Last Time, a final Bug Gadoll emerged to stand as our last boss and Kaburagi had just had his main old avatar finished off by Kamina Shades Boss. With threats great and small in evidence, it seemed like just about anything could happen.
This time, the emergence of the Last
Gadoll, termed Omega, doesn’t do much to delay Kamina Shades Boss.
However, he is prevented from finishing Natsume off by the arrival of
Kaburagi in his other avatar, shooting a spike right through Kamina
Shades. However, there’s not all too much time for their issues to
be worked out, as Deca-dence heads into battle with Omega.
Omega, though, is no more a programmed
enemy, and won’t go down easily to standard tactics. It breaks
Deca-dence’s giant punchy fist cannon and spits laser back at the
attempted orbital strike against it, damaging the home base of the
System and its robots, which prompts the System to make its own
choice: Kamina Shades Boss merges with his little assistant,
declaring his role is at an end and triggering a mechanism that will,
once a countdown giving Gears a chance to log out and presumably for
necessary wind-up is finished, collapse the dome that covers the
Deca-dence play area, obliterating everything inside, including
Omega, the Tankers, and incidentally Kaburagi and the other escaped
bugs; basically everything we’ve cared about up to this point.
Minato is left conflicted and helpless, talking to Kaburagi as Jill
chimes in… not with a solution, but with an element to one: someone
(Kaburagi, of course) can log into Deca-dence directly; not the game,
but the mobile fortress itself.
There are, as Minato would like to
point out, still a few holes in this brilliant plan. First of all,
Deca-dence was heavily damaged by its scuffle with Omega, so assuming
direct control doesn’t seem like an automatic win, especially with
Final Shutdown looming. Meanwhile, Kurenai leads the other fighting
Tankers and the remaining Gears into battle against a brood of free
Gadoll hatching from eggs carried by Omega. During the skirmish,
Natsume spots Kaburagi driving to Deca-dence for his plug in and
follows the trail back, meeting Jill and the other Bugs in the flesh
(so to speak). On his side, Kaburagi reaches the core of Deca-dence,
where he’s hailed by Minato, the latter also there in person rather
than by avatar. They have an admittedly good discussion that ends
with Minato helping Kaburagi plug into Deca-dence, acknowledging that
in doing so he’s become a Bug himself. As Kaburagi logs on,
countdown progressing, the episode ends.
I’m of a few minds regarding this
episode. First, there was some really good material in it. The
conversation between Kaburagi and Minato at the core was great, and
even better was Jill being questioned about her backstory, which
strayed onto her philosophy. It’s clear that she was one of the
major architects. She designed Deca-dence herself, and though we
don’t know what got her sent to the prison camp, we do know that she
came to believe, as Kaburagi, that a world without bugs was not
actually desirable. Essentially, a perfect system “must be free of
bugs” but is then sterile in its perfection, unable to create or
innovate, while Jill values the novelties that bugs bring. She also,
apparently, left one in Deca-dence that we’ll be seeing.
On the other hand, compared to other
episodes of Deca-dence, I actually felt this one was kind of
limiting. It’s clearly just the setup for what payoff we’re going to
get next week, and at this stage it needed to, and did, choke off
possibilities rather than grow them. We might see the Tankers help
out in spirit, but there’s not going to be a significant rising of
that lot any more, it just isn’t in the cards as a major movement.
In my mind, that’s probably the big one, but just in general we’ve
been placed on rails and now just need to follow them to the end.
Short write-up, I’m aware, but this is
an episode of Deca-dence that actually felt short… and I’m holding
many of the comments I could have for our viewing of the resolution
next week.