s remembered Grandma’s last directive, and it has to do with Eden, likely the Project Eden that’s been meaningfully referenced before.
Going back, the emotions through here are pretty good. The characters take a bit long to catch on to Atri’s low battery state, but she’s enough of a goober that it doesn’t really feel stupid to not notice, like the audience does, when she’s out of it. Natsuki and Atri have some important talks, resolving that he doesn’t know how a human and an inhuman being with a heart should get along, but that they ought to work it out as they go. These are all good scenes. I like that the show doesn’t just treat Atri as the girlfriend now; the relationship between her and Natsuki is said to be fundamentally different from one with a human, and for where this setting is and who these characters are, that makes sense. This isn’t Beatless (as much as that show is underrated. If you like Atri but could maybe take a bit more action, watch Beatless! Now that it’s all released you can skip the recap episodes and remove its biggest downside en passant) so I’m glad it kind of has a different take.
In any case, next week: Project Eden and, I presume, the End of Atri.