In this penultimate episode, we learn Natsuki’s grandmother may, in fact, have been a supervillain.
At the very least she had, as Natsuki himself says, a “terrible personality”, and as is apparent from all the crud she left behind, infinite offscreen dark matter resources.
The gist of this episode involves finding Eden, of Project Eden, which I may have associated badly as it is apparently a thing of Natsuki’s grandmother and not widely known. We get a first leg of search with some fanservice of the various girls in their swimsuits and no results, followed by a search into the night along a path Natsuki traces thanks to pure intuition and that random cut-in from the storm which didn’t seem to amount to anything.
This search encounters grandma’s defenses: a spreading artificial fog, crazy underwater currents that toss Natsuki’s minisub like a tornado, and so on. Eventually, Natsuki washes up at the place: Eden, an artificial island made by his grandmother, complete with birds and beetles and all sorts of other things in robot form, maintaining an ecosystem seemingly for the use of the absent humans.
Atri and Natsuki are led to Eden’s core, where there’s another tube like the one used as a charger before. At this point I would like to apologize for griping about realism before, it’s now clear that none was intended and we should just enjoy the crazy scale of mad science grandma’s productions. Most Bond villains couldn’t hack this together! How many banks did the old lady rob – heck, how many nations did she hold ransom – in order to get this constructed in absolute secrecy?
Whatever, doesn’t matter, it’s a cool set.
At the core tube, it seems that Atri is wanted to become the core management system for Eden for whatever purpose grandma intended. Natsuki doesn’t like this very much, because it would presumably seal Atri forever, but Grandma’s AI hologram shows up to berate him and also to tell him that she put a virus in Atri that will totally delete her memory “to maintain secrecy” if she’s up for more than 45 days without going into the tube. Natsuki, furious and clearly hoping he’ll be able to solve this mess, orders a retreat… but Atri refuses, apparently seeing and accepting this as her purpose.
And that’s the big tragic irony we’re going to get here: Atri having a human heart will enable to sacrifice herself, rather than living. Given how far into the climax we effectively are, I expect we’ll get both a big sendoff and some sort of long tail where we get to see the results of Project Eden being more awesome than just maintaining an artificial island that seems to be maintaining itself just fine without her. Given Grandma’s subject of focus, maybe it does something about that whole “Setting is becoming Waterworld” problem? At this point, I don’t think anything grandma could cook up would be really absurd, it’s time to roll with the mad science.
While I could speculate more, at this point there is really one episode left (for real this time) and I might as well break it down after we finish next week.